Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Ruby Bridges challenged US segregation in 1960.

This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.

Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin

Also on the show:  Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’

Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Color of Change’s Portia Allen-Kyle about predatory tax preparers for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

ProPublica (10/17/19)

Janine Jackson: April is nominally tax season, but right about now is when many people start worrying about it. That’s why TurboTax paid a heck of a lot of money for Super Bowl ads to hard-sell the idea that people could use its service for free—if they hadn’t used it last year, or if they filed by a certain date.

But if free, easy tax-filing is possible, should it be a gift to taxpayers from a for-profit corporation, from a corporation that has already been fined for unfairly charging lower-income Americans, from a corporation that has aggressively lobbied for decades to prevent making tax filing free and/or easy?

Our next guest has looked into not just the top-down inequities of the tax preparation industry—described by one observer as the “wild, wild West”—but how those problems fall hard on Black and brown and low-income communities.

Portia Allen-Kyle is interim executive director at Color of Change. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Portia Allen-Kyle.

Portia Allen-Kyle: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

JJ: I want to ask you about the report you authored, called “Preying Preparers.” I believe that many, if not enough, people have a sense that poor, low-income folks are at the sharp end of tax policy generally, and tax-filing specifically—that rich people get to keep, not just more money, but a higher fraction of money than low-income folks, who have less money and who need every nickel of it.

But I’m not sure that people understand, that isn’t just the capitalism chips falling where they may. Your report says, “Exploiting low-income taxpayers is core to the business model of tax prep companies.” Tell us what we might not know about that.

PAK: Doing that report was so eye-opening for so many different reasons, both personally and professionally, at Color of Change, in our advocacy. I remember years ago, when I discovered after going to H&R Block, and paying more than $300 for a fairly simple return, and finding out that the person who filed my return wasn’t even an accountant. And I remember how ripped off I felt.

So fast forward, being in this role and doing this work, and this report in particular, just going into how much of a scam the tax preparation industry is, both the storefront tax prep companies—so your H&R Block, your Liberty Tax, your Jackson Hewitts of the world—as well as large corporations, such as Intuit and other software providers, that provide these tax-filing services.

And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe or, in many cases, receive money back from the government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.

And these businesses, especially for Black taxpayers, for low-income taxpayers, have found ways to profit off of people’s already-earned money, by inserting themselves as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to fleece people’s pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned and they are due as a refund, or by upcharging, upselling and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers, where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest, under the guise of giving them a same-day advance or same-day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all a scam. And it’s why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.

JJ: A key fact in your report is that the tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems: Tax laws change all the time. You’re looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you’re supposed to, and look for any benefits you’re entitled to. And, of course, throughout this is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it. That’s an industry-wide failing.

PAK: Oh, absolutely. There are no real requirements for tax preparers in these companies. Whereas if you go to an accountant, accountants have professional standards, they have training requirements. Not anybody can hang up a shingle and say, “I am an accountant,” in the same way that not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, “I am a doctor.” But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, “I am a tax preparer, because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal training to these companies, and am now in the business of selling tax preparation.”

JJ: But not to everyone, because let’s underscore that, the fact that these systemic problems, this is a regulatory problem, clearly, but it doesn’t land on everyone equally, and it’s not designed to. And so in this case, you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it’s easiest to take advantage of. Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of predation.

Portia Allen-Kyle: “It’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us.”

PAK: One of the ways in which especially storefront preparers are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these franchise operations, some of them maintain year-long locations, many of them do not, but they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season, in neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income, disproportionately taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds, so those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit, and really prey upon those folks in selling tax preparation services.

And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals, it’s why they’re incentivized to upsell products, some of the products that they’re also selling are refund anticipation loans. So they may lure you in and say, “Get a portion of your refund today,” or “Get an advance upfront.” That’s an unregulated bank product. So you have an unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated loan product, that often sometimes reach interest rates of over 30%. And they know what they’re doing, because that is where they make their money, in the selling of product.

And we see that in the data, that free programs such as VITA, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers who don’t have children, and aren’t eligible for EITC. So many of these companies will refer out other folks, for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes, prey on folks that they think they’re getting big refunds, but more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and expectations:  the wealthy millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they’re not going to H&R Block. Mark Cuban is not walking into H&R Block to file his taxes, right?

Folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants, are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing year-round advice on how to make the system work for them.

And so there’s a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting, that an entire segment of the market is not, when tax prep is handled in this way. Because, at the end of the day, it’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us, doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality, and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for companies like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60%. So you have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated, and essentially increases their risk of an audit.

NPR (3/16/23)

And then, when they are audited—it was found that the IRS disproportionately has audited Black taxpayers, and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, etc. And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured, and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place.

And while it sounds like, when you see advertisements from H&R Block or Intuit about how they stand by and guarantee their services, they’ll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit. It’s not altruistic. You’ll need that protection, because they’re going to mess it up, and have messed it up, for so many people.

And that part of the story is not often talked about, when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared. And that’s often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes, in the same way that the Affordable Care Act is the public option for healthcare.

JJ: What is direct file, and why can we expect to hear in the media a lot of folks saying, “Oh, well, you might think direct file is good, but actually…”? What should we know about it?

PAK: What we should know about it is, as I mentioned, direct file is the public option for taxes. And it’s important, because it allows people to file returns, simple returns, directly with the IRS. So last year, the pilot program was only available in 12 states. This year, the program is open to folks living in 25 states. We hope to see and are fighting for the expansion after this season into all 50 states, and recognize the tough road ahead for that.

But it is a program that, in its first year, saved over, I believe it was 130,000 taxpayers, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours in tax preparation. And already we’ve seen folks flock this season to the direct file system. And in the first two weeks, Color of Change has been doing a lot of advocacy; we are the top referrer of traffic to direct file. And so we’re already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours, which is a real benefit to community. This is a system that is government working for you.

It’s also important, because the other thing that private companies have really invested in, and fought so hard about, is that even when you file with H&R Block, when you file with Intuit or TurboTax, when you file with Liberty Tax, that information is still going to the government, to the IRS. But now it also is housed in this private corporation that essentially uses it as a part of their business model, to sell other products to you and prey on you in other ways.

And so it’s not a coincidence that a company like Intuit owns TurboTax, which is a software platform that will take up your data. They also own QuickBooks, so they have a bunch of data on small businesses that keep their accounting in that way. They own MailChimp, and so they have information of millions of folks who join direct marketing email campaigns, and so they can link data in that way. And then they also own Credit Karma. And so for those who are looking to improve their credit scores, for example, they also then have information about Americans in that level. And match this to essentially prey in different ways, with different types of tax products and other banking products.

And we’ve seen this in the expansion of fintech tax product loans that has been going crazy. When Cash App, for example, is telling you that you can file your taxes for free, you should assume that you are the product. And cutting out that corporate middleman is critical and essential, for not just ensuring that families keep money in their pockets, save time, that they are able to put back, spend with their kids, spend with their families, spend pursuing other things, but also is a data protection strategy as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change. The report, “Preying Preparers: How Storefront Tax Preparation Companies Target Low-Income Black and Brown Communities,” can be found at ColorOfChange.org. Portia Allen-Kyle, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PAK: Thanks for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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New York Times (1/29/25)

This week on CounterSpin: A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.”

The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month—because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if  white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization. That lies back of many public and media conversations…so just saying Charles Drew invented blood banks is disruptive! What if Black people aren’t subhuman?

What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances and responses to those circumstances of Black people in these United States—our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history—real history, and not comforting tall tales—connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding and inspiring?

In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo,  “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation.

That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We’ll hear that important conversation again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk and ICE.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.

The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.

“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”

The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”

Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.

The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.

‘Preoccupation With DEI’

Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.

“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.

Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert: 

As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.

As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk

has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.

Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).

“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”

Blaming gay singers

Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.

Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox News Digital (1/10/25) said:

While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.

You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.

And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).

LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.

Crusade against ‘woke’

Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.

Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.

Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.

While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.

Equal opportunity disasters

These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.

There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.

Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.

Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.

Metastasizing mythology

Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”

Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:

Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.

Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).

What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).

This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Janine Jackson: Welcome to The Best of CounterSpin 2024. I’m Janine Jackson.

This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us, in part, by showing how elite news media are clouding them. It’s not to say big media always get the facts wrong, but that what facts they point us toward day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners and sponsors, at the expense of the rest of our lives and our futures.

An important part of the work we do as producers and as listeners is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and to stay in conversation. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the mediawatch group FAIR.

***

2024 included many reasons for public protest, which our guest reminded is both a fundamental right and a core tool for achieving other rights. Journalist and activist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.

Chip Gibbons: “There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech.”

Chip Gibbons: And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.

There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.

It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.

But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.

So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.

And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that, even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.

And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.

***

JJ: Svante Myrick is president of People for the American Way, and former mayor of Ithaca, New York. We spoke with him about voting rights and roadblocks.

Svante Myrick: “They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote.”

Svante Myrick: Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote.

Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.

And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.

JJ: I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.

And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”

SM: And that’s so well said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”

***

JJ: Though it’s dropped from many outlets’ radar, police violence continued in 2024, but so did efforts to reimagine public safety without cops at the center. Monifa Bandele is an activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She talked about a new report mapping police violence.

Monifa Bandele: “We actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

Monifa Bandele: Black people are just like any other people, right, all over the world. And so, for a long time, people had no idea what options there could be, what alternatives there could be, for community safety other than policing.

It’s not just presented in our policies and what we see on the streets, we’re fed a daily dose of it in our larger popular culture. The police shows, the true crime series. All of your favorite actors at some point have been on the policing shows, or even if it’s shows about “gangsters” or “criminals,” it really has what we call this copaganda—which is police propaganda—storyline, which ultimately says, you need police, you need vigilantes, you need this tough-on-crime entity in order to have some semblance of safety in your community.

So I’m actually really proud and impressed in the Black community, because what our report shows is that, even though we are really bombarded, millions and millions of dollars are spent to convince people that this is the only way that you can get safety, and people have lived their entire lives only experiencing this one model, that large portions of our community are really questioning that, and are really listening to folks who are saying: “Hey, we actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

And this is something that, while we do it sometimes in our buildings and in our tenant associations or in our families, this could be scaled up community-wide. This could be scaled up citywide, statewide, nationally, where we actually figure out and get to the root of violence. You prevent most of it from happening, because you have the right mechanisms in place. And then when people are in crisis, and may cause harm to themselves or others, we combat that by giving them what they need to not be in crisis in that moment.

***

JJ: Immigration stayed critical in 2024, but we didn’t hear much from folks particularly on the US southern border who don’t support aggressive unto lethal state responses. Aron Thorn joined us from the Rio Grande Valley. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Aron Thorn: “The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection.”

Aron Thorn: I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.

The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.

And so something that does not often show up in these stories, that is particularly pertinent right now, is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.

And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.

What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?

As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.

***

JJ: Media Matters took a look at coverage of climate disruption, finding that, where there were some improvements, they just didn’t match the severity of the crisis. Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters.

Evlondo Cooper: “Even the best coverage we see…there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis.”

Evlondo Cooper: We look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.

So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”

EC: Totally.

JJ:  And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”

EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”

But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.

***

JJ: The oft-heard phrase “crisis of journalism” means different things to different people. This year, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ran an article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm.” It was co-authored by our guests, Collette Watson, co-founder of the group Black River Life, and Joe Torres, senior advisor at the group Free Press. The two are co-founders of the Media 2070 project.

Colette Watson: “What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm.”

Collette Watson: What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.

When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.

We know that from that earliest root, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.

Joseph Torres: “We’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy?”

Joseph Torres: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.

At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.

And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.

These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized. What are we creating that’s different?

***

JJ: Throughout the year, more and more entities declared Israel’s violent assaults on Palestinians a genocide. But how did elite US media talk about it? Greg Shupak of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and author of The Wrong Story: Palestine Israel and the Media, talked with CounterSpin.

Gregory Shupak: “Genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like.”

Gregory Shupak: First of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: Yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story. But there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

***

JJ: As we all reeled from the presidential election results, I talked with FAIR’s own editor, Jim Naureckas, and senior analyst Julie Hollar, for some thoughts about how we got here.

Jim Naureckas: “Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of.”

Jim Naureckas: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”

And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.

Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.

And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done—or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.

And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.

Julie Hollar: “Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward.”

Julie Hollar: I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority—although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them—but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.

So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.

And by not doing that at all—and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.

But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around—well, I’m getting ahead of myself—and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.

Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.

And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.

***

JJ: That was FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. Before them, you heard Greg Shupak, Collette Watson and Joe Torres, Evlondo Cooper, Aron Thorn, Monifa Bandele, Svante Myrick and Chip Gibbons, just some of the voices it’s been our pleasure to bring you this past year.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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CounterSpin host Janine Jackson

CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.

It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.

Guests featured on this year’s Best of CounterSpin include Chip Gibbons,  Svante Myrick, Monifa Bandele, Aron Thorn, Evlondo Cooper, Joe Torres, Colette Watson, Greg Shupak and FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas.

As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?

Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree.  White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.

As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

Janine Jackson interviewed author and UC/Santa Barbara research professor emeritus George Lipsitz about the impacts of housing discrimination for the October 11, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Grist (3/10/15)

Janine Jackson: Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways.

Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”

Now we understand that folks are working to reclaim pieces of the affected community called the Harlem River Yard, including allowing access to the Harlem River waterfront, access that’s been cut off to the public for a long time.

That’s just one of thousands of stories that exemplify the ways that racism inflects all kinds of decisions, policies, laws, that we’re told are, nowadays anyway, indifferent to race. That’s a mistaken notion that hobbles our ability to respond effectively to the interconnected harms of white supremacy and myriad US institutions that, to be real, harm everyone, and not just Black and brown people.

UC Press (2024)

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. He’s the author of many books, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place among them.

His most recent book, that we’re here to talk about, is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. It’s out now from University of California Press.

I will note that George was, for years, the chair of the board of the African American Policy Forum, where I also serve as a board member. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, George Lipsitz.

George Lipsitz: Thank you. So glad to be here.

JJ: Your new book addresses the interconnectedness of laws, policies and practices around housing that, without needing to be overtly coordinated, reinforce one another to produce and reproduce discriminatory outcomes. So we could really pull an opening thread anywhere here.

But when we talk about housing discrimination, I know that many folks’ minds go to redlining, where officially sanctioned protocols meant Black families just couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods, and the thinking is, while certainly that had lasting impacts, it was years ago, and it’s been legally remediated by now.

So while the book talks, importantly, about the inadequacies of the ways that harms have been diagnosed and responded to, maybe we could just start with a breakdown of some of the multiple forms of discrimination in housing that that takes. Why is it that housing is at the center of the spider web of so many other discriminatory dangers?

George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”

GL: When I say the “danger zone is everywhere,” housing discrimination raises in peoples’ minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on peoples’ life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.

I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.

Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.

CNN (3/6/15)

It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.

And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.

Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms, the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.

I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.

So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.

JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?

GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrian accidents. The street lighting is worse.

People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK, deal with the pests and rodents that are in this place.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.

CBS (9/19/22)

Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes from playing in the street, and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.

Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get non-nutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.

JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.

For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.

GL: Yeah, well, certainly these impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.

Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.

But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.

Guardian (2/26/20)

And similarly with health, that we have an individualized model of health that imagines that people’s genetics, and whether they exercise and whether they eat healthy food, is the key thing in determining their health. But there are also collective issues, like sewage management, garbage collection, coal-burning furnaces and incinerators, lead in paint and gasoline.

All of these things have an impact on health, and they not only need to be studied together, but people involved in fair housing law have to think about health justice. People who are dispensing medical care need to think about the neighborhoods that their patients come from and return to, and the impact that those neighborhoods have on their health, and on the relations between parents and children, and on even whether people are considered valued in this society.

You live in a place that tells you you’re everybody’s lowest priority, you may not have a reason to want to be healthy. And then, if you add to that, the lack of physicians, the high cost of healthcare, the way in which pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies jack up the cost of healthcare, you’re basically engaged in a calculated cruelty in the organized abandonment of large numbers of people.

And this harm is most egregious on children, because they can’t defend themselves, because their physical systems are less able to deal with health menaces. And so we’re basically squandering a large part of the next generation in a country that is increasingly made up of people who are not white, and we’re basically setting those children up for failure. It’s like a time bomb that will go off in the future, and there’s a lot of foreseeable harm that could be prevented.

A key theory of pediatric care is that you don’t just remedy illnesses after they happen. You foresee them in advance and prevent them from happening. We could do that with the environment, we could do that with nutrition. We could do that with giving people a safe, affordable living environment. But we don’t do it, because there’s so much money to be made from injustice.

JJ: I do want to put folks onto the book The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, because there’s no way that we can address all of this in the time that we have. But I want to say, the book is enlightening about many things, and one of them is the importance of just the way that we look at, the way we see societal inequities, and the way we talk about them. And what you’re saying is we’re talking about rejecting this approach that addresses individuals as though they were divorced from community. We’re looking at individual actions by individual landlords, and not looking at systems, and that’s part of the problem.

GL: And this is what the law assumes, that an injury interrupts an otherwise just situation. You sue the individual perpetrator, you’re then made whole, and you go back to being fine.

But what if you’re not fine to begin with? What if there isn’t one individual perpetrator? What if it’s a conjuncture of obstacles in your way? Once you punish that one corporation, they declare bankruptcy, and they open up the next day with a different name.

And once the injured person wins a fair housing settlement, they go back into an innately unfair housing market, where they are disadvantaged in getting loans. They’re disadvantaged in getting insurance. They’re disadvantaged in their relations with the police. They’re disadvantaged in relation to the schools that their children are able to go to.

So multi-axis problems need multi-axis and intersectional solutions. And that means we need to work together. It means that there’s a limit to what any one of us can do as an individual to have good health or housing for ourselves, much less for the whole society.

And that’s why I try to stress in the book the emerging active and engaged public sphere constituency for good health and fair housing, and fair housing councils throughout the country, and advocates and attorneys who take on those cases, public health collectives, environmental justice organizing, community gardens, food co-ops, arts-based health projects like Building Healthy Communities in Boyle Heights, a whole series of community land trusts where people pool resources to take speculation out of the market.

And so people are mobilizing precisely because they realize that as an individual, there’s very little you can do. In the courtroom, the boardroom or the banker’s office, there are limits to what can be done.

Now there should be justice in all of those places, and individuals are entitled to good health, good housing, to the full benefits of civil rights law. But we also need to have an understanding that race itself is a political, not a biological, category, that it functions because people see things a certain way. Racism persists because people believe that people are members of different races, and we need to see racism as structural, systemic, collective.

And good health and good housing can’t just be left to be private commodities to be purchased. They’re public resources, and they need to be protected by the public, and nurtured and sustained.

LA Times (5/29/22)

JJ: I’ll only ask you one final question about news media, because we do see coverage, sometimes, about the difficulties of homelessness, or the problems of companies like Blackstone buying up homes. We see coverage. It’s just that it’s not connecting the dots. The story about why people are homeless is not connected to the story about venture capitalists buying up homes. It’s not connected.

And so to me, it’s what I call “narrating the nightmare.” Something terrible is happening, and look at these harmed people, but somehow we can’t name who’s behind it, or how it could be stopped. “But,” media say, “you can’t say we’re not acknowledging it because look at this one story where we said how harmful it is.”

And it drives me up a wall, because I know that reporters aren’t stupid, and I know that they’re not incapable of thinking systemically. I know they don’t think structural problems are boring, and I know that they don’t understand that regular people could grasp them.

So I guess what I’m saying is that corporate news media suffer from some of the same ailments that you are diagnosing in healthcare and housing, and could benefit from some of the same medicine, I guess.

New York Times (11/2/22)

GL: Yeah, and some of this has to do with the demographics of the news media industry, which is similar to the demographics of the legal profession and the medical profession. There aren’t enough people who have experienced discrimination directly.

But it’s also that a good plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so last year there were a number of stories about bias in home appraisal, in which Black families got a low appraisal for their home and they then got a white friend to sit in for them, and they took down the Jacob Lawrence paintings and the Toni Morrison books. And when it appeared that the home was owned by a white person, it was as much as $500,000 more.

I’m glad they covered this, and this is a good story. And Fair Housing groups have sued about appraisal discrimination, and the National Fair Housing Alliance has a whole campaign about it.

But nobody connected those instances to the systemic problems in the appraisal industry, which Elizabeth Korver-Glenn has written about in her book Race Brokers. They haven’t related that the low home value appraisals are connected to high property tax appraisals, as Andrew Kahrl points out in his great book The Black Tax. So the information is out there, but it’s just that they end the story too soon, and they assume things are going to be all right.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play called A Raisin in the Sun, which is about a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. And at the end of the play, the Black people are in the neighborhood, and critics said, “Oh, this is a happy ending.” And Lorraine Hansberry said, “Well, if you think that’s a happy ending, wait until they wake up the next morning and have bricks and rocks thrown at their house, and the neighbors don’t talk to them, and the police harass them.”

And so you can’t end the story too soon. We have to think about all these interconnections.

JJ: Absolutely. And we could and will continue this conversation much further.

But I just want to tell folks that we’ve been speaking with George Lipsitz. He’s research professor emeritus of Black studies in sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. And the book we’re talking about is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and it’s available now from University of California Press. George Lipsitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GL: Thank you, Janine. I really appreciate the conversation.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.

Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as “an anti-Enlightenment program.” The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.

John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): “Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”

McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters’ “infuriated chanting.” He said:

Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans…. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus…. Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….

The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

He’s clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech “permissible.”

Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is “a form of abuse” of Jewish students through the “relentless assault” of protesters’ Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president’s decision to “crack down” on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.

‘Flagrant unprofessional conduct’

For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), “upholding the ideals of free speech” requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.

In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters’ speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as “breaching grade privacy requirements” (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).

A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.

Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax “said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’…. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Wax made public comments about Black students’ grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.

The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel’s recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor’s white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

Given McWhorter’s previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn’t have to listen to speech like “from the river to the sea,” one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax’s subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.

Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be “Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous,” his headline declared, but “She Shouldn’t Be Punished” for them.

‘Living with discomfort’—or not

“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy…but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member,” a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).

McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”

He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”

The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s “discomfort—or even anger and injury” is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a “form of abuse” that they should not be expected to simply “be able to tolerate.”

Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax “engaged in ‘flagrant unprofessional conduct’ that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn” from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”

McWhorter deems the disciplinary action “egregious,” yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.

Acceptable and unacceptable restrictions

Columbia University’s suspension of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict “the ideal of free speech,” in McWhorter’s view, because the university had not “categorically prohibited criticism of Israel.”

McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with “identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment”:

Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.

The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.

McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, “pushing” demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas “categorical” prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.

It’s remarkable that McWhorter doesn’t see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.

Enormous chilling effect

Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): “Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics…have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”

What’s more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.

McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having

shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.

Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”

Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent

behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging…supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.

Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.

Tip of the iceberg

Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): “Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza…colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter’s attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):

Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.

On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have been fired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.

If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.

But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New York Times and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it’s remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

 

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UC Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Random House (2024)

Acclaimed journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to nonfiction with his essay collection The Message, published on October 1, only to be met with patronizing dismissal and a whiff of racism on CBS Mornings (9/30/24).

Coates left journalism to spend several years teaching and writing fiction, and intended to return to essay writing by producing a piece similar to George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” What he ended up with was The Message, a collection of three essays that explore “how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.” Coates visits Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine—exploring how the narrative of each place is constructed and perpetuated by journalists and media organizations.

The longest of the essays, and the most discussed, is on Palestine. Coates goes beyond the now widely accepted call for a ceasefire, or even a call for an arms embargo: He condemns the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and says Israel’s existence as an ethnostate is fundamentally wrong. Coates has been met with praise, but also blatant dismissal—the second response being exemplified on CBS Mornings.

‘In the backpack of an extremist’

Tony Dokoupil (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on Palestine “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

Host Tony Dokoupil began the interview with an aggressive monologue that effectively dismissed Coates’ and his worldview, painting him as a radical not worth listening to:

I want to dive into the Israel and Palestine section of the book, it’s the largest section of the book…. I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off, the publishing house goes away…the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.

It is hard to imagine a white author as celebrated as Coates receiving such an immediate dismissal, not just of their writing, but the very basis of their political beliefs. Dokoupil forwent an attempt to have a substantive conversation by accusing Coates of “extremism.” (The “backpack” reference seemed like an attempt to insinuate a sympathy for terrorism, as Minority Report noted—10/2/24.)

More than two minutes into the 7-minute long segment, Dokoupil still hadn’t let Coates talk about his own book. The host continued to lambaste the author, suggesting Coates was either ignorant of Middle Eastern history or creating a false narrative:

I found myself wondering, why did Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very smart guy, very talented guy, why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada…the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?

And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?

Coates pointed out that Dokoupil’s narrative is the one constantly perpetuated by corporate media, and that his own concern is “with those who don’t have a voice, who don’t have the ability to talk”—in this case, the Palestinians. He noted that no establishment US news outlet has a Palestinian-American bureau chief, or even correspondent, and spoke of the suffering he saw during his trip to Israel and Palestine.

Dokoupil chose not to engage with Coates’ criticisms of the Israeli state. Instead, he pointed out acts of violence experienced by Israel—which are greatly outnumbered by the acts of violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians—and continually pivoted the conversation to try and make Coates answer whether or not he believes Israel has a right to exist, rather than engaging with the issues that Coates wrote about.

In response to the right-to-exist question, Coates said that no country has established their ability to exist through rights, but rather through force: “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.”

‘What offends you about a Jewish state?’

Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): “I am against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity.”

Dokoupil accused Coates of writing a book that “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel,” and finally stopped beating around the bush and asked him outright: “What is it that so particularly offends you about a Jewish state? A Jewish safe place, rather than any other country?”

Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates followed the disingenuous argument that to condemn the state and actions of Israel is to be antisemitic. The exchange between the two exemplifies the issue with Palestine coverage in American media: Israel-centric viewpoints are undeniably the dominant narrative, and challenging that narrative is simply not accepted, even by one in the media fold. Those who do so are either implicitly or explicitly accused of antisemitism and dismissed out of hand.

The CBS Mornings interview called to mind the recent comments by CNN host Jake Tapper, who spread a lie attributing an antisemitic remark to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and asked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to condemn the nonexistent comment. Tlaib had challenged the arrest of arrest of peaceful pro-Palestine protesters, suggesting that their being singled out for punishment on the basis of their views indicated a bias—and because she did so, she was herself faced with spurious charges of bias.

Coates stated in both his profile with New York magazine (9/23/24) and an interview with the New York Times (9/29/24) that he knew people would take issue with The Message. He told New York that he knew he would face backlash, and his career would likely suffer for speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people:

I’m not worried…. I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.

Dokoupil proved Coates’ expectations were well-grounded. Still, at every point during the nearly 7-minute exchange, he responded calmly and rationally, stating his belief that Israel is an apartheid state, comparable to the Jim Crow–era South: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”

Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates was more an interrogation than an interview, and the patronizing tone and racism that Coates encountered on CBS is a part of a media ecosystem that continuously uplifts pro-Israel voices and leaves out pro-Palestine ones.

Messages to CBS may be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Elsie Carson-Holt.

Following the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times’ “Critic’s Notebook” (8/23/24) published an analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pantsuit choices during the event.

“For the most important speech of her life, the presidential candidate dressed for more than identity politics,” read the subhead.

“In the end, she did not wear a white suit,” the piece began, later explaining the linkage between the color and its symbolism of women’s solidarity. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman outlined the significance of Harris’ navy blue suit choice in accepting the Democratic nomination.

The New York Times (8/23/24) said that Kamala Harris came to her convention speech “dressed for more than identity politics.”

“Ms. Harris made a different choice. One that didn’t center her femininity—or feminism (that’s a given)—but rather her ability to do the job,” Friedman wrote, as if those points were mutually exclusive.

A politician’s fashion choices are undoubtedly symbolic. Friedman has also recently published pieces about Donald Trump’s use of his suits to define patriotism (6/14/24), JD Vance’s use of his beard to portray traditional masculinity (7/18/24) and Tim Walz’s use of rugged clothing to define his “regular guy” image (8/22/24).

In each of these instances, the white male politician is using his style to communicate a message about his—and his constituents’—identities. But only in the piece about Harris’ clothing choice does Friedman use the term “identity politics,” lauding her for not defaulting to “when in doubt, women wear white!”

In fact, a FAIR study of US newspapers found the overwhelming majority of times the vague term “identity politics” was mentioned, it was referring to Democrats and the left.

What is identity politics?

Even though the right has taken to derogatorily using it against the left, “identity politics” is commonly understood to mean forming political alliances based on identities like religion, ethnicity and social background.

That definition applies equally to MAGA Republicans’ explicit or implicit appeals to white, Christian and traditional gender identities as it does to the left’s emphasis on ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. The DNC and RNC’s pep-rally atmospheres are both designed to project unity under political—and politicized—identities.

But a FAIR study of newspaper coverage during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic national conventions found that news media largely peddle the right-wing application of the term. A search of Nexis’ “US Newspapers” database for the phrase “identity politics” during July 14–21 and August 18–25  turned up 52 articles (some of which were reprints in multiple outlets) that related to the major parties, their conventions, and their presidential and vice presidential candidates.  Forty-five of those articles used the term to refer to Democrats and the left, four used the term to refer to Republicans and the right, and three referred to both groups.

A New York Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd (8/23/24) was one of the 45 articles that associated “identity politics” with Democrats and/or the left. It applauded Harris for how little she discussed her identity, except for promising that she’d sign a bill restoring abortion rights.

“Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics,” Dowd wrote.

Harris “dwelling” on her race and gender—as someone who would be the first woman, first South Asian and second Black president in the country’s history—would have been poor judgment, Dowd implied.

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics,” the Arizona Republic (7/16/24) quoted an RNC speaker, “we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God.”

However, in two Arizona publications (Arizona Republic, 7/16/24, 7/19/24; Arizona Daily Star, 7/20/24), another woman emphasized her lived experience as “a single mother” to uphold her support of Trump—without the term “identity politics” being assigned to her. Instead, Sara Workman, one of the “everyday Americans” who spoke at the RNC, was quoted assigning it to Democrats:

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics, we are here tonight because we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God,” she said.

The irony of criticizing “identity politics” while invoking a line in the Pledge of Allegiance that was added to the oath in 1954 to assert the country’s Christian supremacy was lost on the outlets that published this quote.

Similarly, a piece referencing Vance playing up his “working-class roots” and “rags-to-riches” upbringing not only didn’t acknowledge the “identity politics” in such a presentation, but granted space to another Republican source to use the label derogatorily against the left (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/17/24). RNC committee member Harmeet Dhillon, was quoted saying Trump’s decision to pick the white, male Vance instead of “a woman or a minority” was “a sign of maturity and confidence in our party being able to succeed based on our ideas, not on identity politics.”

The ‘balance’ double standard

Another concerning idea echoed in the press was the assertion that Harris, simply by being a woman of color, would alienate white male voters, and therefore thank goodness she chose a white man as her running mate!

In the Detroit Free Press (8/22/24), a Republican wrote that Harris needed to “commit to ending identity politics” to get her vote.

In a commentary for the Detroit Free Press, headlined “Five Things Harris Can Do at DNC to Make This Michigan Never-Trump Republican Vote Democrat” (8/22/24), guest columnist Andrea Bitley listed “commit[ting] to ending identity politics” as one of her stipulations. It’s “historic” that Harris is a “woman of color,” Bitley wrote, then connected that to an important qualification: “However, returning to the heart and soul of democracy and broad-based politics that don’t play favorites with niche groups will make casting my vote easier.”

Bitley’s implication is that being Black, South Asian or a woman itself requires special effort to avoid pandering to identity groups—and ignores Donald Trump’s playing favorites with the extremely niche group of billionaires he counts himself among.

Before Harris officially became the Democratic nominee and announced Walz as her running mate, the Lexington Herald Leader (7/21/24) in Kentucky discussed the possibility of another white man, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, becoming the VP pick.

“If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, told the outlet. He added, “We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

The New York Times (7/21/24) also reported:

Well aware of the cold reality of identity politics, Democrats assume that if Ms. Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to be vice president, were nominated to the presidency, she would most likely balance her ticket with a white man.

In other words, the press regularly advises Harris to avoid identity politics at all costs—except when the identity being favored is white male.

These pieces did at least acknowledge that white and male are identities, but didn’t acknowledge the double-standard of Harris being called to “balance” her ticket out with a white man, when the last 43 of 46 presidencies have been held by white men with white male running mates.

Both-sidesing

Some say Donald Trump is a “threat to democratic values”; others say “identity politics” (and federal regulation) are the “true threat” (Boston Globe, 7/21/24).

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe equated the dangers of “identity politics” to Trump’s threat to democracy. Guest columnist (and former Washington bureau chief) David Shribman (7/21/24) quoted Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner:

The Republicans believe the country is halfway to the Soviet gulag. The Democrats believe the country is halfway to Adolf Hitler. They both see this election in apocalyptic terms.

Shribman continued:

Both sides—those who believe Donald Trump represents a threat to democratic values, and those who believe that identity politics and an inclination toward a highly regulatory federal government are the true threat—consider this year’s election a moment that will define the country for a generation.

People on the left believe Trump’s America is “halfway to Adolf Hitler” because many of his supporters are literal neo-Nazis. They believe Trump is a threat to democratic values because he encouraged his followers to carry out a deadly insurrection on the Capitol after he could not accept that he lost the 2020 election, and he is preparing to overturn the 2024 vote.

People on the right see the US as “halfway to the Soviet gulag” because…Democrats want you to acknowledge slavery and respect they/them pronouns?

This false equivalence is dangerous, and it is difficult to understand how white supremacy, a worldview based entirely on race, is not considered “identity politics” in this case.

Rare mentions of the right

Tressie McMillan Cottom (New York Times, 8/19/24): J.D. Vance’s evasions on his “childless cat ladies” line “reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.”

Out of the four articles that used the term “identity politics” to refer to the right, three were from New York Times writers.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (8/19/24) referred to the “egregious right-wing identity politics” in the context of Vance’s uncreative—and Gileadean—attacks on “childless cat ladies.” The Times‘ TV critic (7/19/24) also referenced the performance of macho male identity politics at the testosterone-laden displays at the RNC, saying, “This is what male identity politics looks like.”

Lydia Polgreen interrogated the derogatory application of the term “DEI candidate” to Harris, arguing that if Harris is a “DEI candidate,” so is Vance (New York Times, 7/21/24). Polgreen argued:

All politics is, at some level, identity politics—the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country.

Pointing out that white is a race, male is a gender and identity plays into all politics are arguments missing from most of the coverage, which failed to truly interrogate what people really mean when they apply these terms only to people of color and other minorities.

The fourth piece applying “identity politics” to the right came from the right-wing Washington Times (7/16/24) under a headline declaring that Black Republican speakers at the RNC “Put Identity Politics to Rest”—after leaning on their family “histories” that included slavery, cotton picking and “the  Jim Crow South.” “That was where the identity politics ended,” the paper assured readers.

Invisible identities

Race theorists like john a. powell have long interrogated the idea of whiteness and maleness being treated as “invisible” defaults:

White people have the luxury of not having to think about race. That is a benefit of being white, of being part of the dominant group. Just like men don’t have to think about gender. The system works for you, and you don’t have to think about it…. The Blacks have race; maybe Latinos have race; maybe Asians have race. But they’re just white. They’re just people. That’s part of being white.

Harris as vice president is a “symptom” of the Democrats’ “perspective…based on identity politics.” (San Diego Union Tribune, 7/21/24).

This belief that the normal, default human form is white and male is what allows people like Tom Shepard, a longtime San Diego political consultant quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune (7/21/24), to imply that Harris being chosen for the 2020 ticket as vice president is merely a symptom of the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics, and one of the “fundamental problems” with the party’s policy:

The Democratic Party, for all of its strengths, has over the last several decades kind of developed a perspective that is based on identity politics, and the reason that Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket as vice president is, at least in part, a symptom of that approach.

It’s the same reason why terms like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), “diversity hire” and “identity politics” are used derogatorily against people of color, women and sexual minorities, disabled people and other underrepresented groups that dare to attempt to achieve equity with white men (CounterSpin, 8/8/24; FAIR.org, 7/10/21).

Without specificity in definition and equal application to either party’s politicking based on identities, “identity politics” becomes yet another dog-whistle used against those who simply dare to not be white or male.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and CEPR’s Algernon Austin about the Black economy for the September 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CEPR (8/26/24)

Janine Jackson: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called the “US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me.

A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic indicators, not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go, as a society that has yet to address deep, historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That conversation is coming up on today’s show.

***

JJ: Corporate news media tend to report economic news like the weather. Yes, it affects different people differently, but the source, the economy, is just—stuff that happens.

But there’s really no such thing as “the economy.” There are policies and practices about taxes and lending and wages, and they are as historically embedded, preferentially enforced and as susceptible to intentional change as everything else.

So how should we read reports about the “best Black economy in decades,” particularly as one question news media rarely include in the daily recitation of numbers is: Compared to what?

A new research brief engages these questions; the title’s a bit of a giveaway: “The Best Black Economy in Generations—and Why It Isn’t Enough.”

We’re joined now by the brief’s co-authors. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Algernon Austin.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Thank you.

Algernon Austin:  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

JJ: Economic reporting can seem very dry and divorced from life as lived. We read that the country’s GDP is up, or that inflation is leveling off, and a lot of us just don’t know what that means, in terms of whether we are more likely to get a job, or a wage increase, or a home loan. If you can parse that data, though, it does tell us something, if not enough. So let me ask you first, what particular indicators are telling us or showing us that Black Americans are experiencing the most positive economic conditions in generations? What are you looking at?

Algernon Austin: “If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would…significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.”

AA: One thing that I pay a lot of attention to is the employment-to-population ratio, or the employment rate, and that’s simply what percent of the population is working. And that’s something that’s very concrete, that people can relate to. And the Black population, historically, has had a significantly lower employment rate than the white population.

So why we’re in the greatest economy on record is because, if you look at the prime age employment rate, that’s individuals 25-to-54 years old, the Black prime age employment rate, the annual rate for the first half of this year has been at a record high. So that is certainly quite positive news, and something that we should celebrate.

But as you pointed out, compared to what? Compared to the white prime age employment rate, it’s still below average. And when you do the full calculation of what I call the “Black jobs deficit,” we need about 1.4 million more Black people working to have the same employment rate as white people.

And what does that mean in terms of income for Black America? If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would have an additional $60 billion, that’s with a B, $60 billion going into Black America, which would significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.

So that’s the positive: We have a high employment rate. The negative is it’s still lagging, and that lag, that deficit, is still causing a great deal of poverty for Black people.

JJ: So Algernon, you’ve connected employment and poverty and income right there, which are the key indicators that I’m seeing lifted up in this report. Unemployment is one that is a complicated thing to report because, as we know, sometimes unemployment rates don’t include people who’ve stopped looking for work, and all of that. But you’re saying that unemployment and poverty and income are all connected here. What can you tell us about what those other indicators, the poverty rates, and the income and wealth indicators, what do they add to this picture about good news?

AA: We pay a lot of attention to the unemployment rate, which is valid; it’s an important indicator. But for populations that face persistent challenges finding work —and I just said that there are about 1.4 million Black people who should be working but who aren’t—you see the unemployment rate undercounts joblessness. Because if people have been repeatedly rejected by employers—so imagine someone who maybe was formerly incarcerated—that individual is less likely to be actively looking for work. And if you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not counted as being unemployed. Or if you’re in an economically depressed area and you look around and you say, “there’s no jobs,” and you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not being counted as unemployed.

So the unemployment rate is an important indicator, and the Black rate is typically about twice the white rate. Right now, it’s a little bit less than two times, so that’s, again, another positive sign. But it does undercount joblessness.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Yeah. And in terms of income and wealth, we’ve also seen some positive signs. So I think that’s why we’re saying it’s the strongest Black economy in generations, because we see in many of the major indicators that Blacks are at record high. Also in terms of median household income, Blacks in 2022 were at $53,000 median income for households. And so that is a record high for the African-American community. As well as wealth in 2022, where we have the most recent data, it’s at a record high of $45,000.

Now, just as Algernon had noted, record highs can be great, but relative to what, and what does that mean? The median income for white households is $81,000. So Blacks are still about $30,000 less in terms of median income. And I think most people would understand that $53,000 for a household is not a lot of money.

And we look at wealth. We also argue that $45,000 median wealth is actually a household that is asset poor, that does not have enough wealth to keep them financially secure. There’s been estimates, well, let’s just put forward that white median wealth is $285,000. So you have that $45,000, compared to $285,000, with past estimates of middle-class wealth beginning around $170,000.

So we can see that we’re hitting record highs, but we’re still leaving African Americans in spaces of economic insecurity, and that’s why it isn’t enough and we need to do more.

New York Times (5/30/24)

JJ: There’s been a phenomenon lately where reporters and pundits seem to say, “People are saying they’re not happy with the economy, but they’re wrong, because look at this chart.” It’s sort of like people are maybe too dumb to know how good they have it.

But people aren’t dumb. They know they have two jobs and still struggle. They know they have a fairly good income, but they could not survive one medical emergency. But reporting, and some politicking, seems to suggest that if you aren’t doing well, then maybe that’s a you problem, because, after all, “the economy” is firing on all pistons. But people’s opinion about their economic health and their economic situation, Black people’s opinion, comes from a combination of things, you found?

AA: A lot of the reporting is based on macroeconomic indicators, which are, I’m not disputing them, it’s just that the big picture, national average can mask a lot of variation on the ground, and can be distant from what people are feeling.

So we’ve been through, because of Covid, because of the lockdowns, because of the shutdown and supply chains, because of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a massive spike in inflation, I think probably more than we’ve seen in a generation. And that has been quite a shock. And I think that affects people’s views of economic conditions.

We’ve also seen very high interest rates, and that makes it very hard for people to borrow, or increases the cost of trying to get a mortgage, increases credit card debt. We’ve seen, in terms of housing, a real scarcity in housing, and a real spike in housing costs.

So there’s a lot of things for people to be worried about, to be anxious about. And of course there was the Covid recession, which was massive. So there’s been a lot of economic turmoil, and it’s an error to discount what these recent traumatic experiences are, and the fact that they’re not just experiences, there are real economic consequences that people see every day when they go to the grocery store and pay their grocery bills.

JJ: And Dedrick, the report says Black Americans are optimistic, pessimistic, multifaceted and complex in terms of their understanding of their own economic situation, and then when they’re asked about the broader picture; and that makes sense as human beings.

Pew (7/18/23)

DA: Yeah, yeah. I did think that was an interesting thing pulled out of our paper, was looking at some past surveys and seeing 67% of African Americans expressed optimism, feeling good to somewhat good, about their financial future, while at the same time, in a different poll, in a Pew poll, we saw that African Americans, 70% said they did not have enough money for the life they want. And these are different things, right?

Again, if you’re used to ridiculously high unemployment rates in your community, and then it’s getting a little bit better, that might make you feel optimistic that, oh, well, maybe things can get better in my household. But, at the same time, you can still understand that, “but I don’t have enough money to be a homeowner. I’m having a harder and harder time paying grocery bills.”

So both of those feelings can live within one’s life experience and be real. I think it’s only when you’re trying to just have a very simple explanation of how people feel that we act like they’re in contradiction.

JJ: Algernon has referred a couple times to consistent challenges faced by Black Americans. I think that’s part of what’s left out of a lot of news media conversations. So let’s just talk about, when you say big numbers, macro numbers, can be trending in a good direction, but they’re not enough, and they’re not going to be enough without something else, what are you getting at? What would responsive policy look like?

CBPP (6/10/24)

AA: In response to the Covid pandemic, the federal government expanded the child tax credit, and expanded the earned income tax credit, so that more poor people and more poor people with children would get aid from the federal government.

And what did we see? We saw a dramatic decline in poverty, dramatic decline in Black poverty, dramatic decline in Black child poverty, as well as for American Indians, for Latinos, and for the white population. So we know what works, we know that we have the power to do it, but, unfortunately, conservatives in Congress decided that they were not going to extend the expanded child tax credit and the expanded EITC.

So we’ve seen a reversal. So we’ve seen Black poverty rates—and this is using the supplemental poverty measure, that factors in these tax credits—increase again. So it’s unfortunate that policy makers don’t put the policy agenda to fight poverty, and to produce more racial equality, as a higher priority.

DA: Yes, and I’ll just add to that, I think an important takeaway from this is that though we have some record highs, we don’t need to let up on the economy. We need to put our pedal down to the metal, as the saying goes, in order to continue to build and strengthen. Because even with these record highs, in terms of income, we noted a report that was done last year with the Institute for Policy Studies, that noted that even at the current rate, if you look from 1960 to 2020, it would take hundreds of years before Blacks had equal pay with whites, and it would take almost 800 years for Blacks to have equal wealth with whites.

And so over the last five years, we’re having some important advances. And so what we need to do is do policies that build off of that, right? Whether it’s to continue to strengthen the earned income tax credits and other such types of credit, I think increased home ownership, there’s a lot of conversation on that. We have to make sure any type of home-ownership advancement is something that disproportionately affects African Americans in particular, but Latinos as well. African Americans have never had the majority of their population as homeowners, and that’s the No. 1 source of wealth for most Americans. So if we can do something in 2025 to really strengthen homeownership for first-time homeowners, that could be something substantial that could help break away from these historic inequalities that have made racial inequality, not just something that occurs through prejudice, but something that can be seen through socioeconomic status.

AA: We also need targeted job creation. Subsidized employment is the most effective way, so subsidized employment programs targeted to high-unemployment communities. I mentioned that we still need about 1.4 million more Black people working for the Black employment rate to be the same as the white employment rate. So we need to target those high-unemployment communities with effective job creation.

CEPR (2/9/23)

JJ: When I hear “consistent challenges,” I mean, we’re talking about racism, in terms of economic policy in this country, and the harms have been targeted, historically and presently—redlining, loan denial, all of that, the harms have been targeted. But at this moment, supposedly reforms are not allowed to be targeted, because that would be DEI, that would be unfair.

And I know we’ve talked about, for example, the Covid response was not about race. Great Depression, the WPA was not targeted by race. It was actually something that helped Black people, because it helped everyone. But we’re in this present moment that we’re in, where if you say these people are being particularly harmed, and so at least some remedy should be targeted towards them, we know that that’s going to be politically difficult. And I know that’s a weird question, but I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

DA: Clearly, racial equality has always been politically difficult, as the history of this country has shown. So it will continue to be politically difficult. I think we have seen, like the War on Poverty, that sometimes in its name might not appear as something particularly focused on African Americans, but it was coming out of the strong Black civil rights movement of that time period, when we saw a substantial decline of Black poverty in particular, all poverty. But many of the policies I did think had a disproportionate impact on African Americans.

The most effective and efficient way to address disproportionate negative harm is to then put in positive economic impact, particularly on those communities. So we should look at ways of doing that. Sometimes race would be the factor named, but sometimes you can also get it just by focusing on first-time homeowners of certain income and wealth level that would disproportionately have a good amount of African Americans, Latinos, and would have some whites, but would have a disproportionate impact on the community.

So I think if policymakers are willing—and I think our job as the electorate is to make policymakers willing—and we can get forward these policies, whether we call them DEI policies, or whether we call them trying to ensure that America is majority homeowner, or America is fully employed throughout the nation, there are ways of putting this forward.

Vox (7/9/23)

AA: This is a long struggle. So if you look at the history of the Black civil rights movement, or Black liberation struggle, however you want to characterize it, there have been moments when we’ve moved forward, there have been moments when we’ve moved backwards. So this is just one phase. So it’s important for people to recognize: OK, what’s next? How do we move forward from this particular point? So I think it’s important to regroup and think about how we move forward.

I’m focused on affirmative action policies, and particularly affirmative action in employment, which still exists, which needs to be protected and fought for, because it will be under attack. The second point that Dedrick was making is that there are ways that may be less efficient for racial justice, but there are ways to make impacts that reduce racial inequality.

And we saw it, going back to poverty, the expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit had a disproportionate positive impact on reducing Black poverty. It also reduced white poverty, and poverty for all other groups, but because more Black people were poor and in hardship, it had a disproportionate benefit. So although that was a race-neutral program, it did have a disproportionate racial benefit.

And similarly, I’ve called for targeted subsidized employment, and notice I said targeted to high-unemployment communities. You can go to Appalachia and find majority white communities that are high unemployment, and we should be concerned about those high-unemployment white communities. But if you target job creation to high-unemployment communities, you will disproportionately benefit Black communities, because that’s where the high unemployment is disproportionately concentrated.

So I think it’s important that we continue on both fronts. Let’s exploit all the race-neutral policies that we can, but also let’s not give up on a race-conscious economic justice fight in addition.

JJ: I just want to ask you, finally, about news media, about reporting. When, Dedrick, we spoke in 2017, I was talking about a Washington Post piece that said that a rise in middle-class incomes was “unequivocally good news,” even as the same report had some sort of notes in between, one of which was, oh yeah, “yawning racial disparities remain.” And that’s kind of par for the course in news, the idea that racial gaps in economic circumstances and options are lamentable but normal, and kind of a footnote to the real story, which holds an implication that a rising economic tide will eventually lift all boats.

And that framing and that absence of complexity, while it’s kind of par for the course in corporate journalism, it reflects a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of the way economic developments affect different groups, which is what we’ve been talking about. And I wonder, from both of you, if you have any thoughts about the role that journalism currently plays in illuminating this set of issues, and about the role that journalism maybe could play?

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: “The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America.”

DA: Things have changed a lot over the last 30 years, even this idea of racial inequality, minority groups. I mean, now you look at Blacks and Latinos, and Latinos oftentimes, as well, have lower income levels, have lower home ownership levels, and you put these populations together, Blacks and Latino, and they’re about a third of the population. And if you talk about youth and children, you see that the majority of kids in many school districts throughout the country are students of color.

So no longer can it be kind of, well, there’s an issue with a small part of the population, but the rest of the economy is going strong. The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America—Latinos being the largest group now, African Americans being the second-largest group. So it will be essential, if we’re looking at how the economy can grow, making sure these communities are getting their share of the growth that would get them at a level of true middle class.

I think that’s one thing I particularly look at in terms of wealth, is that Black America’s never had a strong Black middle class in terms of wealth. You’ve always had a very small population that have had a middle-class economic wealth stability. And, again, the future of reporting on the future of the country really requires understanding those differences, and highlighting that, so we can push the country in the right direction, and how do we move the country forward in a way that is equitable in a manner that it never has been.

AA: I don’t want to appear to be too self-centered or self-serving, but we need the information presented in this report covered, because I feel both parts of the story have not gotten sufficient media attention. One is that we’re at historic highs on so many different measures that I don’t think has been talked about enough, and two, we still have significant inequality that we haven’t addressed. There’s some positive signs, but we obviously need to do a lot more. And like Dedrick said, we need to keep pressing the gas. We can’t take our foot off the pedal.

So that’s one thing. The other thing—I try to stress this when I speak to people—is that we’re talking about the United States, and Black people are part of the United States. Latinos are part of the United States. The American Indian or the Indigenous population are sort of part of the United States; some are independent nations, but they’re also interacting with the US economy.

If you improve the economic conditions of the Black population, you’re improving the economic standing of the United States. If you improve the economic condition of Latinos, you’re improving the economic strengths and health of the United States.

And it’s important that people understand that, because, unfortunately, people tend to go into a zero sum mode, and not recognize that helping Black people, in terms of public policy, is a way to help the entire country, help the United States. So that’s something that I think reporters can also work on communicating.

DA: The one thing I’ll add, in terms of what can reporters do, I think reporters need to focus in on expertise, Black expertise, expertise around racial inequality. I’ll just put forward, as recently new president of Joint Center for Political Economic Study, it’s important that Black institutions are utilized and are put at the forefront of conversations around the economy and these issues.

It’s great that there’s been more conversations around racial wealth divide, and race and economics; there’s been a lot of conversation around DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—movement, and attacks on it. But I don’t feel that they have enough centered on those who have been at the forefront of highlighting these issues, putting forth policy solutions to address them.

There are a cadre of reporters who have been focused on these issues for the last 20 years, and these reporters need to be at the forefront of the conversation. Too often times, if I do get a call, I’m getting a call from someone who’s reporting this for the first time, and doesn’t even quite understand the reality that there is deep economic inequality, it has been ongoing, and it would take radical change to really get us to a place where we could have some equality. So, again, I think we need to value those who have been focused on this area, and those institutions from these communities, if we really want to report correctly on these challenges.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and with Algernon Austin, director of the Race and Economic Justice Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The brief we’ve been discussing can be found at both JointCenter.org and CEPR.net. Thank you both so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DA: Thanks for having us.

AA: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

CEPR (8/26/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed author and educator Tim Wise about ‘DEI hires’ for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: While Republicans are clearly scrambling to find profitable lines of attack in a new presidential race, they’re deploying one line that draws on a lot of history: labeling presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a “DEI hire,” with reference to programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The notion, if anyone needed it spelled out, is that any Black or brown person or woman in a job is only there because employers were forced to hire them.

To many, this sort of thing is transparent misogyny and racism, and then that special combination of the two. But being obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t impactful. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built on decades of undermining any intentional efforts to dismantle or even acknowledge the living history of structurally embedded white supremacy in this country.

Tim Wise is an anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist. He joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tim Wise.

Tim Wise: Thank you for having me.

JJ: One official definition of DEI is “organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.” We might add that could be historically and currently, but that’s the idea.

Now, it used to be most everyone would say, “Sure, that’s a good idea,” but then maybe just not do it. Now, we seem to have slipped backward to where the right feels they can boldly say, “Oh, we don’t even support that idea.” It’s strange, isn’t it, to miss the good old days when people didn’t say what they thought?

Tim Wise: “When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression.”

TW: Right—we’ve sort of gone from the days of the dog whistle to the air horn or bullhorn on these things. I remember, 30-plus years ago, when I started out doing this work in the campaigns against David Duke down in Louisiana. Duke felt the need to sort of hide his racism, to downplay his overt white supremacy.

And it seems like the gloves are off now. And so DEI has become essentially the new n-word for certain folks on social media. They will apply it to any person of color, regardless of that person’s qualifications, regardless of that person’s accomplishments. And they’ll apply it to public officials who, after all, pass the only test one needs to determine qualifications, which is, they got elected, right?

So if the mayor of Baltimore happens to be a Black man, and a barge hits a bridge and the bridge falls down, they call him the DEI mayor. What does that even mean? I mean, you get elected by getting votes, just like white mayors. And if the mayor had been white, I don’t think there would’ve been some special white man superpower that would’ve kept the bridge up.

But what that is is a way of reminding people, or telling people, these folks are less qualified, and they’re taking your stuff.

And I think the reason that they’ve ramped that up, and the gloves have come off, is that unlike 30-some odd years ago, 20 years ago, we suddenly have white folks confronted with a couple of realities. One is that the culture and the demographics of the country are changing, in a way that renders us less hegemonic than we once were. And when you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression. You feel like the wheels are coming off the bus. And so there’s this perfect storm of white anxiety that we are in the midst of, and we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to that.

JJ: And we’ll come back to that. Just doubling on what you’ve just said, folks may remember this 1990 ad for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that showed white hands crumbling a job- rejection letter with the voiceover, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

“White Hands” ad for Jesse Helms (1990)

It’s powerful, in part, because of what it glides over. How does our dude know he was the best qualified? And then the implication that decades of rejecting minorities because they weren’t white represents the state of fairness that we’re trying to get back to. And, I was just going to say, even though these current campaigns are more overt, they’re still drawing a lot of power from what they don’t say. And why does that work? Who does that work on?

TW: I think it works because, first off, we have a long history of believing, No. 1, of course, that folks of color are less qualified, and whites are more qualified. That’s always been a problem in our country.

But I think there’s an even more fundamental thing at work, and that is, if you think about the most dominant ideological underpinning of America, what is it? The core of our belief system is this belief in meritocracy, rugged individualism, the idea that wherever you end up is all about you. So if you work hard, you can make it, anyone can.

And that’s, in theory, a race-neutral ideology, it’s also the secular gospel. If America were a Bible, it would be Genesis 1:1.

The problem is, once you imbibe that, once you internalize that belief, and you look around, and you see a society of profound racial inequality, of gender inequality, of class inequality, what is the logical thing for a person to do? And by a person, I don’t even mean an overt bigot. I mean an everyday average person who thinks about that, goes, “Gosh, if where you end up is all about your own effort and anyone can make it, then I guess these people on the bottom, maybe they are lesser, right? And the people on the top really are better.”

And so racism and sexism and classism can all be reinforced in people who are not actually particularly hateful, prejudiced or bigoted, but simply put two and two together: the idea of rugged individualism, and the objective reality of social stratification or inequality. So we really have to address that, because that suggests that a core element of American political thought is going to reinforce this kind of thinking. And once it does that, it can reinforce the very systems that promote that thinking.

X (3/15/21)

JJ: Republicans may have faith that they can just say “DEI” and their work is done, because of the success of other recent efforts. I will never get over how Christopher Rufo just called his shot. He just said:

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

And news media, who were in a place to say, “Well, no, you can’t just take a term and say it doesn’t mean what it claims to, it means whatever you say it does”—they didn’t do that. They simply folded this intentional misrepresentation into the public dialogue. I feel like they got played like a fiddle, and for reasons. But it didn’t just allow, but promoted, the notion that these attacks were some organic bottom-up thing, rather than an orchestrated campaign. What do you see as the current or potential role of the press in this?

TW: I think the media have done a miserable job, as you suggest, in responding to the blatantly, transparently dishonest narrative that folks like Rufo are spinning, when he says, as he has on his Twitter thread—he’s amazingly transparent about this—that we’re basically going to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We’re just going to name things what we want to name them. We’re going to tell people, this is what it is. We don’t even care.

He’s been quoted in a speech saying he doesn’t give a—and I know I can’t say the next word, because we’re on radio—about what CRT actually is. He doesn’t care about it. He, in fact, wants us to debate the specifics of it, while he just uses it as a propaganda cudgel.

Intercept (6/8/23)

And the media, rather than exposing that, have done piece after piece after piece, and I’m talking puff pieces, about Christopher Rufo, where they don’t dig into the funding, for example, the multi-billionaire dollar stuff that’s coming in for him and the organizations he works for.

This is not some grassroots, bottom-up campaign of some simple guy sitting at his computer in his home, taking on the powerful. This is somebody being funded by the powerful. But hardly any of the media have really attempted to pull back the veil on who he is and who is funding him and what their agenda is. And we know what their agenda is, because it’s the same agenda they’ve had for 50 years or more, really more than that, going back 60 years.

These are the ideological descendants of the people who never supported the civil rights movement, who never supported the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ideological descendants of the folks who used to write, at the National Review, that Black folks basically weren’t ready for the right to vote. They weren’t civilized enough yet. That was the official position of Bill Buckley’s magazine back in the ’60s. So that’s who these folks are, and if the media really believed in investigative journalism, they would expose that.

JJ: And then the other line that bugged me was, “Well, they aren’t even teaching CRT in elementary school,” as if that was a pushback.

TW: Yeah, there was sort of a capitulation, right? This idea that liberals, rather than standing up and fighting the attacks, said, “Oh no, that’s not us, my goodness.” Because the implication is, “Well, thank God it’s not, I mean, thank goodness we don’t do CRT with children, that would be poisoning their minds.”

But all CRT tries to do, and this is so important for people to understand, is to provide a theoretical grounding so that when you look out and you see racial disparity, you have a framework and a lens for understanding it. And without a systemic lens, frankly, the only explanation left is the one the right prefers, which is, these Black and brown folks are broken. And CRT is saying, “No, it’s not Black and brown folks who are broken.”

It’s not necessarily that white people are bad. CRT doesn’t bash white people. That’s a great myth. CRT doesn’t really say anything about white people as people. It says something about white supremacy as a system, historically and contemporaneously. And if you don’t have that framework, I don’t know how you can make sense of the world around you, except by blaming the people on the bottom for being there.

JJ: Finally, you travel the country, and have for years, talking to people about these issues. What’s the vibe? Where do you find hope right now?

TW: I find hope in the young folks, disproportionately, who led the uprising, obviously, in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. I find hope in the young people, disproportionately, who have stood up for the rights of Palestinians and the lives of Palestinians in this moment as well.

City Lights (2020)

I find hope in the enthusiasm that we’re seeing right now in the newly refashioned presidential race. I think there’s a lot of energy to realize that there is an opportunity to defeat Trumpism. There is an opportunity to beat back these folks who say they want to make America great again, by which they obviously mean a directional reference to the past.

I think there’s hope in knowing that the vast majority of the people in this country believe in democracy, want democracy, reject things like Project 2025, and want to move the country forward, rather than moving it backward where those folks want to go.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tim Wise. The most recent book is Dispatches From the Race War, from City Lights. Tim Wise, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TW: Oh, you bet. Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

(photo: Elvert Barnes)

Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Thomas Jefferson University’s Tauhid Chappell about cannabis equity for the June 28, 2024 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Extra! (2/13)

Janine Jackson: Marijuana use in this country has always been racialized. The first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, including the message that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” So concerns were justified about what the legalization and profitizing of marijuana would mean for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization.

Tauhid Chappell has worked on these issues for years now. He teaches, at Thomas Jefferson University, the country’s first graduate-level course studying the impact and outcomes of equity movements in the cannabis industry. And he joins us now by phone from Maine. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tauhid Chappell.

Tauhid Chappell: Always a pleasure.

JJ: When we spoke with you last year, you helped debunk a lot of Reefer Madness–style fear-mongering around supposed social harm stemming from the legalization of marijuana. There was old-school “gateway drug” language, marijuana was going to on-ramp folks to opioid use. It was going to lead to traffic accidents, and use among teenagers was supposedly going to skyrocket. We are further along now; what more have we learned about those kinds of concerns?

TC: I can happily report that as far as the ongoing reports that are coming out of what we call “mature markets”—states like Colorado, Washington, Oregon, even California—teen use has not been severely impacted. In fact, I believe that there’s a Colorado study that says that teen use has actually declined with legalization.

Opioid use has not suddenly gone up because of marijuana legalization. In fact, many states, in their medical marijuana programs, have used opioid reduction as a reason why patients should be using cannabis, to actually get them off of opioid addiction, until we are actually seeing a reverse, of people who get on cannabis actually now starting to lessen the amount of opioids they use in their regimen.

JJ: Well, the worry of many of us was that marijuana becoming legal would just blow past the fact that there are people in prison, mainly Black and brown people, for what now some other folks stand to profit from, that legalization would not include acknowledgement, much less reparation, for the decades in which whole communities were critically harmed. And then we just kind of say, “Hey, we’ve moved on, and now everybody loves weed.” What can you tell us about efforts to center those harmed by illegality in this new landscape of legal cannabis?

Tauhid Chappell: “How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions?”

TC: There is still much work to be done in the social and racial justice that would bring a reparative nature to the people, to the individuals, and their families and their communities, that have been impacted by cannabis prohibition and the war on drugs. Some states are trying to really focus on justice-impacted people to participate in the cannabis industry. Others are focusing on just trying to expunge records, pardon people, and that’s that. And then other states are not even contemplating or really moving to center people who have been impacted by incarceration, or are still incarcerated for marijuana, and other related offenses, too.

So you have a patchwork of states that are doing well and can be doing better, and then other states who really need to prioritize and focus on individuals and families and communities who’ve been impacted by the war on drugs.

Most recently in the news, Maryland’s governor has just pardoned 175,000 people for simple possession of marijuana, a typical charge that has impacted so many people in the past. That is something that I encourage other states to look at as advocates for more healing and repairing to happen for those that have been previously and currently impacted from their incarceration due to cannabis prohibition.

And then the one thing that I’ll also mention, too, in terms of focus on those that have been impacted by the war on drugs, I encourage other states to look at Illinois’ R3 Program, which I believe is the Repair, Reinvest and Restore program, that specifically designates cannabis tax revenue to be utilized as grants, not loans, as grants that different organizations can apply for to help expand their programming that goes into communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs.

You don’t have a whole lot of states that are utilizing cannabis tax revenue to go back into communities that have been disproportionately harmed. And you don’t have a lot of states that are trying to figure out: How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions and get back into society as a normal, average citizen?

So there is more work to be done. I don’t think it’s ever going to be over, in terms of people asking, calling for repair from the harms of the war on drugs. But if we can continuously see more governors, more legislatures expand the definition and criteria of who can get a pardon, who can get an expungement for marijuana-related arrest, that’s going to help a lot more people out.

CounterSpin (12/18/18)

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about journalism. When I was talking on this subject back in 2018, with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, we were talking about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at that point, saying “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” That was the level of the conversation. I know it might sound clownish to some people, but you’d be wrong to imagine that those attitudes are not still in the mix somewhere. You have worked in news media, you know the pushes and pulls on reporters. What would you like to see in terms of media coverage of this issue?

TC: I would like to have a lot more reporters be serious about the ongoing, what I believe is nefarious behavior by a lot of these large, well-capitalized—I’m talking tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars—capitalized multi-state operators that are really scheming to try to have a monopoly in different states. You have different large companies that have started early in other states like California, Oregon and Washington, realize that there’s too much competition and now are actually shutting down their operations on the West Coast and focusing on strongholds that they may have in other states, that may not have as much of a mature or expansive market.

There are companies like GTI that are really trying to capture Massachusetts’ market, for example. We have other major companies, like Trulieve, that are trying to really own their monopoly in Florida, right? You have other companies that exist in states like Pennsylvania, where it’s only medical, where the only dispensaries and processors, the majority of cultivators, are all out-of-state operators, people who don’t even live in Pennsylvania. You have companies like Curaleaf—Curaleaf is one of the largest cannabis companies in the country—really trying to double down their efforts in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey and other states, and make sure that no one else can really participate in the market.

I would really love more investigative journalism done to see how are these businesses forming? How are they collaborating and working with each other, even as competitors, and what are they doing at the policy and law level to change regulations that make it more favorable to them, and cut out small-business operators, justice-involved operators, equity operators? What are these large companies doing to lobby? Because, as cannabis legalization continues to be expansive, and now we’re talking about potential rescheduling of marijuana, to Schedule 3, at the federal level, you’re going to see these bigger companies come in and try to capture the market share and push everybody out.

We understand that people who have been directly impacted by a marijuana arrest, if they want to get into the business of marijuana and get a cannabis license, it makes sense for them to be supported and to be educated and to be nurtured for success, because that’s what they deserve after everything that they’ve been through.

Not everyone believes or cares about or shares that same sentiment. You have people who only look at marijuana legalization as another way to make money, and that’s all they want.

And so many of these bigger companies are doing all this shadow work behind the scenes. I would really love more journalists to really look at that, really connect the dots. This isn’t just a state-by-state level. These are companies that are working collectively together in multiple states to make sure that they’re the only players in the market. I would love more investigations behind these bigger companies.

JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note for now.

We’ve been speaking with Tauhid Chappell of Thomas Jefferson University. Tauhid Chappell, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TC: Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

‘Veered too far left’

Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

Egregiously misleading

For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

‘Pendulum swinging back’

The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

‘Veered too far left’

Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

Egregiously misleading

For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

‘Pendulum swinging back’

The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

‘Veered too far left’

Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

Egregiously misleading

For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

‘Pendulum swinging back’

The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Janine Jackson interviewed Media 2070’s Joseph Torres and Collette Watson about media reparations for the May 3, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Media 2070

Janine Jackson: The idea of some form of public, communal recognition and redress, or reparation, for Black Americans for centuries of systemic, state-sanctioned harms, and their lasting and continuing impact, is not new. But our guests’ work considers the particular meaningful and sustained harms of news media, of journalistic institutions charged with informing the public without fear or favor, that historically and currently have used their special place and power to help drive the oppression of Black and brown people—through storytelling, and through overt support for racist practices, policies and ideas.

Media 2070 was co-founded by Joseph Torres, who is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press—and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media—and writer, musician and communication strategist Collette Watson, who is co-founder of the new group Black River Life. Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

And they both join us now by phone from Washington, DC, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joe Torres and Collette Watson.

All right, well, “crisis of journalism” is going to be a phrase that a lot of listeners are familiar with. It’s a conversation among people, and among philanthropists, about how we can “save journalism.” But it’s unclear to us at FAIR, as to many others, if some of those folks in that conversation really understand that corporate journalism, US mainstream, so-called, journalism, has always contained its own poison. And if they are actually willing to address that, or if the goal is more of the same elite conversations that have excluded lots of people, but to do them in a more genteel way than maybe Fox News.

So I want to ask you both, to start: What is missing from current diagnoses and remedies for what we’re told is the crisis of journalism?

Collette Watson: I guess I’ll kick us off, and just say that what’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.

When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.

We know that from that earliest route, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.

Joseph Torres: I’ll add, Collette and I, we began writing this essay over a year ago for this political journal, and Collette, one of the co-creators of 2070, but also the senior director of the 2070 project until recent weeks, and what we try to do in this essay is: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.

At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question:  when hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.

Kansas City Star (12/22/20)

And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.

These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized.

What are we creating that’s different? How do we address issues of racial hierarchies, and that these institutions have played a role in undermining democracy for Black folks, and for other folks of color? So if we think the current democracy can be equated with the right to vote and equal-protection rights being reinstated 60 years ago, local journalism by dominant news organizations have played a role in undermining democracy, so-called democracy, for Black folks and other folks of color since the get-go, and still are today.

And so we are just trying to make an intervention into this debate, because the debate is happening; there’s a lot of money being invested in the space. There’s a lot of policy work happening—not just with the federal government, in local states—trying to make an intervention in funding local journalism. And we are afraid we’re just going to be replicating the same kind of harms.

JJ: Yeah, saving democracy via local journalism seems to mean, for a lot of folks, just shore up and sustain these local journalistic outlets. There’s the missing piece of acknowledgement of the harms that those outlets have done, and it’s clear that some people view the whole idea of reparations more broadly as “something bad happened to people in the past,” and so people that “look like them,” to put it crudely, are looking for resources now.

But I feel that, particularly if you look internationally, and even within this country, that understanding is shifting, so that people see, not just that harms on individuals, but on communities, are unending, but also that they see that truth and reconciliation processes, that they’ve seen in South Africa or in Argentina or in El Salvador, for example, they involve healing for the whole community.

And the starting place is not only about debts unpaid, but it’s about acknowledging that there’s been a distorted understanding of history, that everyone has been harmed –, particularly the people who have been specifically oppressed and harmed, but reparation involves acknowledgement first. It’s not a question of throwing money at the issue. There is an acknowledgement, and a truth-telling, that has to happen first.

That’s my rambling, you can call that a question, but you know what I’m saying, that it’s not enough to say, “Oh, we did a bad thing,” as some papers are doing. “Back in the 18-dickity-do, we wrote a bad thing, but we’re sorry about it.” That’s not what is being called for.

Liberation Ventures

CW: Absolutely. And I think one key part of this is really seeking to broaden, not only our sense of journalism and its history and its future, but our sense of what repair and reparations involve.

When we created the Media Reparations Project, we also sought to really spread the understanding that reparations has to be a holistic process. We took a lot of inspiration and leadership from people who have been fighting for reparations ever since emancipation. And when we are speaking to what reparations is all about, often in community, people sort of reduce it to this idea of a check.

As you just said, Janine, it’s not just this one-time apology, or even a one-time payment. It has to be holistic and understood as a process, a journey rather than a destination. And speaking of folks we took inspiration from, our friends at Liberation Ventures, which is a reparations organization, they describe reparations as a comprehensive process that involves reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability and redress.

And when you’re talking about the realm of journalism, Joe mentioned a couple of different platforms and papers that have issued apologies and sort of stopped there. And we know that this entire conversation around the future of journalism is one that should really inform what next. After the apology, and after the investigation, what is it that newspapers and other media platforms can and should be doing to rectify the different types of harm that they have wrought—whether that be sensationalistic headlines and false headlines that led to racial terrorism and lynching, whether that be the ways that, even to this very day, it’s nearly impossible for journalists to sustain careers because of toxicity in newsrooms. And there’s so much more that we could name, but it has to be an ongoing process that’s engaged with people who have been directly impacted, and defined by community.

Joe Torres: “For us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too.”

JT: When we’re talking about these papers, we talk about narratives, right? And narratives are a political tool. Narratives are used by those in power, and these media companies, to uphold racial hierarchy. And “uphold racial hierarchy” means not just within those newsrooms, but within the society as well. So these newsrooms are playing an outsized role in shaping what local communities look like. And we talked about the example of segregation in Baltimore, and wealth creation and wealth death and all that.

And so these media companies are playing a role in reinforcing the racial hierarchies throughout each community they serve, whether schooling, housing, just name it, right? They’re playing a role in shaping the society with their narratives. Because these powerful media owners are political players within the society in which they exist.

And so the idea of acknowledgement, it’s just the beginning, as Colette is saying, and you’re talking about, too, Janine; it has to be like, how do we get to redress?

Because what’s happening, they reinforce structural racism in our society in all these various ways.. And for us, we’re just focused on the media part, because structural racism also exists in the media system. So for us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too, for our own communities to be able to own and control the creation and the distribution of their own narratives.

And so this is what we’re fighting for. If we can shift how media functions, I think there’s a better chance, or a greater chance, that we could actually address all the other underlying causes that are affecting society, that newsrooms play a role in promulgating in all these different ways.

Colette Watson: “There’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.”

CW: Joe, I think in addition to changing the way that the media has perpetuated hierarchy and harm in society, this discussion around repair, and really reframing the way we understand the future of journalism conversation, is also an invitation to actually save journalism. And I think that there’s a lack of understanding of the fact that journalism being white-dominated, and being steeped in a worldview of Black inferiority and a worldview of racial hierarchy, has very much been a part of why we find this industry to be faltering at this point.

It’s policies and culture and so much, but it’s all grounded and rooted in journalism’s early rootedness in racism. And what I mean when I say that is, we talk a lot and we hear a lot about community trust and community engagement and different things about how audiences perceive the field, and how they’re willing to even maybe invest in it, whether that be investing time or what have you. But there’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.

And then there are so many journalists of color who have tried to be truth tellers, and tried to embody the true purpose of journalism in holding power to account, who have found it next to impossible to do that, because of toxicity inside dominant and corporate newsrooms, and because of the underfunding and underinvestment in Black-serving and other-serving, different religious minorities and other groups, LGBTQIA+ community—all of the newsrooms that serve these marginalized identities have been woefully under-resourced by the public sector and by philanthropy, when compared to their white counterparts.

Dissent (Summer/21)

And so, whether it be on the part of journalists of color or communities of color, there’s this deep divide, and this sense that the main, dominant media doesn’t care about our lives, and doesn’t think of us when they’re talking about journalism and democracy. And when I talk about that to people, I like to always say, there’s two words you can add on, in the ways you’re talking about these issues of the future of journalism, that’ll take you so much further than where we usually go. And those two simple words are “for who.” Journalism for who? Democracy for who? Who are we serving?

Carla Murphy talks about “multiple mainstreams,” and thinking of the future of our media system as one that is steeped in serving the information needs of just so many different kinds of folks, and serving the creation of conditions for different kinds of justice. And I think that when you begin to think about who we are wanting to serve and whose needs we’re centering, that opens up so much more opportunity and so much more oxygen around what journalism can be. But we can’t get there if we just talk about it the same old way and really are using legislation and policy ideas and philanthropy to shore up the status quo.

Kerner Commission (1968)

JJ: Absolutely. I just want to say that, for some folks, this might sound out of pocket; it might sound like a new idea. But the truth is, this is drawing on roots. The Kerner Commission, just to say one thing folks remember, but they remember it as saying, media should do better by Black people. And that’s not what it said. It said news media are failing everybody and failing the future with their white-centric perspective. It challenged the whole thing. So there are historical roots that you’re pulling on here. There are traditions here, there are examples here. It’s not out of whole cloth. There is something to connect to here that gives strength to the ideas that we’re putting forward here.

CW: Yes. I mean, Joe Torres, for my money, is one of the most incredible researchers and minds that we have in this field, and I really encourage folks to dig into the essay, because throughout these pages, as you’re describing, Janine, there are just so many examples from throughout history.

A lot of people don’t realize, for instance, that the earliest FCC broadcasting licenses were issued during the Jim Crow era, and so to white men only. And so that leads us to the present day, where we have a media system where just a very scant percentage of our TV and radio are Black-owned.

And we could go on and on, because, like I said, Joe has just done exhaustive effort here in making sure that we have the evidence when we talk about this. Joe, I know you don’t like getting credit, but….

JJ: But, hey, when you have to, you have to, because voids need to be filled, frankly. It’s not a conversation that folks have. Folks have it rhetorically: “I bet there’s things missing here,” but they don’t know what’s missing, and that’s—they need work like you’re doing.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922)

JT: I appreciate that. Collette knows I don’t like that, but I appreciate it. One of the things we learned in putting this essay together four years ago, was that in Chicago, there was a commission formed to study the causes of the upheaval, the Chicago race riots. And it came out in a report in 1922, and it devoted a significant portion of the report to the media’s role, the white media’s role, in fomenting this. And so here was an example of a multiracial commission that said, “Hey, the media, especially the white media, played a role in this racial, so-called, unrest, the violence that happened in this city.”

Then you talk about the Kerner Commission, Janine, and then 50 years later after that, what we have in 2020, the uprisings, and all these folks within journalism circles calling on their newspapers or their media institutions to address racism in their own newsrooms.

And one of the things that’s really understudied, it’s a really unbelievable example to me: In 1964, the Community Relations Service was created. It became, soon after that, an agency within the Department of Justice. And the peacekeepers, the mediators, they realized early on, within the first few years of its founding, that a major obstacle to integrating our society, to people adhering to Brown v. Board, was journalism, was the media, and that they had to try to not just integrate the media systems, but they started to hold conferences for Black and brown folks, and for people to fight license challenges against broadcast, and they brought in experts who came in and taught activists how to challenge broadcast licenses. This is within the Department of Justice, and that part of its mission was basically not funded anymore, following the Nixon administration, right?

Here’s a government agency within the Department of Justice, realizing that the biggest obstacle to people adhering to the decision of Brown v. Board, and integrating our society, was the media. That’s another indictment, as you’re saying, about the Kerner Commission, a little over 50-plus years ago.

And so we’re still dealing with this. We’re still dealing with that we don’t have our own institutions, that the first chairman of the FCC was the former chief justice for the Mississippi Supreme Court. Of course Black and brown people wouldn’t get licenses during this era. It’s all been baked in, right? It’s all been baked in. And since then, consolidation has only put things out of reach for us, compounding the lack of wealth that exists in our community because of the extraction of our nation’s political project, right?

JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’ll just ask, finally, what do folks who think, media reparations? Is that going to restrict what I get to see and hear? Is that going to police what I get to see and hear? That’s not the conversation that we’re talking about having, right?

CW: Absolutely. I mean, Joe, I will defer to you.

JT: Well, I mean, we talk about abundance. It should be an abundance of voices out there. And there’s no reason we have such a concentrated media system, where you have a few companies; and here we talk about the cable/broadcast model, for example, which—television is still making a lot of money, and news is driving that. So while we’re talking about a so-called crisis in journalism, we talk about, normally, print media. Broadcast media is trying to get in the action too, and trying to take legislative efforts to get their piece of the pie, while they’re making a lot of money, right?

And so, it’s like, how can we have an abundance of Black and BIPOC media outlets out there that’s serving local communities, that’s providing a variety of perspectives. And we are fighting for not only the variety of perspectives, but also a tether to serve the health and well-being of the community, not out there for bottom-line profits, right, and to maximize profit. How can we have an abundance of this?

The idea is, it’s not what’s being taken away from you, it’s what’s going to be added to your life, to ensure the health and well-being of the communities. How is it serving the health and well-being of the needs of people in local communities and local society? And media can play an instrumental role in ensuring that, in advocating for that. Or it too often plays a detrimental role, as we see, in taking away those kinds of rights that allow people to have their basic needs served, in housing and food and schooling.

And so, the vision for an abundance of media outlets that are well-funded? There’s no reason why we can’t do that. We invest so little in this country into media, and especially in public media, and we can create something different, and something better.

JJ: That’s beautiful. All right, we’ve been speaking with Joe Torres from Free Press and Collette Watson at Black River Life. You can tap into the work that we’ve been talking about at MediaReparations.org. Joseph and Colette, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

The post ‘When Hasn’t Journalism Been in Crisis for Black People?’<br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Joseph Torres and Collette Watson on media reparations appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Media 2070

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.”

In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools.”

The piece was written by Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who regularly contributes longform features that platform anti-trans and anti–Critical Race Theory views through a palatable “hear me out” frame, while including little in the way of opposing arguments—or fact checks (FAIR.org, 5/11/23, 2/12/22, 8/2/21).

This profile of the Fontanillas—two former California teachers who left their jobs and moved to Florida in 2020, “disillusioned” by school shutdowns and colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows the Post once again depicting efforts to address racial and gender bias as a bigger problem than racial and gender bias themselves.

‘Direct from the classroom’

“The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits,” Natanson wrote:

But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools—and offer families an alternative.

The irony of the Fontanillas founding a far-right Christian school to fight “indoctrination” is lost on Natanson, as she, too, uncritically repeated these claims, as though the couple’s experience as teachers legitimized the far-right ideologies they peddle.

Natanson reported that Kali’s social media presence has attracted people to her school—despite her being “regularly suspended for ‘community violations.’” The article does not specify what those violations are, but on Instagram, Kali herself shared a screenshot of her account being flagged for disinformation, and another video talking about how a post she made about “newcomers” (i.e., migrants) received a “violation,” in calls to get her followers to follow her backup account.

The piece refers to her ideas—including referring to Black History Month as “Black idolatry month” and encouraging her followers to be doomsday preppers—as “out there.”

Kali is half Black and half white, and Joshua is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent—a fact that is mentioned alongside the couple’s gripes with the idea of slavery reparations and the concept that America is systemically racist.

Hate and conspiracy theories

The punchline here is that Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 4/5/24) ought to be able to call members of groups she dislikes “freaks.”

Kali brags that the more right-wing her ideas, the more families she attracts to her school. “But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from online observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview,” Natanson wrote.

The “hate” that these videos “inspire,” Natanson wrote, is from commenters who oppose Kali’s messages:

Online commenters regularly sling racial slurs and derogatory names: “slave sellout roach.” “dumb fukn bitch.” “wish dot com Candice Owen.” “Auntie Tomella.”

Never mind the hate and conspiracy theories Kali spews in her videos. A recent video on Kali’s Instagram begs followers to follow a backup account, because a video she made about migrants was taken down by Meta as a violation of community standards. She says she believes her account has been “shadowbanned”—or muted by the platform.

Even the posts that remain unflagged by Instagram are full of bigotry and disinformation, including a cartoon of carnival performers being let go from a sideshow because they’re “not freaks anymore,” a compilation video of trans women in women’s restrooms with text that reads “get these creeps out of our bathrooms,” and a photo of a trans flag that demands, “Defund the grooming cult.”

An ad Kali posted for an emergency medical kit claimed that the FDA had “lost its war” on Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that the right has latched onto as a panacea for Covid-19. In reality, the lawsuit the FDA settled with the drug company involved an acknowledgement that the drug has long been used to treat humans, not just livestock—but for parasites, not viruses (Newsweek, 3/22/24). The National Institutes of Health (12/20/23) report that double-blind testing reveals ivermectin is ineffective against Covid.

Evidence of ‘indoctrination’

For Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 1/9/24), the “facts” are transphobic, and “feelings” are to be disregarded—other people’s feelings, anyway.

Kali, who regularly mocks trans women and left-wing activists, apparently couldn’t take the heat. The backlash got so bad, Natanson writes, that

coupled with her chihuahua’s death and an injury that prevented her daily workouts, it proved too much for Kali. She went into a depressive spiral and had to take a break from social media. She barely managed to film her lessons.

In the Fontanillas’ lessons, the existence of white Quakers who fought against slavery is proof that racism is not institutionalized in the US. It’s also evidence of an “overemphasis” on reparations, even though, as Natanson mentioned toward the very end of the piece, many Quakers did take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later chose to pay reparations.

In addition to Covid shutdowns, other evidence of left-wing “indoctrination” offered by the Fontanillas included a quiz that asked students to recognize their privilege, the use of a Critical Race Theory framework in an ethnic studies class, announcements for gay/straight alliance club meetings (with no announcements made for Joshua’s chess club meetings), and the work of “too many” “left-leaning” authors—like Studs Terkel, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman—in the English curriculum.

Natanson includes a positive testimonial from a mother whose son Kali tutored before her political shift rightward, who remembers how “Kali let him run around the block whenever he got antsy,” and a screenshot of a review from a current student, who says they “love love LOVE” Kali’s teaching, because it exposes “the stupid things on the internet in a logical way.” Natanson also quotes an employee of the company that handles the logistics for Southlands Christian Schools, the entity from which the Fontanillas’ school gets its accreditation, who says, “Josh and Kali are good people, they have a good message, there is definitely a market for what they’re doing.”

The only opposition to the Fontanillas’ arguments in the nearly 3,000-word piece, beyond incoherent social media comments, come in the form of official statements and school board meeting soundbites.

Natanson includes a statement from the school district the Fontanillas formerly worked, saying that the ethnic studies class Kali resigned over was intended to get students to “analyze whether or not race may be viewed as a contributor to one’s experiences.” Another statement from the district denied Joshua’s claims that his school privileged certain clubs over others, and upheld that its English curriculum followed California standards.

The only direct quotes from students opposing the Fontanillas are two short comments from students at a school board meeting who said they enjoyed the ethnic studies class. It does not appear Natanson directly interviewed either student: One statement was taken directly from the school board meeting video, and the other from a local news article. The lack of any original, critical quotes in the piece raises the question: Did Natanson talk to anyone who disagreed with the Fontanillas during her reporting on the article?

Bigger threats than pronouns

The Washington Post profile presents the Fontanillas as pious and principled—leaving out any imagery of their hate-filled ideology.

The article included a dramatic vignette of the couple bowing their heads after seeing a public art exhibit with pieces depicting a book in chains and a student wearing earrings that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS”—”just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray,” Natanson wrote.

While thus passing along uncritically the Fontanillas’ take on what’s wrong with the world today, the article made no mention of more substantial threats bigotry poses to children and society at large.

LGBTQ youth experience bullying at significantly greater rates than their straight and cisgender peers (Reisner et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2021), and bullying is a strong risk factor for youth suicide (Koyanagi, et al., 2019). LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). However, bullying of LGBTQ youth occurs less often at LGBTQ-affirming schools (Trevor Project, 2021).

A recent study found that about 53% of Black students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 20% said they were exposed to racial trauma often or very often in their lives (Aakoma Project, 2022).

Individuals of Black and Hispanic heritage have a higher risk of Covid infection and hospitalization from than their white counterparts (NIH, 2023). Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker (4/24/23) found that during the pandemic, communities of color faced higher premature death rates.

The migrants at the US border that Kali demonizes in her videos are seeking asylum from gang violence, the targeting of women and girls, and oppressive regimes propped up by US policy.  Undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as US citizens to be arrested for violent crimes (PNAS, 12/7/20). They are also being turned away at higher rates under Biden than they were under Trump (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

Not the censored worldview

Far from being suppressed, the “anti-woke” movement is very effective at suppressing ideas that it disagrees with (Pen America).

The idea that left-wing “propaganda” is “infiltrating” public schools is upside-down.  If there’s a particular ideology that is being systematically censored in this country, to the point where it deserves special consideration by the Washington Post, it is not the Fontanillas’.

Since 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to ban Critical Race Theory in schools. Eighteen states have already imposed these bans or restrictions (Education Week, 3/20/24). The right is pushing for voucher schemes that transfer tax revenues from public to private schools, including to politicized projects like Exodus Institute (Progressive, 8/11/21; EPI, 4/20/23).

In the first half of this school year alone, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being banned. According to PEN America (4/16/24), people are using sexual obscenity laws to justify banning books that discuss sexual violence and LGBTQ (particularly trans) identities, disproportionately affecting the work of women and nonbinary writers. Bans are also targeted toward literature that focuses on race and racism, Critical Race Theory and “woke ideology.”

It is dangerous and backwards for the Washington Post to play along with this couples’ delusion that they are free speech martyrs—even as their “anti-woke” agenda is being signed into censorious law across the country.

The piece ended back in the virtual classroom with the Quakers, as Natanson takes on a tone of admiration. Kali poses the question to her students, “What does it mean to live out your values?”

“Kali smiled as she told her students to write down their answers,” Natanson narrated. “She knew her own.”

The post WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) is concerned that they live among us. They are Arab Americans. And what are they doing to threaten the United States? Voting.

The Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm in response to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American and a member of the left-wing voting bloc known as the Squad, calling for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan presidential primary. “Will Dearborn, Michigan, Determine US Israel Policy?” the headline wondered ominously. The subhead explained: “The pro-Palestinian Democratic left wants to force Biden to stop the war in Gaza against Hamas.”

At issue was that Tlaib’s mobilization of the large Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan, against Biden’s pro-Israel stance could put Michigan in play in the 2024 presidential election, thus potentially swaying the incumbent to be more critical of Israel.

Voting as subversion

The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) frames the question of whether to keep supplying an Israeli war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians as “another test of how much Mr. Biden is willing to bend to the left.”

Expressing alarm at the idea of a president adjusting policy in response to democratic pressure, the Journal warned that the “left’s threats are already influencing Mr. Biden’s foreign policy”: As “domestic criticism of Mr. Biden’s support for Israel has increased…Mr. Biden has become much more critical of Israel.”

The editorial board continued:

The problem is that if the Arab Americans in and around Dearborn begin to set US policy, Hamas and Iran will be the beneficiaries. Ms. Tlaib and others claim not to support Hamas or the October 7 massacre, but the ceasefire they want would have the effect of leaving its fighters alive and free to rebuild their terror state. The suffering in Gaza is terrible, but the main cause is Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.

What the financial class’s top paper is saying is that an ethnic voting bloc in Dearborn might “claim” not to be a Fifth Column—but in fact they are at best unwitting stooges, and at worst lying traitors, effectively supporting official enemies of the US government. (The Journal‘s logic would delegitimize virtually all opposition to US violence—since ending such violence would no doubt be welcomed by its ostensible targets, who are by definition enemies.)

Of course, opposition in Michigan to Biden’s Israel policy extends well beyond Arab Americans (or Muslims). A recent poll of likely voters found that nearly 74% of Michigan Democrats favored a unilateral ceasefire. And voters yesterday in Minnesota—a state with no sizable Arab-American population—cast “uncommitted” votes in such high numbers that it has stunned political analysts and raised alarms about the president’s viability in the general election (Reuters, 3/6/24; NBC, 3/6/24). A “no preference” campaign did surprisingly well in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts (WBUR, 3/6/24).

Arab Americans in Michigan do have a small degree of political power now, because Michigan is a critical swing state. But that’s not a unique position for an ethnic enclave in American politics. Does the Journal also have a problem with the outsized role South Florida’s Cuban-American population plays in a state with so many electoral votes (Politico, 11/4/20)? Is the Journal concerned with the influence Hasidic voting blocs have on New York City’s politics (New York Times, 10/30/22)?

The uncommitted vote was successful; the AP (2/28/24) called it a “victory for Biden’s anti-war opponents,” reporting that the state will send two uncommitted delegates.

‘America’s jihad capital’

While the Wall Street Journal‘s subhead (2/2/24) refers to “politicians in the Michigan city [who] side with Hamas,” the only official mentioned is Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who criticized Biden for “selling fighter jets to the tyrants murdering our family members.”

Support for terrorism in southern Michigan has long been a concern for US counterterrorism officials. A 2001 Michigan State Police assessment submitted to the Justice Department after 9/11 called Dearborn “a major financial support center” and a “recruiting area and potential support base” for international terror groups, including possible sleeper cells.

That piece claimed that the problem in Dearborn was that its Arab-American residents were would-be criminals. “What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats,” Stalinksy said. “It’s potentially a national security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.”

The fallout from the op-ed was immense. Fox News (2/5/24), which like the Journal is a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, reported that Dearborn’s mayor said that “city police increased security at places of worship and major infrastructure points as a ‘direct result’” of the article. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (2/3/24) tweeted that the op-ed “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” Biden, along with Michigan elected officials and Arab-American community leaders, condemned the article (Detroit News, 2/5/24).

State Rep. Alabas Farhat (AP, 2/6/24) co-sponsored a resolution demanding a retraction and public apology, saying the piece “fanned the flames of hatred and division in our country during a time when hate crimes are on the rise.” He added, “It makes it so that it’s normal to question how patriotic your neighbor is.”

The Journal editorial board doubled down with its own racist, Islamophobic tirade. This vilification of Arab-Americans is the same kind of thinking that led this country to force Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the face of a war against Japan. Enlightened society would like to think that times like that have been relegated to the dustbin of history, but the fact that we’re seeing this today in the Journal is proof that scary times are here again.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post WSJ Speaks Out Against Threat of Politicians Responding to Voters appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

When I became a journalist over 15 years ago, I did so to highlight the voices of activists—not top city officials. But things took an unexpected turn in 2014, as the Washington Post sought to end DC Mayor Vincent Gray’s career.

As his reelection bid neared, Gray comfortably led all polls—much to the chagrin of the Post, which hadn’t forgiven him for winning office four years earlier.

In that prior 2010 contest, Gray, riding a wave of Black support, upended the incumbent DC mayor, Adrian Fenty. It was an act for which the Post never forgave Gray, as Fenty was the paper’s dream come true.

Fenty had run as a progressive in 2006, and won in a landslide. But upon taking office, Fenty flipped and adopted the Post’s anti-labor, pro-gentrification agenda as his own. The shocking about-face earned Fenty the Post’s ever-lasting love, but cost him Black voters—and his reelection.

While Fenty conceded to Gray in 2010, the Post had a harder time moving on. And the paper would spend the next four years attacking Gray, particularly on the eve of the 2014 election.

Dog-whistling

As the 2014 election neared, anti-Gray editorials, already commonplace, started running multiple times a week, and then nearly daily. In the nine days leading up to the start of early voting, the Post (3/9–17/14) ran an incredible seven editorials targeting Gray.

And it wasn’t just the editorial page that was busy electioneering.

To the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (3/19/14), DC Mayor Vincent Gray “made a lamentable decision to stoke the city’s racial politics” by endorsing the statement that “Washington has become a city of the haves and have-nots.”

Two days into early voting, Gray received the endorsement of Marion Barry, the former four-term DC mayor. In his column on the endorsement, the Post’s Dana Milbank (3/19/14) dismissed Barry, who came out of the civil rights movement, as an “old race warrior” who “has inflamed racial tensions for decades.”

Milbank opened by taking advantage of the slurred speech of the ailing Barry (who’d live just eight more months):

Embattled Washington Mayor Vincent Gray called in a notorious predecessor, Marion Barry, to prop up his reelection campaign Wednesday afternoon. Gray got exactly what he deserved.

“Vince Gray,” Barry told a modest crowd in a church basement in Southeast Washington, “is a leader with a solid crack record.”

The self-proclaimed mayor for life caught this Freudian slip. “Track record,” he corrected.

Barry, now a 78-year-old City Council member in failing health, is, famously, the one with the crack record.

As an example of Gray’s potential “subtle but divisive appeals to African American voters,” the Post‘s Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) offered, “To some in our city, I’m just another corrupt politician from the other side of town.”

Milbank’s racialized attacks were not a one-off. A week earlier, Post columnist Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) gratuitously dropped Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s name into the mix, in an attempt to tie him to Gray:

If Gray is engaging in tribal politics, he’s certainly doing it more subtly than the master of the trade, Marion Barry…[who] after his 1990 drug arrest…was not shy about sending signals to his African-American base—embracing the support of Louis Farrakhan and other controversial activists.

Not only does Gray lack ties to Farrakhan—notorious for his history of antisemitism—but as a student at George Washington University, Gray joined a Jewish fraternity, where he was one of three Black students to integrate the school’s all-white fraternity system.

DeBonis was too busy dog-whistling to white voters to mention this in his column, ironically headlined “Is Vincent Gray Dog-Whistling to Black Voters?”

The day before DeBonis’ piece, Jonetta Rose Barras’ Post column (3/12/14) associated Gray with “some Third World dictatorship” and “snake-oil sellers.”

‘Growing ex-prisoner vote’

“Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away,” the Post‘s Aaron Davis (3/22/14) reported, and “no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray.”

Meanwhile, with early-voting underway, here’s how Post reporter Aaron Davis opened his story, “In DC Mayor’s Race, Embattled Gray May Have a Secret Weapon in Growing Ex-Prisoner Vote” (3/22/14):

Above an official portrait of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, crisp silver lettering spells out a welcome to one of the shiniest new places in DC government—the Office on Returning Citizen Affairs.

And on a flier lying nearby: “YOU CAN LEGALLY VOTE!”

The bustling facility is designed solely for convicted criminals…a slice of the population growing by thousands each year. Ex-offenders account for at least one in 10 DC residents and perhaps many more…. Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away in favor of winning a few thousand votes that could tip the balance in a close race….

[And] no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray, the embattled mayor seeking a second term.

In case the dog-whistling wasn’t loud enough, Davis all but accused Gray of buying the votes of ex-offenders, who in DC are disproportionately Black. He wrote that under Gray, DC

has hired 534 former inmates—most for positions with benefits, including hundreds into jobs that were once off-limits because of their proximity to children, such as school bus attendants, drivers and camp directors.

Despite the Post’s racialized attacks, the paper’s editorial board (3/12/14)—in a textbook example of projection—accused Gray of “injecting race” into the election.

‘Charges should be brought now’

“A lot of seamy stuff might come to light,” Post columnist Robert McCartney (5/23/12) speculated. As it turned out, it didn’t.

The Post’s dog-whistles to white voters could get the paper only so far—because DC is nearly half Black, and Black DC voters have a history of stubbornly defying the Post at the ballot box.

Knowing this, the Post sought to preempt DC voters by getting rid of Gray before he stood for reelection—via an indictment over his campaign four years earlier.

Gray’s 2010 campaign was aided by $650,000 in undisclosed funds. While Gray maintained he didn’t know about the funds (and he may not have), the Post had what it needed to get him indicted—at least if the US attorney was willing to play ball.

Flattering portrayals of Gray’s would-be-prosecutor, US Attorney Ron Machen, were commonplace in the Post; he was even hailed as “DC’s person of the year” and “St. Ron” in the lead up to the election.

In addition to glowing compliments, the Post also gave Machen his marching orders.

“He already has enough evidence to indict the mayor,” insisted Post columnist Robert McCartney (3/12/14), who previously called Gray “a liar” (5/23/12) who’d “have to resign in disgrace” or go “possibly to prison” (7/14/12). Fellow Post columnist Colbert King’s instructions (3/7/14) to Machen were no less clear: “Charges should be brought now—before DC voters head to the polls. Just get on with it.”

‘Vincent Gray Knew’

Less than a week before the start of voting in the mayoral primary, the Post‘s front page (3/11/14) all but announced an indictment of Gray that never came.

While Machen was able to secure seven guilty pleas among Gray’s aides over their roles in the 2010 campaign, he didn’t have the evidence to charge Gray. So he got creative. Just as voters were set to go to the polls, Machen stood before a bank of TV cameras, with FBI and IRS agents as his backdrop, and all but promised to indict the mayor.

The Post took it from there. Blazed atop the next day’s paper—”in type large enough for declarations of war,” noted the late housing organizer Jim McGrath—was Gray’s guilt. “Prosecutors: Vincent Gray Knew,” read the five-column headline (3/11/14).

Only Gray was never convicted of a crime. In fact, he would never even be charged with one. But with the Post and Machen all but promising an imminent indictment, Black turnout was depressed—”suppressed” might be the more apt word.

This is how Gray’s rock-solid lead vanished and he lost to the Post-endorsed Muriel Bowser—who remains mayor to this day, much to the paper’s delight.

Do the right thing

Once Gray was out of office, a new US attorney quietly brought Machen’s five-year investigation to a close.

Gray, now 81 and facing health struggles, recently announced (Washington Post, 12/20/23) that he won’t seek re-election as Ward 7 councilmember, the position he’s held since 2017.

With 2024 marking Gray’s last year in office, the Post should finally do right by him—and apologize.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

FEATURED IMAGE: Photo of Vincent Gray at Obama’s second inauguration (CC photo: Adam Fagen).

The post WaPo Owes an Apology to the DC Mayor It Drove From Office appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

The New York Times (5/30/23) directs attention toward a hypothetical future AI apocalypse, rather than towards present-day AI’s entrenchment of contemporary oppression.

It’s almost impossible to escape reports on artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s media. Whether you’re reading the news or watching a movie, you are likely to encounter some form of warning or buzz about AI.

The recent release of ChatGPT, in particular, led to an explosion of excitement and anxiety about AI. News outlets reported that many prominent AI technologists themselves were sounding the alarm about the dangers of their own field. Frankenstein’s proverbial monster had been unleashed, and the scientist was now afraid of his creation.

The speculative fears they expressed were centered on an existential crisis for humanity (New York Times, 5/30/23), based on the threat of AI technology evolving into a hazard akin to viral pandemics and nuclear weaponry. Yet at the same time, other coverage celebrated AI’s supposedly superior intelligence and touted it as a remarkable human accomplishment with amazing potential (CJR, 5/26/23).

Overall, these news outlets often miss the broader context and scope of the threats of AI, and as such, are also limited in presenting the types of solutions we ought to be exploring. As we collectively struggle to make sense of the AI hype and panic, I offer a pause: a moment to contextualize the current mainstream narratives of fear and fascination, and grapple with our long-term relationship with technology and our humanity.

Profit as innovation’s muse

So what type of fear is our current AI media frenzy actually highlighting? Some people’s dystopian fears for the future are in fact the dystopian histories and contemporary realities of many other people. Are we truly concerned about all of humanity, or simply paying more attention now that white-collar and elite livelihoods and lives are at stake?

We are currently in a time when a disproportionate percentage of wealth is hoarded by the super rich (Oxfam International, 1/16/23), most of whom benefit from and bolster the technology industry. Although the age-old saying is that “necessity is the mother of invention,” in a capitalist framework, profit—not human need—is innovation’s muse. As such, it should not be so surprising that human beings and humanity are at risk from these very same technological developments.

Activists and scholars, particularly women and people of color, have long been sounding the alarm about the harmful impacts of AI and automation. However, media largely overlooked their warnings about social injustice and technology—namely, the ways technology replicates dominant, oppressive structures in more efficient and broad-reaching ways.

Cathy O’Neil in 2016 highlighted the discriminatory ways AI is being used in the criminal justice system, school systems and other institutional practices, such that those with the least socio-political power are subjected to even more punitive treatments. For instance, police departments use algorithms to identify “hot spots” with high arrest rates in order to target them for more policing. But arrest rates are not the same as crime rates; they reflect long-standing racial biases in policing, which means such algorithms reinforce those racial biases under the guise of science.

Wired (10/15/19): Joy Buolamwini “learned how facial recognition is used in law enforcement, where error-prone algorithms could have grave consequences.”

Joy Buolamwini built on her own personal experience to uncover how deeply biased AI algorithms are, based on the data they’re fed and the narrow demographic of designers who create them. Her work demonstrated AI’s inability to recognize let alone distinguish between dark-skinned faces, and the harmful consequences of deploying this technology as a surveillance tool, especially for Black and Brown people, ranging from everyday inconveniences to wrongful arrests.

Buolamwini has worked to garner attention from media and policymakers in order to push for more transparency and caution with the use of AI. Yet recent reports on the existential crisis of AI do not mention her work, nor those of her peers, which highlight the very real and existing crises resulting from the use of AI in social systems.

Timnit Gebru, who was ousted from Google in a very public manner, led research that long predicted the risks of large language models such as those employed in tools like ChatGPT. These risks include environmental impacts of AI infrastructure, financial barriers to entry that limit who can shape these tools, embedded discrimination leading to disproportionate harms for minoritized social identities, reinforced extremist ideologies stemming from the indiscriminate grabbing of all Internet data as training information, and the inherent problems owing to the inability to distinguish between fact and machine fabrication. In spite of how many of these same risks are now being echoed by AI elites, Gebru’s work is scarcely cited.

Although stories of AI injustice might be new in the context of technology, they are not novel within the historical context of settler colonialism. As long as our society continues to privilege the white hetero-patriarchy, technology implemented within this framework will largely reinforce and exacerbate existing systemic injustices in ever more efficient and catastrophic ways.

If we truly want to explore pathways to resolve AI’s existential threat, perhaps we should begin by learning from the wisdom of those who already know the devastating impacts of AI technology—precisely the voices that are marginalized by elite media.

Improving the social context

Conversation ( 4/19/23): “News media closely reflect business and government interests in AI by praising its future capabilities and under-reporting the power dynamics behind these interests.”

Instead, those media turn mostly to AI industry leaders, computer scientists and government officials (Conversation, 4/19/23). Those experts offer a few administrative solutions to our AI crisis, including regulatory measures (New York Times, 5/30/23), government/leadership action (BBC, 5/30/23) and limits on the use of AI (NPR, 6/1/23). While these top-down approaches might stem the tide of AI, they do not address the underlying systemic issues that render technology yet another tool of destruction that disproportionately ravages communities who live on the margins of power in society.

We cannot afford to focus on mitigating future threats without also attending to the very real, present-day problems that cause so much human suffering. To effectively change the outcomes of our technology, we need to improve the social context in which these tools are deployed.

A key avenue technologists are exploring to resolve the AI crisis is “AI alignment.” For example, OpenAI reports that their alignment research “aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent.”

However, existing AI infrastructure is not value-neutral. On the contrary, automation mirrors capitalist values of speed, productivity and efficiency. So any meaningful AI alignment effort will also require the dismantling of this exploitative framework, in order to optimize for human well-being instead of returns on investments.

Collaboration over dominion

What type of system might we imagine into being such that our technology serves our collective humanity? We could begin by heeding the wisdom of those who have lived through and/or deeply studied oppression encoded in our technological infrastructure.

Greta Byrum & Ruha Benjamin (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6/16/22): “Those who have been excluded, harmed, exposed, and oppressed by technology understand better than anyone how things could go wrong.”

Ruha Benjamin introduced the idea of the “New Jim Code,” to illustrate how our technological infrastructure reinforces existing inequities under the guises of “objectivity,” “innovation,” and “benevolence.” While the technology may be new, the stereotypes and discriminations continue to align with well-established white supremacist value systems. She encourages us to “demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation,” one that prioritizes “equity over efficiency, [and] social good over market imperatives.”

Audrey Watters (Hack Education, 11/28/19) pushes us to question dominant narratives about technology, and to not simply accept the tech hype and propaganda that equate progress with technology alone. She elucidates how these stories are rarely based solely on facts but also on speculative fantasies motivated by economic power, and reminds us that “we needn’t give up the future to the corporate elites” (Hack Education, 3/8/22).

Safiya Noble (UCLA Magazine, 2/22/21) unveils how the disproportionate influence of internet technology corporations cause harm through co-opting public goods for private profits. To counter these forces, she proposes “strengthening libraries, universities, schools, public media, public health and public information institutions.”

These scholars identify the slow and messy work we must collectively engage in to create the conditions for our technology to mirror collaboration over domination, connection over separation, and trust over suspicion. If we are to heed their wisdom, we need media that views AI as more than just the purview of technologists, and also engages the voices of activists, citizens and scholars. Media coverage should also contextualize these technologies, not as neutral but as mechanisms operating within a historical and social framework.

Now, more than ever before, we bear witness to the human misery resulting from extractive and exploitative economic and political global structures, which have long been veiled beneath a veneer of “technological progress.” We must feel compelled to not just gloss over these truths as though we can doom scroll our way out, but collectively struggle for the freedom futures we need—not governed by fear, but fueled by hope.

Featured Image: “Robot Zombie Apocalypse” by Nicholas Mastello

The post The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Beatrice Dias.

New York Times (6/5/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”

When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.”

We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today.

Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’

Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise)

Also on the show:  “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

The post Raed Jarrar on Biden & Saudi Arabia, Joe Torres on Tulsa Massacre appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The New York Times (10/2/22) described the effort to trick migrants into flying to Martha’s Vineyard as an attempt to “force Democrats to deal with the migrants whom they profess a desire to welcome.”

“Yahtzee!! We’re full,” wrote Florida state operative Perla Huerta, once she had tricked enough desperate migrants to fill two Martha’s Vineyard–bound planes (CNN, 11/15/22). In the days leading up to her celebratory text, the recently discharged Army counterintelligence agent scoured San Antonio gas stations, churches and McDonald’s parking lots for asylum seekers who would believe her when she promised them employment and three months’ free rent in Boston (Boston Globe, 9/19/22). All they would have to do is get on a plane.

By September 12, 2022, she had convinced nearly 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to depart Texas. On September 14, they landed unheralded, not in Boston, but in Martha’s Vineyard—an affluent island community largely closed for the season, and wholly unprepared to accommodate the aircrafts’ precious cargo.

Immigration attorney Rachel Self told the MV Times (9/15/22) that

not only did those responsible for this stunt know that there was no housing and no employment awaiting the migrants, they also very intentionally chose not to call ahead, to any single office or authority on Martha’s Vineyard…. Ensuring that no help awaited the migrants at all was the entire point.

‘Begging for more diversity’

Huerta had lied. And it was a sadistic, labor-intensive and costly lie, designed to overwhelm “sanctuary destinations” (The Hill, 9/16/22) and thereby draw attention to the politician orchestrating and bankrolling the airlift: Florida governor and GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis (CNN, 9/17/22).

Fox host Tucker Carlson (7/26/22) proposed using refugees as props in a stunt to embarrass liberals.

But, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters (9/15/22) tweeted, “When GOPers do depraved stuff, it’s worth looking for the Fox host who suggested it.” It appears that DeSantis was taking notes when former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson declared on primetime TV (Fox, 7/26/22):

Next stop on the equity train has got to be Martha’s Vineyard…. They are begging for more diversity. Why not send migrants there in huge numbers? Let’s start with 300,000 and move up from there.

Characterizing human beings as pests that ought to be dumped onto others is regular programming at Fox, which unapologetically peddles white supremacist conspiracy theories (CounterSpin, 5/27/22), promotes alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric (Media Matters, 5/23/23) and portrays migrants as boogeymen (Washington Post, 12/18/18).

However, this is far from a Fox-exclusive phenomenon. Established media—both conservative and centrist alike—treat the subject of immigration with stunning callousness. FAIR’s Janine Jackson (CounterSpin, 8/2/23) noted:

Reporting evinces nowadays an implicit acceptance of the goal of border “management,” keeping things “under control,” keeping immigrants’ efforts to enter from “surging.” The way we’re to understand that the US is doing things right is if there are just fewer people trying to enter.

The problem is not simply that media buy into sensationalist accounts of immigration. When the news amplifies anti-immigration hysteria, asylum seekers are drained of their humanity. Their mere presence constitutes a “crisis,” their desperation amounts to an existential threat, their movement must be sanctioned and scrutinized. In the public imagination, they are no better than monsters.

As long as the US continues to manufacture conditions ripe for mass migration in Latin America, news readers must come to grips with how today’s journalism coaxes Americans into hating migrants. Only then can we begin to treat immigration rightfully—as a natural part of human history, to be celebrated rather than feared.

The monster playbook

Making Monsters attempts to explain “why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed” (Harvard University Press, 2021).

Turning migrants into monsters is simple. According to philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, all it takes is a combination of a physical and cognitive threat. Grizzly bears, he noted, may gnash and claw at us: They are physically threatening. But they are not monsters, because they are part of the natural order.

A singing rose, on the other hand, challenges our conception of normalcy: It is metaphysically threatening. But it is not a monster, because it cannot hurt us.

It is only when the physically and cognitively threatening intersect (think zombies, werewolves or Chucky dolls) that a monster is born. And this is precisely what media do to migrants.

In their 2018 research, Emily Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed analyzed ten years’ worth of immigration coverage in Newsweek, Time and US News & World Report. They revealed that media have a “general tendency to frame immigrants in a negative light, consistent with a ‘threat’ narrative but inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics.”

For example, while the vast majority of migrants—77%—are in the country legally (Pew, 8/20/20), the study found that news media overwhelmingly display photos of asylum seekers crossing the Southern border or cooped up in detention facilities, thus implying criminality (Washington Post, 7/27/18).

In another instance, despite women accounting for a little over half—51%—of US migration (Migration Policy Institute, 3/14/23), national magazines play up the “bad hombres” archetype by picturing Latino migrant men at far greater rates than their female counterparts. This disparity fortifies the  “physical threat” mirage, as the perception of Black and brown men in the US is often blighted by the assumption that they are intrinsically dangerous (Atlantic, 1/5/15).

This stereotyping is enforced when right-wing outlets work tirelessly to prove a nonexistent correlation between violence and heightened immigration. The trend is latent in the conservative media pandemonium surrounding the MS-13 gang:

• “The Illegal Immigration/Crime Link Politicians Are Not Discussing” (Daily Caller, 2/2/23)
• “How Many MS-13 Gangsters Is Biden Settling in the US?” (Washington Examiner, 3/2/23)
• “Grieving Mother Demands ‘Secure’ Border, Vows to be Daughter’s ‘Voice’ After Alleged MS-13 Member Murdered Her” (Fox News, 5/23/23)
• “Killer MS-13 Gangsters Are Being Bused Into Our Communities as ‘Minors’” (New York Post, 6/6/23)

In reality,  the most recent estimates suggest that less than 1% of US gang membership can be attributed to MS-13 (Washington Post, 12/7/18), and native-born US citizens are over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as undocumented immigrants (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12/7/20). Despite that, these headlines represent only a drop in the right-wing fearmongering ocean (Media Matters, 6/30/21, 4/29/21, 8/6/19).

Media scare tactics are not without consequence. According to a 2021 study, the preponderance of negative immigration news has engendered outgroup hostility toward asylum seekers and ingroup favoritism toward the native-born. It’s no wonder that many Americans have begun to believe it when the likes of CNN (Media Matters, 12/20/22), the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/24/21) and Time (FAIR.org, 6/2/23) deem the arrival of migrants a “border crisis.”

But the real crisis at hand is the wanton depiction of migrants as physical threats.

Infections and invasions

Newsmax (4/19/23) is not known for its subtle approach.

Anti-migrant animus is now part of the zeitgeist, and Donald Trump is the poster child. “Everything’s coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, the whole thing. It’s like a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit,” he said in a characteristic 2015 speech (HuffPost, 8/25/16). Trump likening asylum seekers to inanimate objects—like “vomit” and “cars”—is indicative of the dehumanizing language that afflicts contemporary immigration discourse.

Media follow suit, discussing migrants as if they were devoid of human qualities. Valeria Luiselli (Literary Hub, 3/16/17) observed that “some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts!” Fox News’ Todd Starnes (Media Matters, 8/7/12) once actually compared undocumented immigrants to “locusts.”

A scholarly investigation (Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Winter/08) into media representations of migrants asserted that there are two principal metaphors:

When the nation is conceived as a physical body, immigrants are presented either as an infectious disease or as a physical burden. When the nation is conceived as a house, immigrants are represented as criminals, invaders, or dangerous and destructive flood waters.

Heavy-handed right-wing media are more likely to employ the “disease,” “burden” and “invasion” tropes when referring to migrants:

• “Medical Expert: Migrant Caravan Could Pose Public Health Threat” (Breitbart, 10/26/18)
• “Border Crisis: ‘Invasion’ at the Border” (Washington Examiner, 11/1/22)
• “Biden’s Open Borders Mean Disease at Your Doorstep” (Newsmax, 4/19/23)
• “Migrant Crisis Sparked ‘Unprecedented’ Burden on NYC Shelters: City Hall Report” (New York Post, 1/31/23)

Surges, floods and tidal waves

CBS (5/8/23) was one of many outlets that compared people seeking refuge from violence to a natural disaster.

But water metaphors abound in both conservative and centrist sources:

• “Immigration Crisis: Official: ‘A Tsunami of People Crossing the Border’” (Fox News, 5/7/15)
• “A Migrant Surge Is Coming at the Border—and Biden Is Not Ready” (Washington Post, 4/1/22)
• “’Tidal Wave’ of Asylum Seekers Could Head to New York City When Title 42 Expires” (CBS News, 5/8/23)
• “Migrants Bound for US Are Pouring Into Mexico While Biden Takes Victory Lap on Immigration Crackdown” (Daily Caller, 7/29/23)
• “New York’s Flood of Migrants Puts New Pressure on Adams, Hochul Bond” (Politico, 8/21/23)

The water metaphors may be poetic, but they are insidious. In the 2014 fiscal year, the US saw a marked increase in unaccompanied Latin American minors hoping to reunite with their parents beyond the southern border (Vox, 10/10/14). A linguistic analysis (Critical Discourse Studies, 8/12) of New York Times and LA Times’ coverage of the child crossings found that “surge” appeared 91 times, “flood” 21 times and “wave” 14 times. The study remarked:

This water-based terminology establishes a metaphor that represents immigrants as floods. Consequently, these representations call upon ideologies of immigrants as natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion.

As Livingstone Smith wrote:

When we accept the view that some group of people are less than human, we have to overrule the evidence of our senses. At this point a problem arises, because even though a person has accepted that these others aren’t human, they can’t stop themselves from recognizing the other’s humanity. The belief that these people are human coexists in your brain with the belief that they’re subhuman.

The impossibility of migrants being simultaneously human and—as media have convinced many—subhuman generates a cognitive threat. The dissonance between the two statuses challenges our conception of natural order. And, thus, Livingstone Smith’s monster-making formula is complete; the media has provoked within us an unjustified hatred for migrants by successfully casting them as monsters—an affront to our safety and sense of reality.

In describing the demonization of Black men in America in 1955, James Baldwin wrote: “And the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.” Likewise, today it is virtually impossible for Americans to accept migrants as human when the news persistently degrades, brutalizes and distorts their image. But not to accept them as such is to deny them their “human reality,” their “human weight and complexity.” It’s not a fictional caravan of monstrous migrants we should beware of; it’s the monster-makers in US media.

The post Making Monsters: How Media Encourage Hatred of Immigrants appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Lara-Nour Walton.

New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, and to sit when they hear a name that they don’t recognize.

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

For Eric Garner, George Floyd, Michael Brown, most of the crowd—whatever crowd it is, students, academics, the general public—stay standing. But when it gets to Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, it thins and thins.  And by the time it gets to Rekia Boyd and Michelle Cusseaux, generally everyone is seated.

Is that because Black women’s deaths via the same state-sanctioned violence that kills Black boys and men are less compelling? Are the victims less worthy? Or do they somehow not matter?

It’s hard to tease out and to talk about what’s happening. But if we genuinely want to address racist police violence, and bring all of us into the imagined future, we have to have the conversation.

The Say Her Name project from the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve, has worked to lift up the names of women, trans women and girls killed by law enforcement on and off duty, and to talk about how their murders are the same as, and different from, police murders of Black men and boys.

That project is now reflected in a book, Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, out this week from Haymarket Books.

Joining us now is Kevin Minofu, senior researcher and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kevin Minofu.

Kevin Minofu: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m very grateful for you making the time and, yeah, great to be on the show.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, as you and I both know, the Say Her Name project encompasses activism, art, research and writing, and support for families. But the heart of it, the radiating center, is still this really simple thing: “Say her name.” Why is that so meaningful?

KM: I think in describing that, it’s kind of useful to go back to the origins of the movement, because people are always interested in how it developed. People have probably heard about it, but oftentimes may be confused about its history.

Atlantic (12/4/14)

And so Say Her Name developed around December 2014, during the protests that were ignited in New York City after the acquittal of the police officer who had killed Eric Garner, at the march where thousands of protesters from across the country of all ages and all races joined together and were standing up against police violence against Black people, and mentioning the names of men who had been killed by police violence.

In the context of that protest, the African American Policy Forum were, at the protest, trying to uplift the names of women who had been killed by police violence. And so in the process of being part of that activity, we were saying the names of these women, saying their names out loud, and looking at the looks of lack of recognition, of confusion, from the other participants at this protest.

And I think that was emblematic of the erasure of these stories, and the ways in which by saying the names of these women, we were speaking them into existence in people’s minds, into people’s memories, and making them understand a problem that up until then they hadn’t been able to see.

JJ: There’s a thing that we talk about, the loss of the loss, which is, there’s a horror that happens, obviously, when somebody is killed by police, and where you understand that it’s emblematic of the worthlessness of Black lives, in terms of law enforcement in this country.

But when it’s a Black woman or a trans woman or a girl, and then it doesn’t get acknowledged, there’s a deeper level of loss there. And that’s kind of what this project is about.

Kevin Minofu: “Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.”

KM: Exactly. As we’ve always described it, there’s the immense loss of what it means for a person to lose a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, in their families. These are women who all had incredibly full lives, lots of them had children, were all loved by family members and their communities. So there’s that loss that everyone who’s been through grief or has lost someone unexpectedly will suffer.

And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them. So the police officers that we entrust with the safety of our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our cities are the people who are responsible for taking away these lives.

And then once we understand that loss, there’s the secondary loss that the family members are burdened with, which is the loss of their loss. Their loss is not legible to people. People don’t recognize that this is something which is a tragedy. People don’t recognize that that’s something which is a problem.

People don’t recognize the injustice of being killed if you are, in the case of one of the women, Miriam Carey, who was killed while driving with her 18-month-old child by the Secret Service in front of the White House. If you were killed like India Kager, who was also driving with her son in Virginia Beach, and killed in a hail of bullets. If you were killed in the context of your own home, over what was an outstanding traffic violation, like Korryn Gaines.

So an inability for the general public to see the horror of these deaths, and the loss that those deaths mean for the family members that survive, is what we like to term the loss of the loss, and why this book is such a big intervention to try and publicize and get that loss into the public’s attention.

JJ: And to inform the conversation about state-sanctioned police violence against Black people.

But I just want to say, let me just intercede early: I want us to dispense early with the idea that Say Her Name is somehow an invidious project. And I think some listeners might be surprised to hear, but we know that this project has been met with the idea that if you are uplifting the names of Black women and girls who have been killed by police, that somehow that means you don’t think it matters that Black men and boys have been killed by police.

LA Times (7/21/23)

But I will say, having done a lot of looking into media coverage of the issue, very early on, we absolutely saw the question of state-sanctioned police violence as a question about police killing Black men and boys.

And to the extent that women were in the conversation, they were mothers and wives and sisters of Black men who were the victims of state violence. And so let’s just address the fact that this is not about saying that Black men and boys are not also [affected].

KM: I think that’s a very vital thing to add. Thanks for making that, Janine, because the whole impetus of this campaign is stating that we need to expand the scope of our politics, not just replace the names that we include. So we’re not just replacing Black women and Black men in the conversation, but understanding that we need to have a gender-inclusive understanding of police violence.

So of course we know that, across racial groups, that men are killed more often, Black men are killed more than any other race and gender group. But we do know that Black women represent about 10% of the female population in the United States, yet account for one-fifth of all women killed by the police. And more so, research suggests that three out of five Black women who are killed by police are unarmed.

So there’s a particular vulnerability to being a Black woman that exacerbates the chance of being in a deadly and a lethal police encounter that other women don’t face, and even a lot of men don’t face as well.

So being able to speak about that is able to make us understand how we should be able to hold the death of George Floyd in conversation with the death of Breonna Taylor, which happened only a couple months before George Floyd was killed. So that is the point and impetus of our project.

JJ: And also, a problem that is not named is not studied, is not addressed, and then it’s easier for people to say it’s not really a problem, because we don’t have any data on it. So part of this is just to actually collect some numbers and to say this is happening.

AAPF (7/15)

KM: Absolutely. The kind of driving mantra of our work, and our broader work of the Policy Forum, is that we can’t fix the problem that we can’t see, that we can’t name.

And so maybe to give a bit of background, this book is building on work that we did in 2015, which was the inception of our Say Her Name report.

The Say Her Name report then looked at the ways in which Black women were killed. So, for example, driving while Black is something that we have a context for and understanding for, from looking at the history of how people commonly understand police violence.

But looking at, for example, how often Black women who are in a mental health crisis are killed, that expanded the scope of how we understood police violence, because not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.

So giving ourselves these frames for understanding the ways in which this problem occurs, both gave us a comparison to link it back to the ways in which we commonly understand it, and also expanded the scope for how we want to respond to the crisis.

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. There is a narrative, which maybe some listeners are not privy to or don’t understand, but there is a dominant narrative in which Black men who are killed by police are victims of state violence, but Black women who are killed, eh, what did they do to get themselves killed?

And so introducing both the mental health vector, but just, there’s meaning in saying that it’s both the same—racist police violence is similar—and then there are also distinctions. And if we don’t pay attention to them, then we can’t address them.

News 5 Cleveland (11/11/22)

KM: I think part of that work has been, there’s a policy intervention that is required, of course, there’s legislation both across the country and in certain states that needs to be effected to change this, but a big part of this is also just a narrative shift.

So it’s how the media report on the ways in which Black women are killed, or decline to report on them at all. And I think the Breonna Taylor example is indicative of that. The fact that Breonna Taylor was killed in March, and very little was made of the fact at the time, on a national scale, and then a few months later, that’s when her name joined that conversation.

The fact that Tanisha Anderson was killed only a few days before Tamir Rice was killed by the same police department.

The ways in which the media can, frankly, just do their job better, to make sure that we have a more capacious and broader frame of police violence, and are able to tell the stories of these women in a way that doesn’t show deference to the narratives that emanate from police sources, and shows the full beauty of their lives.

JJ: So important. To come back to the book, specifically, this book is not just a book. It’s meant to be a tool. It’s not meant to just sit on a shelf.

And Fran Garrett, who is the mother of Michelle Cusseaux, who was killed by law enforcement, she talks in the book about how things are actually different based on the work around Say Her Name, and how the mental health response in her community, which happens to be Phoenix, Arizona, but now mental health wellness orders are handled differently, and it’s not necessarily law enforcement that comes first to your door.

So the book is a way of also encouraging action. It’s not just documentation of sad things; it’s about how to make things different.

YouTube (9/24/21)

KM: Absolutely. At the heart of the book—and I would encourage all your listeners to go out and get it at a bookstore near you, and online—at the heart of the book is the Say Her Name Mothers Network. The Say Her Name Mothers Network was formed not long after the inception of the Say Her Name movement, and it represents mothers, daughters, sisters, family members who have lost women to police violence.

And that community has existed, and has existed as a source of advocacy, a source of community. It’s connected them to women across the country, from Virginia to California, from New York to Texas.

It shows that there is a community out there, and through this community, and then particularly through storytelling, artivism, using art to disrupt popular narratives, we released a song with Janelle Monáe, who also wrote the forward for the book, called “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout).”

And that’s designed to just—all of these narrative interventions are the seeds for what becomes policy and actually becomes change. It’s a historical project that Black people have been doing in this country since our arrival. And it’s the Black feminist legacy that brings this book into fruition.

JJ: And then, just on media, I think some listeners might think, well, media are covering police violence against Black women, and what they might be thinking about is these terrible, wrenching videos, or these just horrible images of Black women being abused by law enforcement.

And we want to be careful about this, because I think for a lot of people, that might look like witnessing, that might look like seeing what’s happening, but that can’t be the end of the story.

And certainly for journalists, the responsibility of reporters—but also for all of us—is to not just look at it, but to do something about it. And I wonder if you were talking to reporters or thinking about journalism generally, what would be your thoughts about what would be actually righteous response to what’s happening?

Salon (10/28/15)

KM: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, of course, we live in an age of spectacle, and there is still a great spectacle to Black suffering. And the visibility of that, that has increased with the internet and social media, has been important in being able to document abuses and violence across the country.

But the story can’t end there. It can’t end there, just that particular moment. If this was a camera shot, the camera needs to be expanded to look at the dynamics of the communities, the relationship between police forces and these communities, and the patriarchal relationship between the male police officers and women, the racialized relationship between a police force which has been designed to serve white interests and Black communities.

And so to do the vital work of understanding what led to that situation, what led to the Black girl being violently dragged out of a classroom, or beaten for swimming, or killed in a part of the misguided war on drugs. To understand that broader story is the vital work of journalism that we need at the moment, and the vital work that is actually going to save lives.

JJ: Do you have any final thoughts, Kevin Minofu, about this importance and the place of this intervention in the public media conversation about Say Her Name, and about police violence against Black women?

KM: The Say Her Name book, as I said, features different interviews with members of the Say Her Name Network. And so just hearing those stories and actually getting behind a news story and learning about the lives that should have been is really important for everyone to be able to contextualize and humanize the women that form part of the network and this broader movement.

And looking at the ways in which the knowledge that is being lifted up here is vital to us understanding racism, sexism, and at the same time, being cognizant of the fact that that is the precise knowledge which at the moment a backlash to what is termed wokeness across the country is attempting to erase.

I can imagine that the content of the Say Her Name book would inflame the sensitivities of various conservatives and right-wing people that are attempting to silence our ability to speak about our circumstances, because they don’t want us to change it.

So in this context of that environment, reading this book, sharing it with your communities, letting people know about the problem, letting people know that to truly respond to structural racism, to racial injustice, we have to have a gender-expansive, gender-inclusive understanding of it…. I think that’s the work, that’s the mission of Say Her Name.

And we’ve been very grateful to be supported by the public so far. We’ve seen the movement grow, but there’s still so much work to be done, and that’s the work that we’re excited to continue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. You can learn more about this work on the website AAPF.org. Thank you so much, Kevin Minofu, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KM: Thanks, Janine.

The post ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Media coverage mainly focused on the politics of calling Israel a “racist state” (Daily Beast, 7/19/23) rather than on the question of whether Israel was racist.

When Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D.–Wash.) called Israel a “racist state” at the Netroots Nation conference, corporate media dutifully covered the political backlash—but scrupulously avoided evaluating the veracity of Jayapal’s statement.

Addressing activists who interrupted a panel to protest panelist Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s refusal to support a bill protecting Palestinian children, Jayapal said:

As somebody that’s been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.

Republicans immediately jumped on the statement, working to cast the Democratic party as antisemitic for as many news cycles as possible (Daily Beast, 7/19/23). Top Democrats swiftly rebuked Jayapal, distancing themselves from her remarks and declaring that “Israel is not a racist state.”

Jayapal offered a lengthy apology, explaining, “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” but rather that

Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.

Reporting the push-back

A Washington Post article (7/17/23) quoted no one but US officials, making claims about Israel that many human rights experts would dispute.

Most major US news outlets covered the blowup over Jayapal’s statement. But astonishingly few took the obvious and necessary journalistic step of factchecking it.

NPR (7/17/23) discussed the events under the headline, “Top House Democrats Reject Rep. Jayapal’s Comments Calling Israel a ‘Racist State.'” CNN (7/16/23) went with “Top House Democrats Rebuke Jayapal Comments That Israel Is a ‘Racist State’ as She Tries to Walk Them Back.” The Washington Post‘s version (7/17/23) ran under the headline, “Democrats Push Back on Rep. Jayapal’s Description of Israel as ‘Racist State.’”

NPR characterized her words as “controversial.” The Post and CNN quoted top Democrats calling the remarks “unacceptable,” and CNN added a quote from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling them “hurtful and harmful…wholly inaccurate and insensitive.”

Both NPR and CNN briefly mentioned that progressive Democrats have “concerns” about “human rights” in Israel, but offered no further information about them.

‘System of domination’

But, of course, progressive Democrats aren’t the only ones with concerns about human rights or racism in Israel, and Jayapal didn’t come up with the “racist state” characterization out of thin air.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International (2/22) have condemned Israel’s apartheid system, which Amnesty defines as a “system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.”

In 2021, Human Rights Watch (4/27/21) published a lengthy report spelling out its determination that Israel had committed crimes of apartheid against Palestinians, which is defined under international law as

an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

HRW explained, for those inclined to split hairs, that this applies to Palestinians because under international law, “race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.”

Earlier the same year, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (1/12/21) released a report declaring Israel an “apartheid regime.”

Amnesty International (2/1/22) followed the next year, publishing a 280-page report titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians” that declared that

Amnesty International concludes that the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group.

These reports came about after Israel in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status that declares Israel is the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” and that “the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”—in other words, that Israel is not a nation-state for its Palestinian residents, whether accorded citizenship or not, and that Palestinians subject to Israel’s control have no right to self-determination.

As B’Tselem explained in its report:

It is true that the Israeli regime largely followed these principles before. Yet Jewish supremacy has now been enshrined in basic law, making it a binding constitutional principle—unlike ordinary law or practices by authorities, which can be challenged. This signals to all state institutions that they not only can, but must, promote Jewish supremacy in the entire area under Israeli control.

Jayapal’s statement, therefore, that Israel is a “racist state” has clear grounding in international law, as multiple respected human rights organizations have documented.

‘Certain subjects are taboo’

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor (7/19/23) was one of the few commentators who cited Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International‘s positions on Israel. But even he softened their critique, writing that they saw Israeli discrimination against Palestinians “as akin to apartheid.”

But in the flood of coverage, mentions of any of the human rights organizations that have designated Israel an apartheid state were extremely rare—and only came after Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib highlighted them in a speech on the House floor against a House resolution declaring Israel “not a racist or apartheid state.” At publication, a Nexis search of US news sources found 474 articles and transcripts since July 15 that mentioned Jayapal and “racist state.” Only 24 of those mentioned Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or B’Tselem.

The New York Times (7/18/23) quoted Tlaib saying, “Israel is an apartheid state,” and noted that in her speech she cited “determinations from United Nations officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounted to apartheid.” This was followed with three sources calling the “racist state” characterization “contrary to the facts,” “false” and “hateful.”

The Hill (7/18/23) offered a brief article about Tlaib’s comments, and the Washington Post‘s follow-up article (7/18/23) mentioned them as well.

Opinion columns in Newsweek and the Post were noteworthy standouts. Both noted the human rights organizations’ designations and explored the political context beyond the current theatrics. Ishaan Tharoor’s Post column (7/19/23), headlined “It’s the Republicans, Not the Democrats, Who Are Radical on Israel,” focused on the contradictions of growing US public support for Palestinians as the GOP moves radically rightward on Israel/Palestine foreign policy.

The Newsweek column (7/18/23), by Omar Baddar, offered the only forceful defense of Jayapal’s remarks FAIR could find in establishment media. Under the headline “​​Rep. Jayapal Was Right: Israel Is a Racist State,” Baddar argued: “We cannot live in a functioning democracy and make informed policy decisions if certain subjects are taboo, and if acknowledging reality in them is derided.”

Newsweek diligently countered Baddar’s column with another (7/18/23) under the headline, “No, Israel Is Not a ‘Racist State’.”

When Amnesty released its report last year, the New York Times refused to even mention the report for 52 days (FAIR.org, 5/23/23). When journalist Katie Halper, in her new co-host position at Hill TV, recorded a political commentary about the human rights reports titled “Israel IS an Apartheid State,” the Nexstar Media outlet killed the segment and axed Halper (FAIR.org, 10/7/22). That we could find even one critical piece in the wake of Jayapal’s comments in an establishment publication was surprising, given the strong taboo against criticism of Israel that cuts across outlets.

But it’s lamentable that when the controversy at hand is a politician calling Israel a “racist state,” most of US media can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the human rights community has weighed in on this question in the affirmative.

Featured Image: MSNBC (7/18/23)

The post Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them.  But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others.  It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.

The post Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.

Free Press

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.

The post Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association’s Tauhid Chappell about cannabis justice for the June 9, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: As media critics, we encourage people to write letters to the editor, noting that even if your letter doesn’t run, it may help another letter with a similar point get in. Because a paper that gets one letter may not feel obliged to represent that view, but if they get 20, they may figure they should run one.

New York Times (5/17/23)

All of which is to say, the New York Times must have got a boatload of letters scoffing at columnist Ross Douthat’s sad sack May 17 piece about how legalizing marijuana is a big mistake, not least because his opposition to it is making people call him a “square.”

Unsurprisingly, Douthat isn’t being a principled contrarian, just obfuscating. As noted by Paul from Washington and Jeff from Queens and Peter from Boston, he sidesteps comparative mention of legal drugs like alcohol or tobacco, and dismisses decades of society-wide harms of racist enforcement of anti-marijuana legislation by saying cops who used weed as a pretense to stop and frisk Black people will just find other reasons, so: so much for that.

For the Times columnist, it all comes down to the wicked weed as “personal degradation,” which, in 2023, sails like a lead balloon.

There is an informed, good-faith conversation to be had about the impacts of marijuana legalization, and especially the effort to see some of the benefits of this newly legal market, in some places, go to those most harmed by its illegality.

Our guest works on precisely these intersections. Tauhid Chappell is a founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association, and also a project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project, focusing on that program’s Philadelphia initiative to reimagine how local newsrooms approach coverage of crime, violence, and the criminal justice and carceral systems.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tauhid Chappell.

Tauhid Chappell: Thanks for having me.

JJ: So Douthat’s column was headlined “Call Me Square, but Facts Show the Error of Legalizing Weed,” which, OK, the invocation of “facts” is a rhetorical device: You all are vibing, but I’m a grownup who only traffics in facts. It’s a frankly boring tactic that people use to discount the humanity of others and think they’re doing something.

But I love a good fact as much as the next guy. So, in terms of public opinion, in terms of reported social harms, in terms of the information that we do have, would an observer say that marijuana legalization, where it has happened, has been a big, dangerous mistake?

TC: No, in fact. I am happy to say that, because legalization, for both medical and adult use, has been around, especially on the West Coast, in places like Colorado, Washington, Oregon and California, we are now starting to see the long-term studies of the impact of legalization.

CNN (7/8/19)

There has been a fear that teen use is going to go up. That’s been debunked by the studies on these various states over the last decade of legalization. There’s been fear about higher road rage, or higher traffic accidents, due to being “under the influence of cannabis.” That’s also been debunked. There’s been ongoing fear about marijuana use being some sort of gateway into harder drugs. That has been debunked, and we’ve also seen a decrease in opioid use in states that have legalized cannabis for medical use as well.

And so there has been a lot of reefer madness that continues to point at unscientific, non-peer-reviewed data that does not actually support the ongoing fears that people continue to fearmonger across the country. We have a plethora of data, a plethora of government-backed studies as well, to show that the legalization of marijuana has been nothing but a net positive overall.

JJ: Let me ask you another side of information: Are people still being arrested for marijuana possession? Because media would tell me that it’s all the Wild West, and that’s why we might think about putting the genie back in the bottle, but it’s not exactly the case.

Tauhid Chappell: “Incarceration, especially for Black Americans, still has not significantly decreased, despite legalization of marijuana.”

TC: Yeah. In states such as New Jersey—and we’re pulling from data from the West Coast, because they’ve legalized longer, as well—we have seen an overall decrease in arrests for cannabis possession. But that does not mean that Black people are not still being disproportionately targeted for cannabis. We are still seeing that across the country.

In fact, the ACLU did a wonderful report that shows that incarceration, especially for Black Americans, still has not significantly decreased, despite legalization of marijuana.

And an example of this is in Pennsylvania, where medical marijuana is legal. However, if you are not a medical marijuana–registered patient in the state, and you are not in a city like Philadelphia or Harrisburg or Pittsburgh which has decriminalized cannabis possession—if you are caught with marijuana with you, and you’re not a medical marijuana patient, you still could be criminalized and potentially incarcerated from police if you step out of those decriminalization areas.

So that’s to say, yes, overall we are seeing a positive decrease in arrest, but that does not mean that Black people are still not being disproportionately targeted for marijuana use or possession.

JJ: I know that you have a Philadelphia focus. Are there things that are happening right there that are emblematic, that you think point to larger issues? What’s going on in Philadelphia that you think is useful to think about?

TC: We’ve noticed that municipalities, ultimately…. When it comes to cannabis legalization, the state will create, usually, sometimes broad categories of how the cannabis markets should be rolled out.

But municipalities, at the very local level, determine what types of cannabis businesses they can allow in their cities, right? They have zoning ordinances, they have permits, they have specific locations that businesses can and can’t operate.

And so something that I encourage everybody, especially those that are interested in getting into the industry, is to start educating your council members, your county commissioners, because this is something that’s completely new to them.

Many of them have never been exposed to marijuana as a legal business. Many of us have gone through decades and generations of marijuana as a harmful drug, it’s a narcotic….

And so to see this become legalized, where there are actual business and economic considerations? Many people, especially lawmakers and politicians, still don’t have enough information to make the best decisions on how to make an accessible and equitable and friendly cannabis market, where people can be participants without the fear of any sort of retribution or incarceration.

So education, education, education. Philadelphia, specifically, we had just a big primary where we are going to have a new mayor coming up this year. That means more education for them, because they may be the mayor that has to oversee legalization in their city. They’re going to have to figure out what types of cannabis businesses they’re going to want to allow in Philadelphia, who should have those licenses to operate, and where should they be able to operate, and what types of support should they be receiving.

So municipality to municipality, you have varying levels of education. Some mayors embrace legalization. They’re excited for it. They want to see the financial returns of these new businesses.

Others are very much NIMBY, not in my backyard. They’re still afraid of it. They still think it’s going to create a drug market in their backyard.

And so we have a lot of level-setting to do at the local level.

Washington Post (11/18/16)

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about journalism. A million years ago, except it was actually January 2018, I talked with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, and this is at a moment where Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, was saying, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

And we had a Kansas State representative, Steve Alford, who said—in 2018, not 1918—that we need to remember why marijuana was outlawed, which was because

African Americans, they were basically users, and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.

So there’s obviously an opinion shift, a culture shift happening, but in terms of media, what would you like to see, new questions asked, new ways of approach? What would you like to see in terms of media coverage of the issue?

TC: There are three people that I like to point to as really good examples of good reporters asking tough questions, holding politicians accountable, calling out agencies that are supposed to be doing the job of rolling out legalization, but have not.

One of them is the former Boston Globe journalist Dan Adams, who covered the Massachusetts legalization for years. Great reporter.

NJ.com (10/11/22)

Jelani Gibson, who is the first Black reporter in a traditional newspaper to cover cannabis. He works for NJ.com. He holds the state accountable, asking a lot of politicians, asking a lot of regulators questions about expectations, realities, what the law has said and what has actually happened pertaining to the law.

And then, from a national perspective, Mona Zhang from Politico does a great job in analyzing how different governments are trying to address the ongoing inequities that we see in cannabis legalization.

And I think that continues to be a point that we need to emphasize, is that despite legalization, the people who have been harmed the most are either still locked up, or being released but not being supported into the reentry of society, and they’re not able to benefit from the true legalization, which is being able to legally run their own cannabis operation and be supported in that too.

So I would love to see more media reporting on the ongoing inequities, and the solutions that other municipalities and states are trying to do to rectify the situation. I think more awareness of that is going to lead to a lot more, I guess, inspiration for cannabis advocates and stakeholders to bring these solutions to their lawmakers and politicians in the respective localities.

JJ: All right. I suspect we’ll speak with you more in the future. Tauhid Chappell is founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association, as well as a project manager for Free Press. Thank you so much, Tauhid Chappell, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TC: Thanks for having me. Appreciate everything that you do. Truly an honor to be included in this interview.

The post ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(image: PCBA)

This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from Tauhid Chappell, founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association and project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project.

(CC photo: Janine Jackson)

Also on the show: Lots of people are concerned about what’s called the “digital well-being” of children—their safety and privacy online. So why did more than 90 human rights and LGBTQ groups sign a letter opposing the “Kids Online Safety Act”? Evan Greer is director of the group Fight for the Future. She tells us what’s going on there.

The post Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

NBC (11/2/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life.

But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layers of mis- and disinformation that benefit from exploring. Listeners will know that Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions. It looks like the Supreme Court will rule on a watershed case this month. We talk about it with writer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, among other titles.

We also hear some of an earlier discussion of the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. vs. Harvard that CounterSpin had with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

Transcript: “This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans”

The post Jeff Chang & Jeannie Park on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Algernon Austin about race and unemployment for the March 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The unspoken premise of most major news reporting is that people are all independent economic actors, making choices about what skills to acquire, what workplace to work at, what salary to negotiate. The economy, overall, reflects the range of those choices and their impacts. The idea that people find themselves in jobs or sectors with differing pay scales and workplace rights informs what news media see as acceptable states of affairs, and what they present as reasonable interventions.

Which is why it takes an active effort to see the role that policy has played, and does play, in shaping employment opportunities, and, what’s more, how using policy to help people would reflect not the insertion of the government hand into a hitherto untampered-with realm, but simply the use of policy to address a keystone problem.

Algernon Austin is the director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of, most recently, America Is Not Post-Racial: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Racism and the 44th President.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Algernon Austin.

Algernon Austin: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Ascent (2/19/23)

JJ: The headlines tell me that unemployment in the United States is at a record low, and you sort of seem uninformed or churlish to not acknowledge, if not celebrate, that.

But it’s important, isn’t it, to recognize the limits of that raw number? What and who is being obscured there?

AA: Absolutely. The unemployment rate, it’s a valid statistical measure. However, it’s important to recognize its limitations.

To be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively looking for work in the past four weeks. And if you have faced significant obstacles in finding work, or if you are unfortunate enough to live in some of our more economically depressed areas, then you’re not likely to be actively looking for work, because you’ve been rejected repeatedly from employers, or you look around your community and you know that there are no jobs available.

And for individuals in those circumstances, they stopped actively looking for work, although they would like to work. But even though they don’t have a job and would like to work, because they’re not actively looking for work, they are not counted as unemployed.

So in that way, the unemployment rate presents a significant undercount of the overall rate of joblessness. And the undercount is most severe in populations that, as I mentioned, face a lot of discrimination in the labor market, or live in more economically disadvantaged communities.

So that means that, although the Black unemployment rate has been consistently about twice the white unemployment rate for the last 60 years–so this two-to-one ratio has been a permanent, sort of structural feature of our economy–although that Black unemployment rate being twice the white rate is still a high rate, it still undercounts the Black joblessness by a significant degree.

So, if we had a count of Black joblessness, it would be a multiple, two, three, four times what the official Black unemployment rate is.

JJ: I wanted to ask you, because part of the celebration about the relatively low unemployment rate has said, “and this is also reflecting advances in terms of Black employment.” So what is the status, you’ve just indicated it, but comparative Black and white employment, or unemployment, is that changing, historically, that relationship?

CEPR (2/1/23)

AA: No, over the last 60 years—and I highlight 60 years because this is the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And the title, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—people forget that there were significant economic demands, including demands for jobs, at that march.

And unfortunately, the Black unemployment rate was twice the white unemployment rate in 1963. It’s about twice the white unemployment rate today. And it’s been about twice the white unemployment rate for all 60 years. So this is a serious structural problem in American society, and it’s a problem because of racial discrimination in the labor market.

I talked about the economically depressed communities; Black communities have been hurt significantly by the decline in manufacturing, because of deindustrialization, etc.

And the broader problem, remember, I said that there’s lots of joblessness that’s not being counted. Mass incarceration that hit Black communities, and Black men particularly severely, contributes to that hidden joblessness in Black communities. Because if you’re a Black man and you have a criminal record, it becomes very difficult for you to find work, among the Black populations that are not likely to be counted in unemployment statistics.

JJ: I want to talk to you a little bit about history, which is so relevant here, but often kind of dropped out. The history is there to be found, but it seems like only some things survive as a dominant narrative.

And one thing that has dropped out is the role that the government played with regard to jobs during the Great Depression. And I wonder if you could just tell listeners a little something about that, and the import of that history today?

AA: Yes, it’s important to recognize, people don’t fully recognize—this gets me to a sort of tangential issue—our discourse about the working class in the United States tends to be coded white, but the majority of Black people are working-class people, the majority of Latino people are working-class people. And increasingly, as our country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, the working class is every day becoming more and more racially and ethnically diverse.

So we really have to change our thinking: When we think about working class, remember that we’re also talking about the majority of Black people, and the majority of the Latino or Hispanic population.

So the WPA, the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, it’s really important for people to realize that in response to this massive economic downturn and massive high rates of unemployment, the government stepped in and directly created jobs for people.

And the positive thing about that is that it included Black people. And at the height of the WPA jobs program, over 400,000 Black workers were employed by the WPA.

So this is a really important example, because it shows that the federal government can create jobs, and can employ Black workers.

Algernon Austin: “Because a lot of Black joblessness is not counted in the unemployment rate, we still have a massive need for jobs in Black communities.”

Today, as I mentioned, even in a period of historically low unemployment rate for Black people, because the Black unemployment rate is still twice the white unemployment rate, and because a lot of Black joblessness is not counted in the unemployment rate, we still have a massive need for jobs in Black communities.

And the WPA shows us that the federal government can actually address this, through direct job creation, through subsidized employment programs, which is what the WPA was.

And I’m actually involved in a campaign that’s called Full Employment for All, that’s calling for the federal government to create a national subsidized employment program that’s targeted to communities that suffer from persistently high rates of joblessness, and people can find out about that, and sign on to it, at the website FullEmploymentForAll.org.

And although we’re talking about the importance and the crisis of joblessness for Black people, it’s important to recognize that there are other places across the country that also have significant levels of joblessness.

So, in Appalachia, you also have significant joblessness. In the Southwest, you can find several communities with high levels of joblessness. Among the Native American or American Indian population, you can find many of those communities suffering from high rates of joblessness.

President Biden, in his State of the Union address, talked about forgotten places and people. And so Full Employment for All is about, let’s target job creation to these forgotten places and people, and include them in the American economy.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, on the level of ideas and in terms of media, it’s seen as unserious or unsophisticated to say that you can’t understand why we have lots of people who want jobs and lots of jobs that want doing, and the idea that the government would play a role in connecting those things is somehow not serious.

And I just wonder how we fight that.

AA: Yeah, it’s like you said, I think, in your introduction, the government exists to serve the people, the government exists to make our lives better.

And, unfortunately, the American government does do that. But unfortunately, it does that primarily for the wealthy people who pay the lobbyists.

So the government is constantly enacting policies that help people–it’s often helping wealthy people via helping corporations.

But what we saw during the Great Depression, with the WPA, was the government working to help average working people. And we need more efforts to get our policymakers to enact policies that help average working people, or average people who would like to work, as I’m doing in the Full Employment for All campaign, making sure the government provides jobs for those people.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Algernon Austin; he’s director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They’re online at CEPR.net. And that website we’ve discussed is FullEmploymentForAll.org. Thank you so much, Algernon Austin, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AA: It’s been a great pleasure for me.

The post ‘Let’s Target Job Creation to These Forgotten Places and People’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Judy Heumann

This week on CounterSpin:  “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. Here’s hoping they’ll extend their interest into the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policy changes could address them. We’ll talk with Kim Knackstedt, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963

And speaking of problems that aren’t actually behind us: You will have heard that the US is experiencing “blowout job growth,” and unemployment is at a “historic low,” with gains extending even to historically marginalized Black people. Algernon Austin from the Center for Economic Policy and Research will help us understand how employment data can obscure even as it reveals, and how—if our problem is joblessness—there are, in fact, time-tested responses.

The post Kim Knackstedt on Disability Policy, Algernon Austin on Unemployment & Race appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s Makani Themba about Jackson, Mississippi’s crisis for the March 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: So this is CNN on February 17: “And ahead, the plan to create a court system for the wealthy and mostly white parts of Jackson, Mississippi, and separate from the system for the mostly Black community.”

It’s hard to know how to respond. For sure, it’s good that CNN is choosing to point its national audience’s attention to what’s happening in Jackson. But at the same time, if it’s not too much, why is a deeply anti-democratic, racist action just a sort of blip on the evening news, like a new drink at Starbucks?

Mississippi Bill 1020 gives the state of Mississippi the control to appoint systems, and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba says it would be less than honest to call the effort “anything other than racist.”

New York Times (2/20/23)

Which leads us to headlines like the New York Times on February 21: “In Mississippi, Racial Outrage at Court Plan.” Well, CounterSpin listeners will likely be attuned to the difference when journalists use “racial” when “racist” would be the more appropriate word, and framework, to use.

So what does all this mean in the story of Jackson? And what questions and conversations would help us understand what’s going on there, and point us in the direction of a useful response?

Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies, which is based in Jackson. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Makani Themba.

Makani Themba: Well, I’m so glad to be back. And I’m so grateful that CounterSpin is still going strong. Thank you.

JJ: Absolutely. You know, we keep on keeping on.

I just feel, in this case, that a lot of folks would appreciate some story, some understanding, about what’s actually happening, and how we got to this point.

If I read reporting today, it’s about water treatment, and then about governance. But how would you bring somebody up to speed, who was maybe just looking at the latest headlines?

IBW21 (3/2/23)

MT: I think one of the most important things to understand is that HB 1020, which I know has gotten most of the media attention, is one of about a dozen bills, a dozen bills, that the state legislature and the governor have really, it feels like a sort of gun. It’s like artillery pointed at our city, to be honest. It’s like legislative weaponry.

And these bills, which include 1020, do all kinds of damage. 1020, I think, got a lot of folks’ attention, because it basically creates a new governance structure in the middle of the city that’s a predominantly white area, northeast Jackson. It also includes our downtown, where the Capitol is, and all the way up to the border of Ridgeland, Mississippi, which is the neighboring city, and actually into a portion of Ridgeland—a new jurisdiction which is called the Capitol Complex Improvement District.

It originally came out as a way to make sure that the Capitol had resources to do, you know, gardening, and some improvements for beautification. And the state came back after the City of Jackson, the residents of Jackson, the mayor of Jackson, had fought really hard to get federal dollars to finally come directly to Jackson to address our water issues. Because money was coming into the state for water infrastructure, but that money was not getting to Jackson, even though it was a primary reason why the money was coming in.

So that was the context, right, that we were able to work with Congress to come around the state, because they were blocking the resources; they even created a special process, just for the City of Jackson, to have to have approval for the use of funds that were dedicated to the city.

And so we were able to get around that, and get a sizable appropriation, about $600 million, actually, to address what is about a $2 billion problem. But we were excited. We were planning, we were there.

And it seems like this is not only revenge for figuring out a way to be resilient, and just address the problem without having to deal with the state and all of their shenanigans, but the set of bills, taken together, not only create this governance structure, [they] take away revenues from the city.

There are other bills that restrict our use of our sales tax revenue to only water infrastructure. So we’re not able to fix roads, or do anything else with it. And there’s no other city with that kind of restriction, where they say this is what you spend with your revenue, right? That’s not something happening anywhere else in Mississippi.

It also creates a police force that has jurisdiction over the city of Jackson, and over the Jackson Police Department. And they say the reason why they’re doing all this is to try to address the crime in Jackson. But that doesn’t seem to be true, because crime, one, is actually going down, and when crime was at the record high that it was at a couple of years ago, the state was not engaged at all, except to use it as a way to talk bad about us.

The other thing I think people should understand is that Jackson, like many majority Black and majority brown cities, folks denigrate those cities and defame those cities as a way to devalue, not only the people, but the property, the business, the commerce that happens there, because they don’t want the competition. So I think that’s important for people to understand.

So this whole array of bills—they even have a bill that restricts how the mayor can veto things or not. It’s not just about the water, because then I think it would be a different kind of response.

And the other thing is another bill that actually seizes the money that Congress allocated to the city, and creates a Regional Water Authority that is not responsible for addressing the problems in Jackson, it’s only responsible for receiving the money.

And the governor will have three votes on this commission. The lieutenant governor, who they’re in lockstep, has two votes. And this is a nine member commission. The mayor has four appointments, but two of them are dedicated to two other cities, so really Jackson has two votes on a nine-member regional handoff for money that was allocated directly to the city.

So they’re seizing those funds, as they have done other federal monies. What I also want people to understand is, there’s no law against this. There’s no law against this.

JJ: Exactly. So if we had a conversation about community needs, what would that look like? Who would be in that conversation? The conversation is like, oh, the community failed. But that’s not the story. And if we were going to talk about ways forward, we would, I believe, include different voices. And I just want to ask you, what could that conversation look like?

MT: First of all, I would love to see more investigative reporting and less punditry about it.

JJ: Say it.

The Nation (2/16/23)

MT: That’s important. Because it’s easy to make this, and I know in my own writing I talk about this, as a David versus Goliath story. And it is, in a way.

Jackson doesn’t have the votes. This is a supermajority Republican state house that does all the kind of ill they want, even though, because of the pressure from outside the state and within the state, there’s been some negotiation, but we’re still facing the brunt of the awfulness that all of these bills combined contain.

But yes, so what happens with the money when the federal government gives money to Jackson? Who uses it? Why don’t we see it? And why is that OK? And also, we’re not the only state that experiences these kinds of shenanigans, this kind of misappropriation of funds. All over the place—Michigan’s an example, Texas is another example.

States make applications to the federal government, using the problems of their communities of color, that basically happened because of the lack of investment, which is the first step. And then the extraction—because it’s one thing to not invest, but in Mississippi, they literally extract what they want from the city.

So when this money comes in, they extract that money and say, OK, well, great, we’ve got this money, we talked about the problems. And now we’re going to take this money and make communities that already have smooth roads smoother, already have good water infrastructure even better. We’re going to keep up with that, and then blame the folks—for what they’ve stolen from us.

Where’s the investigative reporting that looks at the documents, that FOIAs the application, that tracks it? And I’m so grateful for the work that the Clarion Ledger has done around the welfare scandal, because that would have never been uncovered had it not been for investigative reporting.

Makani Themba: “If there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people.”

But I think if there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people. It isn’t even that the white communities in Mississippi are benefited, because many of them do not.

I think that they would discover that a few businesses, a few people, a few politicians are benefiting from this, and most people are not. And how do you have a state that’s against Medicaid? Right? I mean, healthcare for their folks.

I think that more investigative journalism would nail these kinds of stories, and that it’s been investigative journalism in the past that’s helped lift up what’s happening in places like this.

And you know, like you think about, we would not know who Fannie Lou Hamer was, if folks weren’t telling the story outside of Mississippi. Because if it was up to them—I mean, this was a state that was trying to keep Sesame Street from coming on the air because it was too forward, too progressive, who actually had to be sued by folks in Mississippi—including the late Everett C. Parker, who media activists actually get an award in his name—they sued television stations in Mississippi in the ’60s, because they would literally not show anything about the civil rights movement, or the marches, or what was going on on the news.

And they had to sue to force that, and they would actually block out national news coverage in Mississippi of these stories. So we’re dealing with a long legacy.

So journalism is critical, good journalism, investigative journalism, or some people would say actual journalism, is critical to exposing this kind of theft and dishonesty.

And also just the issues of democracy. What does it mean to be in a state where there’s a Republican supermajority that does not reflect the proportions of who lives here at all?

Time (9/13/22)

JJ: When I see a headline, like Time magazine’s, “The Mayor of Jackson,” I guess it said, “Had a Racial Vision for His City”—OK, all right, whatever—“but the Water Crisis May Have Put It Out of Reach.”

So when I see that headline, what I hear that telling readers is, we tried to do it, and we failed. And so stop thinking about that.

So you can only talk to people who are interested in change, and media are just maybe not the way to do that. And yet so many people that we talk to, their agenda, their understanding of what is politically possible, is set by media, and it’s media saying, oh, hey, the mayor of Jackson wanted to do something, but he can’t. And that’s their understanding of, well, I guess we shouldn’t even try.

MT: Fortunately, Time magazine is not going to dictate to us what we might do, thank God. And I think, in many ways, the world was captivated by Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s vision around Jackson being the most radical city in America. And that radical vision for the world was very compelling, and also the story of Mississippi, right? The story of Mississippi is everybody’s, deep down.

I think that him articulating that, when he was first elected, gave folks a different view for a moment, right, of this is a place where there’s been resistance. He’s not the first person to articulate that.

In fact, Mississippi’s radical legacy has roots in Reconstruction. The state had the most radical constitution in the country during Reconstruction, and a majority Black legislature, all those things. And then, when the Confederacy took back the state in 1890, that’s the kind of governance we’ve been dealing with ever since. But they don’t represent the majority of the state, and they never have.

And so I think that it’s not true that the water crisis threatens our—and I would say, collectively, Jackson’s—radical agenda, because another convention of corporate media, and oftentimes storytelling, is to reduce it down to one person, when he was always part of a movement and a legacy and a history that many, many, many, many people are involved in.

That what threatens the agenda, so to speak, has been Jim Crow politics, and that the water crisis is a manifestation of Jim Crow politics.

You have a water crisis because there’s no investment in infrastructure when there should be, and those decisions are racialized.

I think that’s the other piece of the story, is that folks are not dealing with how deeply racialized the work, the legislature’s agenda—and I shouldn’t say the whole legislature, let me be clear, the Republicans, because it’s interesting, in Jackson, almost all the Democrats in both houses are Black. Guess why.

So we have this essentially apartheid approach to governance that has been in effect since 1890, with some breakthroughs, with some fights, and the Voting Rights Act was really critical to helping things move forward.

And it’s really been the folks in Mississippi and Alabama, whose blood was on the line, who made that legislation happen, and I want to be clear about that. The whole nation owes Mississippi and Alabama a debt for the elevation of democracy. That’s critical to understand.

And so we look at that, and I want to see reporting about that racialization, right? I want to see reporting about how this paradigm of whiteness and anti-Blackness is driving the policy agenda.

You know, people want to call it “Trumpism.” But this was Trumpism before Trump. This is where he got it from.

JJ: This is not new.

MT: And Jeff Sessions in Alabama, and from this Jim Crow legacy.

And that’s the crisis that we’re in. There would be no water crisis if there was equity. There would be no water crisis if the state of Mississippi had any kind of ethics, and allocated the money which they received from the federal government to the places where there is a problem.

And you think about it, how crazy is it that you won’t invest money where the problem is, and fix the problem? But that is kind of politics as usual—not just in Mississippi, but all over. And that ought to be the crime.

Jackson Undivided Coalition

Look for the hashtag #jxnundivided. You’ll see that online. That will let you know where the petition is, and also IBW21.org.

I have an extensive piece that has how people can get involved, as well as a link to the petition site. So there’s an article there that has a link to the petition drive.

We’re asking everybody to please sign and share it. And it also goes through the list of bills, and there’s two petitions listed in this piece. One is a petition to the state around this attack on Jackson.

The other, and this is, I think, really important as well, is a petition by the family of Jaylen Lewis. Jaylen Lewis was a 25-year-old Black father of two who was killed by the Capitol Police, basically execution-style. And his family is still looking for answers.

It happened in September. There was a witness, who is why we know what we know. But the police themselves have not released any findings, and are supposed to be investigating it. And so there’s a petition there as well for Jaylen Lewis.

And that’s one of the reasons why we’re so concerned about the Capitol Police having jurisdiction. They have a police chief who’s not accountable to anyone in the city of Jackson. They’re appointed by the attorney general of the state.

And so there’s a whole range of issues that are just so problematic about this, so that not only will we have this unelected, again, governing body over a big part of what will then not be a part of Jackson, but still in Jackson, right, where we go to downtown, where we shop, all of these kinds of things.

But we’ll have this occupying force that’s not accountable to any of the residents at all, that’s already shot several folks, and killed one in just the last few months.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Makani Themba. She’s a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, as well as chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. Thank you again, Makani Themba, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MT: Thank you.

The post ‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(Image: Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are certainly following the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—giving us a chance to see how floods of reporters can get out there and print a lot of words about a thing…and still not ask the deepest questions and demand the meaningful answers that might move us past outrage and sorrow to actual change. Are there not forces meant to protect people from this sort of harm? Is it awkward for reporters to interrogate the powerful on these questions? Yes! But if they aren’t doing it, why do they have a constitutional amendment dedicated to protecting their right to do it?

There’s a test underway right now in Jackson, Mississippi, where residents who have been harmed many times over are now being told that the appropriate response is to take away their voice. Here’s where a free press would speak up loudly, doggedly—and transparently, about what’s going on.

Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. She’ll bring us up to speed on Jackson.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Social Security.

The post Makani Themba on Jackson Crisis appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

A New York Times book review (2/14/23) gets an important fact about US history seriously wrong.

In a red-baiting New York Times review (2/14/23) of Malcolm Harris’ book Palo Alto, writer Gary Kamiya makes a false assertion about the persecution of Japanese people that amounts to denial of one of the most shameful chapters of US history. The Times should issue an immediate correction and apology.

Complaining that “Harris doesn’t acknowledge the exceptions” to his “seamless, all-explanatory narrative” of California history, Kamiya writes:

Take his discussion of Japanese internment. As an example of how “embracing white supremacy and segregation meant sacrificing a certain amount of nonwhite talent”…he cites the story of the sculptor Ruth Asawa, who was interned along with her family and then “formally excluded from California” and thus forced to study out of state.

“At a time when the Bay Area’s artists began toying with Japanese ideas and forms, artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state,” he writes, implying that all artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state. This is not true.

Contrary to Kamiya’s claim, it is true that not just all artists of Japanese descent, but all Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens were banned from California, beginning in March 1942.  As Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians explained, under the US Army’s interpretation of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066,

all American citizens of Japanese descent were prohibited from living, working or traveling on the West Coast of the United States. The same prohibition applied to the generation of Japanese immigrants who, pursuant to federal law and despite long residence in the United States, were not permitted to become American citizens.

Japanese residents of some lightly populated areas of eastern California were initially not subjected to the ban, but the exclusion was extended to the entire state in June 1942. While the initial plan was to allow the people ethnically cleansed from the West Coast to relocate to other states, this was deemed impractical, and concentration camps, in the original sense of the term, were set up to confine them. As the commission report put it, “The evacuees were to be held in camps behind barbed wire and released only with government approval.”

At the time, the New York Times (3/24/42) presented the incarceration of Japanese Americans in upbeat terms, describing people being rounded up into camps as “weary but gripped with the spirit of adventure over a new pioneering chapter in American history.” (See FAIR.org, 3/24/15.)

This is history that Kamiya, who writes a history column for the San Francisco Examiner, surely knows. So what does he offer in support of his assertion that Harris’ writing that “artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state” was “not true”? This is Kamiya’s entire argument on the point:

To take just one example, the artist Chiura Obata, who was on indefinite leave from his professorship at Berkeley while interned at Topaz, was reinstated by the University of California president Robert Sproul in January 1945.

So the fact that a person released from a detention camp, after the War Department rescinded the ban on Japanese residents in California (effective January 2, 1945), was allowed to get his job back means that the ban didn’t really exist? This is a preposterous argument, and one that will surely mislead many readers about the scope of the anti-Japanese program.

Kamiya treats the fact that Japanese exclusion didn’t continue in perpetuity as a damning indictment of Harris’ book:

Palo Alto is chock-full of Asawas, and this ugly underside of California history should be told. But the book has virtually no Obatas, and that selection bias, clearly driven by Harris’s conviction that “positive” stories are simply window-dressing concealing capitalism’s dark reality, severely damages its credibility.

To the contrary: Kamiya’s insistence that the historical fact that all Japanese people were banned from California “is not true” severely damages the credibility of the New York Times. The paper needs to offer a correction, and an apology, immediately.

ACTION:

Please contact the New York Times to demand a retraction of and apology for the paper’s denial of the historical reality that people of Japanese descent were completely banned from California.

CONTACT:

Letters: letters@nytimes.com

Readers Center: Feedback

Twitter: @NYTimes

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Featured image: Map of showing “Military Area No. 1” and “Military Area No. 2,” from which Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens were totally excluded.

The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Book Review in Denial on Japanese Persecution in World War II appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

The College Board has “purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism” from its Advanced Placement African-American studies curriculum after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—and likely Republican presidential candidate—moved to ban the curriculum in public schools (New York Times, 2/1/23).

Sometimes you have to destroy academic freedom to save it, Joshua Rauh  argues in the Wall Street Journal (2/8/23).

Conservative media took a victory lap. “Critical race theory is out, and Condoleezza Rice is in,” boasted the Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/1/23). “It’s vindication for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The headline of a Journal op-ed (2/8/23) on legislation that prohibits diversity education declared, “Florida Shows How to Combat Woke Indoctrination on Campus.”

A New York Post editorial (2/2/23) called Florida an inspiration to other states, and asked for a “a leader who will step in and save the State University of New York from woke madness.”

Fox News (2/1/23) highlighted the marginalization of the Black Lives Matter movement in courses’ changes, which it framed as the Advanced Placement course being “stripped of ‘woke’ content after criticism.”

The roots of BLM trace back to the acquittal of vigilante George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida—so the “‘woke’ content” Florida is being heralded for successfully suppressing is the legacy of a historic injustice in the state.

At City Journal (2/2/23), the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden made no effort to hide the fact that DeSantis was aiming to stifle the ideas of “far-left academic ideologues”—“left,” of course, being an entirely subjective term, especially in states where Civil War revisionism still exists. Eden had earlier hailed DeSantis in Newsweek (1/31/23), adopting a John Birch Society tone as he suggested that Black studies were an “attempt to impose a far-left worldview on high school students.”

DeSantis has also become a darling of the international right: The British Telegraph (2/5/23) said he should be a model for the Conservative Party as it fights multiculturalism and diversity.

Where ‘woke goes to die’

CBS (11/9/22) highlighted DeSantis’ re-election as a kickoff for his presidential bid.

There’s a broader context here. DeSantis appointed several allies to oversee the prestigious New College of Florida—among them anti-anti-racism crusader Chistopher Rufo, worrying faculty that the governor wants to convert the small public liberal arts school into a conservative idea mill (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/27/23). DeSantis has also mandated that “public colleges and universities survey students and faculty about their beliefs” (The Hill, 6/23/21). Now he’s bullied a major national player in college education into whitewashing its study of the Black experience…during Black History Month. Not very subtle.

DeSantis is offering red meat to the conservative media who are able to mobilize Republican voters by painting college campuses as left-wing indoctrination camps that mold good Christian patriots into non-binary Sandinistas; this will serve him well if he does chase the GOP presidential nomination. But he’s also accomplishing the Right’s overall censorship goals, regardless of what he does with his own political future: He has successfully used state power to suppress speech and activity that might counter racism, homophobia and the growing militarization of police.

It’s why he has proclaimed that his state is where “woke goes to die” (CBS, 11/9/22)—using an African-American Vernacular English expression that signifies awareness of social and racial injustice. DeSantis joins the tradition of another defiant Southern governor, Alabama’s George Wallace, who stood in a schoolhouse door in 1963 to oppose racial integration—but while Wallace represented a dying old order, DeSantis actually has a shot at national power.

This is what makes DeSantis a hero in conservative media. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz (2/3/23) claimed that “leftist” corporate media like CNN are, by contrast, suffering from “DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.” In fact, more centrist media are in no way hammering DeSantis with the same vigor that their right-wing counterpoints are defending him—and that lack of symmetry is illustrative of the truncated political spectrum of corporate media.

‘Builds his brand’

While right-wing outlets depicted Ron DeSantis as a role model, more centrist publications like the New York Times (2/9/23) presented him as…a role model.

With the headline “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, as He Builds His Brand,” the New York Times (1/31/23) treated the story with a both-sides, political horse race approach that downplayed the severity of the issue at hand.

It was even more curious that Times columnist Pamela Paul (2/3/23) wrote about the collegiate struggle against woke word-policing and academic censorship without even mentioning Florida.

What Paul misses here is that the main reason journalists and academics find their jobs in jeopardy for saying something controversial is because this generation of media and academic workers enjoy less job protections than their elders. For example, she reported that Hamline University “had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive,” though it reconsidered this move after popular outcry.

But this wasn’t the result of oversensitivity or Islamic policing of US academia. The problem was that the instructor had no tenure or other job security, which, in an era where colleges are employing a customer service model of education, which means one’s scholarship is meaningless against any tuition-payer who wants to “speak to the manager.” Acknowledging this would pin the problem on neoliberalism and managerial capitalism, which is something the Times can’t do.

But Paul—who I am happy to report is no relation—wasn’t done. She followed up (2/9/23) saying liberals should “learn from Ron DeSantis” rather than fight him:

If ideological conformity has taken root in American universities, long a bastion of liberal ideals, then Democrats are the ones with the knowledge, experience and record to attend to the problem. It’s on liberals to check the excesses of illiberal orthodoxies rampant among those on its far-left wing. It’s on us to ensure academic freedom and the kind of educational system parents can trust.

‘The state’s legitimate power’

In the Atlantic‘s theory of free speech, harsh criticism on social media may be a dangerous totalitarianism (8/31/21), but governments actually banning ideas is just the democratic process in action (1/30/23).

Paul isn’t the only pundit who brought a blame-the-victim approach to the issue. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (1/30/23) framed Florida’s ideological purge as the consequence of democracy:

If Ron DeSantis wants to put [Rufo] in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so.

As a New England resident, Nichols declares, “I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools.” That contrasts a bit with the magazine’s series, “The Speech Wars,” which tends to present controversies over free expression in more alarmist tones, as when the magazine’s Conor Friedersdorf (9/21/19) warned:  “Campus-speech restrictions jeopardize society’s ability to seek truth and advance knowledge.” (“The Speech Wars” project, incidentally, receives part of its support from the right-wing Charles Koch Foundation.)

But then, Nichols says that he agrees there’s “some truth to the charge” that “colleges have, in fact, become  ridiculously liberal,” as he has written on “some stories of campus boobery.” So he does share some ideological common ground with DeSantis, even as he scorns him for his populist pretensions.

Intervening in college affairs

DeSantis is the most successful and high-profile Republican leader to crusade against academic freedom and free speech on campus, but there is no shortage of examples of this political trend.

Right-wing control of North Idaho College’s Board of Trustees has shown how the right can take electoral action to intervene in college affairs directly (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/15/21). Georgia’s Board of Regents, appointed by the Republican governor, moved to make the tenure process more onerous and give the board more oversight (WABE, 10/13/21), while Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he would “push to end professor tenure for all new hires at Texas public universities and colleges” in order to fight “faculty members who he says ‘indoctrinate’ students with teachings about Critical Race Theory” (Texas Tribune, 2/18/22).

Chalkbeat (2/1/22).: “At least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism.”

And thanks to the state legislature in Louisiana, “a task force to study tenure policies at the state’s colleges and universities” is “worrying [Louisiana State University] faculty members that lawmakers may pass laws aimed at limiting academic freedom” (Reveille, 8/6/22). Conservative donors at Yale University were able to pressure at least one professor into resigning her post (New York Times, 9/30/21). All over the country, conservatives are looking to legally ban Critical Race Theory (Chalkbeat, 2/1/22).

In other words, the news with DeSantis and the College Board isn’t just “building his brand” for the campaign, or the consequence of democratic outcomes, as the Times and Atlantic suggest. Rather, it is another material victory in the right’s long war against higher education, one that more or less started when National Review founder William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951.

DeSantis is emboldening Republicans in other states to amp up the campaigns against higher education. Following his lead, South Carolina lawmakers (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/8/23) have sought “information from the state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding all spending on programs, trainings and activities targeted toward people based on their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” defining

diversity, equity and inclusion programs as, among other things, attempts to take an official institutional policy on concepts such as unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation and microaggressions.

As a likely contender for the White House, DeSantis is telegraphing that if elected, he will rein in the power of educators and encourage the closing of the American mind. Anyone in the United States who cares about free speech and academic freedom should be alarmed; so far, DeSantis is polling well (538, 1/10/23).

Outlets like the Times (e.g., 2/10/23) and the Atlantic (e.g., 2/4/23) spill a lot of ink about whether “wokeness” is hampering our discourse (FAIR.org, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). It would be refreshing if they put this question in the context of the Republican-led assault on learning and debate—because right-wing media certainly do.

The post As Right Media Hail DeSantis as ‘Woke’ Killer, Centrists Admire His Brand appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Ross Douthat confesses to having an obsession with the so-called “baby bust.” The New York Times columnist has brought up the supposed perils of low birthrates in countless columns (e.g., 12/14/22, 3/27/21, 12/2/12), and it played a prominent role in his 2020 book The Decadent Society.

In Ross Douthat’s imagining (New York Times, 3/27/21) of different ways “the developed world” can “stop growing ever-older,” the words “immigration” and “immigrants” never appears.

Many would argue that a declining birthrate is a good thing. It follows when childhood mortality rates decrease, and economic security and women’s rights increase. And fewer people on the planet—particularly in fossil fuel-guzzling countries like ours—means less pressure on the Earth’s natural resources.

But in his most recent return to the subject, Douthat (1/21/23) argues that such folks have it all backwards:

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.

That’s a boldly certain statement from someone without any particular expertise in either climate science or demography, and it flies in the face of repeated assertions of the urgency of the climate crisis from global experts.

But Douthat explains—citing Roger Pielske, Jr., who’s been called the “single most disputed and debunked person in the science blogosphere” (Climate Progress, 3/3/14)—that “some of the worst-case scenarios for climate change have become less likely than before.” Meanwhile, Covid pushed birth rates down faster; therefore, the baby bust takes the crown in this competition you didn’t know was being waged.

To support his claim, Douthat names the threats to “rich and many middle-income nations”: “general sclerosis, a loss of dynamism and innovation, and a zero-sum struggle between a swollen retired population and the overburdened young.” In other words, a population decline in these countries would be bad for the economy, and bad for the quality of life of either the old or the young.

Frankly, that sounds like a lot less of a “defining challenge” than current scientific concerns that “even less-than-extreme increases in global temperatures will intensify heat and storms, irreversibly destabilize natural systems and overwhelm even highly developed societies” (Washington Post, 1/6/23).

And, of course, poorer countries will fare even worse from climate disruption. That Douthat believes—sorry, “knows”—that economic stagnation in middle- and upper-income countries is a more dire threat than destabilized natural systems that could overwhelm all societies, but disproportionately impact poor ones (not to mention nonhuman species), offers your first clue that behind Douthat’s birthrate obsession lurks something much more tied to right-wing nativism than he will ever openly admit.

‘Rules’ for an ‘aging world’

First, it’s highly debatable that a population bust is even an economic problem—and it’s certainly not an unsolvable one. As economist Dean Baker (CEPR.net, 1/17/23) points out, Japan’s population has been decreasing for more than 10 years, yet its standard of living continues to grow. Baker argues that increasing productivity can offset demographic changes, and that governments have many other economic policy tools to deal with such changes successfully, just like Japan has done.

Meanwhile, the costs of climate change already total an estimated $2 trillion since 1980 in the United States alone, and are estimated to reach upwards of $23 trillion globally by 2050. Small island nations face the steepest challenges: The IMF estimates that they will endure costs of up to 20% of their GDP for the next 10 years. And developed nations consistently fail to meet the targets scientists say are necessary to stave off the worst outcomes. So, really, which is the more certain crisis?

Douthat’s “rules for an aging world” (New York Times, 1/21/23) read like a right-wing wish list.

But assuming the primacy of a population decline “crisis” conveniently offers Douthat a springboard to ignore urgent climate policies and instead promote several policies from the conservative wish list. In his recent Times column, he offered some of these in the form of “rules” for this “aging world.” Too many old people? Trim their entitlements. Not enough innovation? Clear away pesky regulatory hurdles.

Douthat’s third rule—”Ground warfare will run up against population limits”—is exactly what you fear it sounds like: “Vladimir Putin’s mobilization efforts aren’t what they presumably would be if his empire had more young people.” That’s right, one of the problems with the so-called population bust is that there won’t be enough bodies to sacrifice to hawkish governments’ military adventures.

Rule Four is where it starts to get even more interesting. That rule, according to Douthat, is that countries with higher birthrates will have “a long-term edge” over the others. (Notice he’s concerned with birthrates specifically here, not just population growth rates. I’ll come back to that in just a minute.)

This takes us to Rule Five: “The African Diaspora will reshape the world.” Here Douthat offers up a curious fact: “Africa’s population is still on track to reach 2.5 billion in 2050, and reach 4 billion by 2100.” But wait! If the population of Africa, which currently stands at about 1.4 billion, could nearly triple by the end of the century, do we really have a population bust on our hands?

No global ‘birth dearth’

You wouldn’t know it from Douthat’s incessant hand-wringing, but the human population isn’t projected to start shrinking for another 54 years. Before then, it’s expected to grow from just over 8 billion today to nearly 10-and-a-half billion, due to continued growth in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

In other words, there is no global “birth dearth,” the planet is not in an “age of demographic decline,” and we are not experiencing “the old age of the world”—all phrases he uses in this column—unless you erase a large chunk of that world, which just so happens to be a predominantly Black and brown one.

The global population continues to swell, which means that even if we believed the argument that a country with a declining population will suffer economically, there’s a straightforward solution to that problem (assuming you’re not interested in forcing women to bear more children—which, notably, Douthat is) that would immediately kick the can down the road a good 50 years, something no serious person believes can be done with climate change. That solution is to welcome more of the many migrants seeking entry to such countries, who are instead largely demonized, criminalized and denied their basic human rights.

But Douthat doesn’t see those Black and brown migrants as solutions. If “even a fraction of this population” migrates, he warns ominously,

the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand, and destabilization and backlash on the other, will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in revitalization or collapse.

‘Fear of a Black continent’

Truth be told, Douthat himself (New York Times, 10/20/18) seems plenty worried about African babies.

Lest you think that by including the possibility of “revitalization” in there, Douthat is somehow signaling an openness to such migration, a look back at other columns he’s written about immigration will quickly dispel that notion.

In Europe, he argued (10/1/22):

The preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash—even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.

He was even more blunt in a column (10/20/18) headlined “Fear of a Black Continent”—subtitled “Why European elites are worrying about African babies.” In it, Douthat warned of the dangers of increasing African migration to Europe, but said that  attempts to slow the African birthrate would be “cruel”—so, instead,

anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children.

If that sounds eugenics-like, it’s because it is. Concerns about differential birth rates were common in the early 20th century anti-immigrant eugenics movement; Teddy Roosevelt famously blamed “American” women who chose not to have children for “race suicide” in the context of record levels of immigration. Douthat never describes dark-skinned immigrants as inferior, but he does repeatedly paint them as a threat linked to crime, distrust, destabilization and disaster.

In a column (11/6/16) crediting Donald Trump’s rise to white families not having enough children (which he in turn blames on the “social revolutions of the 1970s”), Douthat suggested that “mass immigration…exacerbates intergenerational alienation, because it heightens anxieties about inheritance and loss.” Read: Old white people who don’t have at least 4.4 grandchildren worry they have no legacy in an increasingly diverse country.

While this is no doubt true to a certain extent, blaming the “ethno-racial anxiety” of white Republicans on immigration and women’s rights gives a big fat get-out-of-jail-free card to misogynists and nativists like Trump who stoke those bigotries.

White anxiety

Making the right seem respectable is Douthat’s main job at the New York Times (1/27/18)—and that means making white nationalists, who play such a large part in the modern right, respectable too.

In fact, in another eyebrow-raising column (1/27/18), Douthat even urged Democrats to give a seat at the immigration policy table to Trump adviser Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s barbaric and unconstitutional family separation policy. Douthat concluded that it’s “reasonable” to want, like Miller, to reduce immigration, because “increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.”

Douthat tried to draw a distinction between immigration restrictionists who are “influenced by simple bigotry,” and the “real restrictionists” like Miller (who presumably have nobler motivations, like opposing “increased diversity”). Comprehensive immigration reform has failed, according to Douthat, because immigration advocates have insisted on excluding people like Miller from the table, thinking

that restrictionists can eventually be steamrolled—that the same ethnic transformations that have made white anxiety acute will eventually bury white-identity politics with sheer multiethnic numbers.

Here’s your friendly reminder that Miller is a white supremacist who sent hundreds of emails to Breitbart News (Southern Poverty Law Center, 11/12/19) promoting

white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”–themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in Mein Kampf.

Nationalist opposition to “mass immigration” doesn’t have to be racist, Douthat (7/8/17) argued elsewhere:

It can just be a species of conservatism, which prefers to conduct cultural exchange carefully and forge new societies slowly, lest stability suffer, memory fail and important things be lost.

What are those important things, exactly? Douthat made his ideal—and disappearing—society clear in a paean to WASP rule (12/5/18) upon the death of George H.W. Bush. In that (also roundly criticized) column, headlined “Why We Miss the WASPs,” he wrote:

​​Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Douthat (New York Times, 12/5/18) says “we” miss the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite because “a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly.”

No matter that they were also “bigoted and exclusive and often cruel”—after all,

for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

That column, notably, drew on the same concept of “trust” he routinely brings up in his arguments against immigration. Douthat argued that the ruling WASPs “inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.” It’s not clear what kind of trust Douthat imagines this white ruling class, constructed on a foundation of slavery, inspired in Black and brown Americans. More likely, Douthat is incapable of imagining the experiences of such Americans. Bush himself rode to victory on the infamously racist Willie Horton ad, and escalated the racist “war on drugs,” damaging social cohesion in ways immigration can scarcely dream of.

Douthat seems to want to believe that racism and sexism were incidental to WASP power rather than fundamental to its rise and maintenance. That you can defend a white nationalist and advocate modern-day positive eugenics without bearing any responsibility for racist, xenophobic extremism. If we were to take Douthat’s advice to ignore the climate crisis and pursue high birth rates in developed countries, we would increase the stress on the imperiled planet for no clear purpose—other than trying desperately to keep the world as white as possible.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post Douthat’s Birthrate Obsession Launders White Nationalist Anxieties appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Janine Jackson: Welcome to the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I’m Janine Jackson.

All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events, perspectives of those outside of power, relevant but omitted history, important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting.

But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that just make it an unlikely arena for the inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter that we need.

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role that we can play in changing it.

This is just a small selection of some of them. You’re listening to the best of CounterSpin for 2022, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.

Janine Jackson: “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources. The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address those concerns in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year.

Rakeen Mabud: “On these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.”

Rakeen Mabud: So we’ve essentially spent 50 years handing our supply chain over to mega corporations. These companies have built a system that works for them, right, it works for padding their own profits, jacking up their profits, all spurred on by Wall Street, who really demanded short-term profit increases over all else.

And so when you think about what a supply chain is for, usually most people would think, oh, it’s here to deliver goods and services. Well, that’s actually not what our supply chain was built to do. Our supply chain was built to really maximize what companies could get out of this, and the dividends that they can pay off to shareholders.

And what that means is that they’ve essentially built this system that has no redundancy. It has no sort of flexibility for changes in an economy, such as a pandemic, or even something like a climate shock, right, which we’re unfortunately likely to see more of over the coming years and decades.

And so there is what we call a just-in-time supply system, right? This is a supply system that is expected to deliver exactly the number of goods that are needed at exactly the moment that they’re needed.

But with something like a pandemic, all of those predictions about what goods will be needed when go out the window. And that’s when you end up with supply shortages, that’s when you end up with bottlenecks.

The consolidation piece of this is also really important. We have three ocean shipping alliances that carry 80% of the world’s cargo.  So there, if one of them goes down, you can see how that massively disrupt our global supply chain, but you can also see how that might jack up prices.

And my team and I have combed through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of corporate earning calls. And you really don’t have to take my word for it. There’s obviously a big, deep story here. But on these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.

Embedded within that is also, let’s cut back on pay for workers. You saw Kroger do this, right? Kroger cut back on hazard pay, jacked up its prices, and then issued a bunch of stock buybacks.

And so the issues facing workers and consumers, as well as these small businesses who aren’t able to negotiate better prices for the inputs that they’re selling in their stores, and are being hit by pandemic profiteering higher up the supply chain. These are all part of the same system, and it’s all rooted in what is essentially, in short, corporate greed.

Janine Jackson: The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death, in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org, and that’s because people needed to hear a different version of that story than what they were hearing.

Bryce Green: “Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.”

Bryce Greene: So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.

But, unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.

And even at the time, Cold Warriors, like the famed diplomat George Kennan, warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world. But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway.

In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime-change interests in the name of “democracy.”

Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.

Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world.

So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.

And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.

And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors, and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.

Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.

So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen.

And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia, they revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely.

The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russia sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.

And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.

Janine Jackson: The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because, sooprise, sooprise, of how we’re portrayed in US media.

We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com.

Layla A. Jones: “This portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers…. The way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.”

Layla A. Jones: “Eyewitness News,” and then “Action News,” which came afterwards, went to more than 200 US cities, but also went international, that format. But, yeah, when it was coming up in the late ’60s, and then “Action News” in the early ’70s, at the same time, there was this suburbanization and white flight happening in urban centers, and for a variety of reasons. We were coming off of the civil rights movement, there was a change in industry and work in cities, but also the news was broadcasting city and urban life as something scary, as something very Black, as something dangerous.

And I guess what we talk about in the piece is that this portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers. They basically said, we proved in the lab that the more people watched local television news, the more likely they were to associate criminality with being Black, the more likely they were to support criminal justice policies that fuel mass incarceration, like longer sentences and even the death penalty. And so the way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.

The important point to make is that what was happening when these formats were on the rise is really multi-layered. So, first of all, it was being run at the top, and even from the top, basically all the way down, by all white people. A lot of these people were very young, because 1965, 1970, this was brand new. So they’re all learning together.

Then they’re intentionally trying to attract—and this is especially “Action News”—intentionally trying to attract a suburban audience and, locally, our suburbs are more white. So they’re trying to attract a white, suburban audience, because they believe that’s where the money is, and that’s what’s going to draw advertisers.

We also looked at the commercials. A lot of the commercials in between these news segments featured white families, and white picket fences, and things that you don’t really see in the cities that they’re reporting about.

So with all those layers going on, what “Action News” found to work for them, what shot them up past their competitor, “Eyewitness News,” was focusing happy, upbeat and community-oriented stories in the suburbs. So the stories about backyard festivals or charity events, they’ll have a photographer go out there just to cover those good events, to make those people feel seen, and to make sure they tune in and watch the news.

At the same time, the stories that can fill up the time and the newscast and are easy, quick, close by and cheap to cover, which is literally what a veteran anchor Larry Kane told me, are crime stories. He was like, you know, the photographer would just shoot the blood, shoot the scene, you shoot the victim, whatever they have to say, and you can do it in 20 seconds. And speed was another element of this format.

And so it created this dichotomy. And, again, I like to say that I don’t believe, from talking to anyone, that it was like, “We hate Black people and we just want to make them look bad.” I just think it was a complete carelessness, and then once they were told, because the stations had been told this is harmful, they never changed their approach. And I think that’s really important, too.

Janine Jackson: As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage. We talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles,  Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. We talked about the 40th remembrance and rededication of Vincent Chin’s murder, VincentChin.org.

Helen Zia: “It became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.”

Helen Zia: It was a horrific killing, and not only that, but a continued miscarriage of justice, where the justice system failed at every turn for a young man who was killed and attacked on the night of his bachelor party because of how he looked at a time of intense anti-Asian hate. And all of that was very important. It brought attention to the whole idea that Asian Americans are people, that we are humans, that we are Americans, and that we experience racism and discrimination.

But that’s not all that was important, because that event and the miscarriage of justice catalyzed a whole movement, a civil rights movement led by Asian Americans, with Detroit, Michigan, as the epicenter of that civil rights movement that reached all across America for Asian Americans, and also had a huge impact on, really, democracy in this country, in many, many different ways. And it represented the solidarity of people from all walks of life.

We were in Detroit, now a majority Black city, back then was a majority Black city, and we had incredible support from the Black community, as well as the Arab-American community, multi-faith, multi-class, people from all walks of life, not only in Detroit. And then it became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.

And that’s why we’re talking about this. It’s to remember that moment, but the legacy as well—of people coming together in solidarity, with the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety. That we are part of a beloved community, that no community should live in fear of violence or hate. And this notion of all our communities being so divided, can we ever be allies, let alone come together.

And so that’s what we’re remembering: Let’s not forget that, actually, we have been in solidarity. And let’s take the lessons of that and move it forward to today, because we need that desperately.

And that’s why we are saying it’s more than remembrance, it’s about rededication. It’s about taking the hard work that happened, and coming together in unity and in solidarity and building a movement. There’s nothing simple about that; there’s no Kumbaya. It really takes people working hard together to bridge understandings and undo misunderstandings, break down stereotypes and build a common understanding and a common bond between communities.

And so when, as you say, communities are portrayed in the news or in TV or in movies, that this is just that community’s concern; it doesn’t involve other people…. Anti-Asian violence, well, hey, that’s just Asians. And we don’t even know that they’re Americans. We don’t even know that they were on this continent for several hundred years.

And so I think you’re right, that’s a way of pigeonholing people and keeping us apart, instead of looking at the true commonality. If we talk about Vincent Chin or violence against Asian Americans, we also talk about Buffalo and we talk about Coeur d’Alene, and how ideas of white supremacy and even active white supremacist groups, they lump us together. They don’t see us as separate groups. They connect the dots in a very negative way. And so it’s really incumbent on all thinking people, and especially our media, to be able to connect those dots too, and not keep us separate.

Janine Jackson: In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them, given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001. We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates.

Sumayyah Waheed: “He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet.”

Sumayyah Waheed: It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.

Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.

And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.

And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a racially discriminatory classification.

So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.

Just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.

So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.

And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.

It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.

Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.

So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.

And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, and they don’t leave the vast majority of us outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise.

Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that their space is the only space, their conversation is the only conversation, and that’s just not true.

One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old, traditional media outlets, but about instead about invigorating community information needs. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project, Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy at Free Press.

Mike Rispoli: “There are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs.”

Mike Rispoli: In 2016, New Jersey was looking to sell some old broadcast public media licenses that it held, and in the selling of those state assets, the state received $332 million.

And Free Press Action was doing some work in New Jersey at the time. We were organizing in communities, trying to find ways to have communities partner with local newsrooms, but also hold local newsrooms accountable.

And so we were doing organizing around the state, and talking to people about the future of local news in New Jersey. And at that time, they’re set to receive this windfall from the sale of these TV licenses. And so we thought, hey, what would it look like if some of that money coming into the state was reinvested back into communities to address the growing gaps in news coverage and community information needs?

And so with that, we began the idea of what became the Consortium, that ran a statewide grassroots campaign called the Civic Info Bill Campaign. And that work began in 2017.

And obviously we all have seen and experienced and have been impacted by the loss of local news, especially over the past 20 years. And many communities have never been well-served, even in the “good old days of journalism.” There are many communities who were never, never really well-served by local media.

And so when we were looking at this windfall that the state was going to receive, we thought, how could we use public funding to not just invest into local news, or to “save journalism.” But instead, what if we use public funding and public money to help rebuild and really transform what local media looks like in the state? How do we leverage public funding to invest in projects that are filling in gaps left by the commercial media market?

I think that what we knew when we began this campaign was that if this was a campaign to bail out the journalism industry, that wasn’t a thing that people were going to get behind. That was a thing we didn’t even think lawmakers were going to get behind.

But instead, really what we talked about was not the woes of one specific industry, but instead we talked about the impact on communities when local news and information is not accessible. And we know from data, when local media is deficient or disappears altogether, it has significant consequences on civic participation. Fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, fewer people run for public office; fewer federal dollars go to districts where there’s no local media presence. Government corruption increases, government spending increases.

So there are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs. And so we wanted to make the campaign, as well as the bill, really centered around that, as opposed to giving government handouts to corporate media who contributed so much to the mess that we are in right now, and that we’re trying to figure our way out of.

Janine Jackson: And that’s it for the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I hope you enjoyed this look back at just some of the year’s conversations. It’s been my sincere pleasure to host them.

Remember, you can always find shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The website is also the place to learn about our newsletter Extra!, and, of course, to show support for CounterSpin if you’re able and so inclined. The show is engineered by Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson; thank you so much for listening to CounterSpin.

The post ‘It Takes People Working Together to Bridge Understandings and Undo Misunderstandings’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed Coalition for a Diverse Harvard‘s Jeannie Park about affirmative action at Harvard University for the November 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson:  You’d have to read the news fairly closely to know about the Supreme Court case about Harvard, where the college is defending its ability to consider race as a factor—among many—in admissions, in an effort to address decades in which simply being Black was enough to deny you admission. 

ACLU (10/18/18)

The group called Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., founded by white male conservative activist Ed Blum, sued Harvard on the pretense that its effort to end discrimination against African Americans was discriminating against Asian Americans. 

Two lower courts ruled for Harvard on all counts, rejecting SFFA’s arguments, before the Supreme Court accepted the case.

Jeannie Park is founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and she’s co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, advocating for diversity and inclusion in higher education. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeannie Park. 

Jeannie Park: Thank you so much for having me here, Janine.

JJ: Let’s just be a little basic. Can you set us up on why there was a presumed need for Students for Fair Admissions, and the whole context of this idea that Asian Americans in particular should not just be mad, but should be the most aggrieved by the idea of affirmative action in education? What is the storyline there that you think needs countering?

JP: Yes, this narrative that SFFA has set up has been very difficult to counter, but there is so much disinformation out there that I really appreciate this opportunity to talk about it. 

The case is brought by someone named Ed Blum, as you mentioned. He has an organization, but the organization, we don’t even really know how many members there are; none of the plaintiffs in this case have ever been named. They did not testify in court. They are all a complete mystery. 

But what’s important to know is that he has been bringing cases against affirmative action, and against race-conscious policies, for decades. This is a mission of his, but not just his. It is a mission of the right wing. 

So he first went after it in a big way with a case called Fisher v. University of Texas, 10 years ago, where he sued the University of Texas with a white plaintiff. 

He lost. He got all the way to the Supreme Court and essentially lost twice, and he then decided that he might have a more favorable case if he used Asian-American plaintiffs. 

So he went advertising for Asian Americans who didn’t get into Harvard and UNC [University of North Carolina], because he is also doing UNC right now; that case is also at the Supreme Court. 

And he is really preying on a lot of stereotypes, a lot of model minority stereotypes, about how Asian Americans get really high test scores and grades, and trying to essentially use them as a wedge to divide communities of color, and to reduce equity opportunities for all people of color. 

And, as an Asian American, I completely reject this attempt, as do many Asian Americans, most Asian Americans, in this country. So this is the fight that we’re in. 

JJ: I think it’s so important to realize that Ed Blum didn’t have folks knock down his door and say, “We feel that we were unfairly treated on the basis of our race, in terms of admission to colleges.” 

In other words, the idea that it isn’t that there’s a large body of harmed people who are seeking redress, but instead a lawyer who is seeking something else. I just feel that that is not necessarily the idea that you would get from news media coverage.

JP: Yes. I think people have this idea that it’s some big class action lawsuit, and in fact it’s not. In fact, there’s a videotape of him speaking to, I believe, a Chinese-American group in Houston, and he says, I failed with Fisher v. University of Texas. And so I “needed Asian plaintiffs.” 

“I needed Asian plaintiffs,” said Edward Blum the force behind several failed lawsuits challenging the consideration of race in university admissions by pitting #peopleofcolor against one another. #NotYourCover #HarvardLawsuit pic.twitter.com/L2okJsTSgu

— Legal Defense Fund (@NAACP_LDF) August 2, 2018

He actively goes out and seeks people from a certain race and, in the original trial, in the suit against Harvard, he and his team had access to the data from 150,000 admissions cases, and actual files from hundreds of actual admissions cases. They did not introduce a single file or a single case where they pointed to discrimination. 

So this is all very manufactured. Again, there is this stereotype out there, and so people have bought into it. And so when he feeds this information, people tend to believe it.

But the thing is, all along, this case was never about defending Asian Americans. Never. In his case that he filed, the remedy that he sought was not to, say, make sure the admissions offices had more Asian Americans admissions officers, or to make sure that the admissions office had training in implicit bias, or how do you counter implicit bias against Asian Americans. 

Nothing that was specifically about Asian Americans. All he asked for was that he wanted the admissions process to be completely devoid of race. He did not want admissions officers to even know the race of any student who applied. 

And can you imagine how that would work? That would mean that, essentially, you wouldn’t be able to know the student’s name. And let’s say a student was a head of the Black Students Association at their high school, or the Chinese Students Association at their high school, or let’s say they worked on behalf of immigrant rights, or wanted to talk about the struggles of their community of color, or their family’s immigration story. 

You wouldn’t be able to do that as a student. And so that would mean that students could not bring their whole self to the admissions process. 

Jeannie Park: “Media need to do a better job of covering the solidarity among Asian Americans and other communities of color in standing against this lawsuit.”

JJ: Let me ask you: It’s such a deep narrative conversation, and news media aren’t good at having it. The very thing that you’re talking about, about people being able to bring their whole selves to conversations—it’s not the kind of thing that news media are great at representing. 

And I just want to ask you, if you were trying to talk in a positive way to reporters who were trying to present the idea of affirmative action, in higher education and elsewhere, but just the whole idea of seeing the Ed Blums for what they are, and looking towards a positive future, are there things that you would ask reporters to do or to not do, or stories you’d like them to cover, or things you’d like them to avoid? Any thoughts about media?

JP: I think certainly the media need to do a better job of covering the solidarity among Asian Americans and other communities of color in standing against this lawsuit, and in standing against all sorts of efforts to hold back racial justice. 

And this is very much an effort to roll back rights, as we’ve seen over and over again with the Supreme Court. Affirmative action has been legal and affirmed by the Court numerous times for more than four decades.

And so this is, again, a retrenchment, a rolling back. And I think it’s important also for the media to not just take things that are fed to them by one side, and not dig deeper into seeing what is misinformation versus what is truth. 

And I have to say, another part of this story that’s been really overlooked by the media is who is behind this lawsuit. So a piece that I and my colleague, Kristin Penner, who also works for the African American Policy Forum, wrote recently exposes who’s behind the lawsuit. 

Slate (10/25/22)

So Ed Blum has made himself out to be the face of this effort, and the media have really covered him as being sort of a “one-man band,” a “one-man legal factory.” You know, just a guy who’s doing this in his living room. 

In fact, he’s been funded with millions of dollars from the far right, and he’s been supported by lawyers and think tanks and media that are also connected to other fights. He also is responsible for the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which has led to all this attempted voter suppression. That happened, I believe, in 2013.

And so he is connected to a lot of concerted efforts to take back the rights of people of color, or just to not even allow them to fully enjoy the rights that they’re promised in the first place.

And by attacking voting rights, it leaves us with no way even to address the other attacks, because if we don’t have representation in our government, we then don’t have representation on the Supreme Court, or…. You see the direction in which the Supreme Court has turned. 

So I think it’s digging deeper into understanding that a lot of these fights are connected, these fights for climate justice, environmental justice, LGBTQ+ rights, rights for people of color, and movements for racial justice, reproductive rights, immigrant rights.

It is a very connected conservative movement, and if we’re not aware of that, we can’t fight it properly and as fiercely as we need to. 

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. Thank you so much, Jeannie Park, for joining us this week on CounterSpin. 

JP: Thank you so much, Janine. I really appreciate this time.

The post ‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

New York Times (10/21/19)

This week on CounterSpin: In 2019, the New York Times reported on Haiti’s hardships with a story headlined “‘There Is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.” The “no hope” phrase was a real, partial quote from a source, a despairing young woman in one of Haiti’s most difficult areas. And the story wasn’t lying about babies dying in underserved hospitals or schools closed or people killed in protests, or people with jobs going unpaid, roadblocks, blackouts, hunger and deep, deep stress in a country in severe crisis. But further into the story was another quote, from that young woman’s mother, who told the Times, “It’s not only that we’re hungry for bread and water. We’re hungry for the development of Haiti.” As we noted at the time, there’s a difference between “there is no hope” and “there is no hope under this system”—and to the extent that US news media purposefully ignore that difference, and portray Haiti as a sort of outside-of-time tragic case, and ignore the role that US “intervention” has played throughout history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again—well, that’s where you see the difference between corporate media and the independent press corps we need. We’ll talk to Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what elite media are calling for right now as response to Haiti’s problems, versus what Haitians are calling for.

Time (10/27/22)

Also on the show: Is racial discrimination over in the United States? Do universities and colleges already reflect the range of inclusion and diversity a democracy demands, such that they should stop even thinking about whether they’re admitting the sort of students they expressly excluded just decades ago? These questions are in consideration at the Supreme Court, though you might not know it from media coverage. Instead, you may have heard about a fair-minded white guy who just, in his heart, wants Asian Americans to get a fair shot at the Ivy League—against all those undeserving Black kids unfairly leveraged by affirmative action. We’ll talk about SFFA v. Harvard with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

The post Jake Johnston on Haiti Intervention, Jeannie Park on Harvard Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Haitian Bridge Alliance’s Guerline Jozef about Haitian refugee abuse for the September 30, 2022, episode  of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Listeners will remember the pictures: US Border patrol agents on horseback, wielding reins like whips as they corralled and captured Haitian asylum seekers along the Rio Grande.

Border Patrol agent assaults a Haitian refugee near Del Rio, Texas (photo: Paul Ratje).

The appalling images might have served as a symbol of the ill-treatment of Haitians escaping violence and desperation. Instead, elite media made them a stand-in, so that when the report came that, despite appearances, the border patrol didn’t actually whip anyone, one felt that was supposed to sweep away all of the concerns together.

Well, there are serious problems with that report, but we should also ask why we saw controversy about photographs foregrounded over the story of Haitians’ horrific treatment at the hands of US border officials—treatment that a new Amnesty report, echoing others, describes as amounting to race-based torture. And why were media so quick to look away?

The question is as vital a year on as reporters talk about other asylum seekers as political pawns and victims, but continue their relative disinterest in Haitians, tacitly sanctioning the harms of US policy.

Joining us now to talk about this is Guerline Jozef. She is founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Guerline Jozef.

Guerline Jozef: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus, announcing the results of the agency’s internal investigation in July, said, “Not everyone’s going to like all the findings, but the investigation was comprehensive and fair.”

He said that because the investigation said that there was no evidence that agents on horseback hit anybody with their reins. So it’s as if he’s saying, “I know you wanted there to be real cruelty here, but there wasn’t, so ha.”

But beyond that deflecting message, that some people just want to believe in cruelty, the problems with the CPB’s report about what happened in Del Rio—those problems are deep, aren’t they?

GJ: Absolutely. First of all, what they did with the report is that they took the lives of over 15,000 Haitians and people of African descent and Black asylum seekers, and they put that into a 30-minute period where that picture was captured.

But the reality is, if that picture wasn’t captured, they would have told us this never happened at all. But we all saw the pictures, and we understood the reality under the bridge.

And if you zoom into the picture, you will see the CBP officer on horseback, his hand holding and pulling the Haitian man by his shirt, and this man was only carrying food to his wife and child.

So the report is telling us this didn’t happen, but all you have to do is zoom into the picture and you will see the intent, and you will see the fear. You will see the power that this officer had upon the person of this asylum seeker.

Now, the report will tell you that they looked into it, and they found that he did not whip the gentleman. But you can clearly see his motion to whip him, and you can see the fear even in the face of the horse that almost trampled this man who was carrying nothing but food.

In addition to that, the report failed to interview or speak to any of the people who were under the bridge, any of the witnesses, and any of those who were actually experiencing the abuse.

We made available to them Haitian migrants who were under the bridge. We made available to them advocates on behalf of the people we saw in that picture, and the reality that the world finally witnessed under the bridge.

None of them were interviewed, contacted or even reached out to.

So in addition to that, they still had 15,000 people in their custody. Yet they didn’t even care to speak to any one of them about the treatment they received, the abuse that was witnessed. Nothing.

JJ: The idea of producing a report about what happened at Del Rio without talking to any of the asylum seekers, I think a lot of folks would find absurd on its face.

The Customs office maintains that this Border Patrol agent was merely “twirling…reins as a distancing tactic” (photo: Paul Ratje).

And I would just note that, in addition to the fear and the obvious violence that one can see in the picture, my understanding is that folks who were there say that there was, in fact—if this is what we’re going to talk about—in fact there was actual use of reins as whips, that that is something that actually happened, which perhaps we would know about if the report had interviewed any actual asylum seekers.

GJ: Absolutely. If they cared enough to find the truth, if they cared enough to have a report that reflected the reality of the people who were subject to that abuse, they would’ve been able to identify what exactly happened, but they did not care enough to look or interview. They did not care to get the truth.

What they cared about is, how do we tell the American people, the American public, how do we tell the world that what you saw never happened?

JJ: Now, is the supposed rationale for turning away Haiti asylum seekers, is it continuing to be Title 42, this supposed public health policy, is that the reason that the administration is still giving for turning away Haitians?

GJ: Yes. So at this present moment, the border is completely closed, due to Title 42. There is no way for people to have access. Nobody can just go to a port of entry and present themselves to ask for access to asylum.

As we are speaking right now, the border is completely closed due to Title 42, which is a health code that was put in place by the previous administration, under President Trump, that was created by Stephen Miller as a way to completely take away any avenue for people seeking safety, people seeking protection, people seeking asylum to have access to due process at the US/Mexico border.

JJ: Listeners will have been hearing about Republican governors flying people around and about. In that story, asylum seekers’ treatment is portrayed as obviously political. But Del Rio was just sort of official policy, if regrettably handled, you know.

We’re not supposed to think about there being politics there, or those people being pawns or victims in the same way, somehow.

GJ: Actually, it is, because, first of all, a lot of the people received false information that if they had gone to Del Rio, they would be given access to protection.

So 15,000 people did not just show up overnight by themselves. Now, the source of that information, or the source of that misinformation, must be investigated. And that is another thing we also asked for the government to investigate, the source of the misinformation that then guided people to where they were under the bridge.

I see also, that could have been a political plot; we don’t know how that happened. However, we saw the moment the people who were there were Black, were answered with violence.

Now, is it political? I’ll say yes, because our system is rooted in anti-Black racism, is rooted in white supremacy.

So, therefore, the moment the Black people showed up, we responded with violence and we deported them, including pregnant women and infants as young as just a couple of days old.

JJ: And it’s just not possible to consider that treatment, that reception of Haitian asylum seekers, out of context with the reception that we’ve seen given to other people. I mean, it’s impossible not to see that context.

Guerline Jozef: “The same way we are able to welcome the Ukrainians in crisis with compassion, love, dignity, humanity, it should be provided to people no matter where they are from.”

GJ: Absolutely, Janine. The reality is, one example, clear example, is how we as a country were quick to put a system together to respond and receive people fleeing Ukraine, right, with compassion, in respect, in love and dignity.

And what we are saying is that same system that was put together overnight to be able to receive 26,000 Ukrainians in less than two months should not be the exception to the rule, should be the norm.

It should be that while Haiti is in the middle of what the United States government is calling the verge of a civil war, putting Haiti on a high risk, right, saying that it is very close to a war zone, we still deported 26,000 Haitians to Haiti in the middle of the crisis, at the same time received 26,000 Ukrainians.

So what we are saying is that the same way we are able to welcome the Ukrainians in crisis with compassion, love, dignity, humanity, it should be provided to people no matter where they are from, their ethnicity, their country of origin, definitely should not matter whether they are Black or white.

JJ: We’re going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Guerline Jozef, founder and executive director at Haitian Bridge Alliance. Guerline Jozef, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

GJ: Thank you so much for having us.

The post ‘The Moment Black People Showed Up, We Responded With Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(New York, 9/22/22)

This week on CounterSpin: As Puerto Rico struggles under another “natural” disaster, we’re seeing some recognition of what’s unnatural about the conditions the island faces, that determine its ability to protect its people. We’re even getting some critical mumblings about “finance bros”—people from the States who go to the island to exploit tax laws designed to reward them wildly. New York magazine described “a wave of mostly white mainlanders” that “has moved to Puerto Rico, buying real estate and being accused of pushing out locals who pay their full tax burden.” Gotta get that passive voice in there. But of course, it isn’t just that these tax giveaways favoring non–Puerto Ricans are gross and unfair; you have to acknowledge in the same breath that money going to them is money not going to Puerto Rico’s energy systems, schools, hospitals, housing. We talk about the harms inflicted on Puerto Rico that have nothing to do with hurricanes, with Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy.

(AP via PBS, 9/24/21)

Also on the show: Customs and Border Protection released findings from an internal investigation a few months back, declaring that no horse-riding Border Patrol agents actually hit any Haitian asylum seekers with their reins, as they chased them down on the Southern border last fall. That finding is disputed, but consider the premise: that people would need to create tales of horror about the treatment of Haitians at Del Rio, where people were shackled, left in cold cells, denied medicine, and separated from children as young as a few days old. Media subtly underscore that skepticism: AP ran a piece at the time telling readers that the appalling images shocked everyone:

But to many Haitians and Black Americans, they’re merely confirmation of a deeply held belief: US immigration policies, they say, are and have long been anti-Black.

The Border Patrol’s treatment of Haitian migrants, they say, is just the latest in a long history of discriminatory US policies and of indignities faced by Black people, sparking new anger among Haitian Americans, Black immigrant advocates and civil rights leaders.

Understand, then: The racism in US immigration policy is a mere “belief,” held by Black people, and only they are upset about it. And this dismissive, divisive view is “good,” sympathetic reporting! We get another, grounded perspective from Guerline Jozef, founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

The post Julio López Varona on Puerto Rico Colonialism, Guerline Jozef on Haitian Refugee Abuse appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson interviewed Alicia Bell and Collette Watson about media reparations for the September 23, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The 1968 Kerner Commission report didn’t just say that US journalists were mistelling the reality of recent civil unrest in Newark and Detroit and elsewhere. They declared that that coverage was only part of a broader media failure to “report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders, and the underlying problems of race relations.”

And the report linked that failure to the industry’s abysmal record in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Black people.

For those that remember Kerner, that’s where it seemed to end. But actually, the report didn’t say more Black journalists were the answer. It said that affirmative action was a necessary part of the process of de-centering US reporting’s white male view.

It wasn’t just about making newsrooms look different. It was about changing the definition of news as being only, or primarily, about white men, and about doing that for the good of everybody.

(Image: Media 2070)

The Kerner report’s themes resound in the experience of Elizabeth Montgomery, a former Arizona Republic reporter and the subject of the new short film Black in the Newsroom.

The film and the actions around it are part of a project called Media 2070 that aims at acknowledging, reconciling and repairing harms the US media system has caused and continues to cause to the Black community.

Alicia Bell is a co-creator and founding director of the Media 2070: Media Reparations Project, and also current director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, housed within Borealis Philanthropy.

Collette Watson is director of Media 2070 and vice president of cultural strategy at the group Free Press.

Welcome, Alicia Bell and Collette Watson to CounterSpin.

Collette Watson: Thank you.

Alicia Bell: Thanks so much for having us, Janine.

Elizabeth Montgomery (photo: Arizona Republic)

JJ: Well, to either of you, I would say obviously Elizabeth Montgomery is special—you know, we all are, but she’s really special—but what is there about her experience that made you think, this is representative enough to hold it up, to use it to highlight some things that we need to talk about? What made you want to tell her story?

CW: I guess I’ll start us off and say that Elizabeth really was not only representative of many people’s experiences, but also very courageous in her willingness to be transparent.

And so often one of the greatest barriers to our ability to shift these negative dynamics, these dynamics of anti-Blackness in newsrooms, is the reticence that surrounds, or the taboo that surrounds, talking about issues of compensation or representation or bias, or just experiences of anti-Blackness within newsrooms. For good reason, because we understand that there’s often the threat of retribution, or losing one’s livelihood, and other kinds of repercussions.

But in Elizabeth’s case, she was in that tradition of brave truth tellers in our community. She was willing to be very upfront about what she was experiencing. And I felt that, for us, it was important to honor that courage, and to help amplify her story.

JJ: What were some of the things, some of the elements of her experience, that had resonance for you, or that you thought would have resonance for other Black reporters who’ve tried to do the work within these “mainstream” institutions.

Arizona Republic (1/25/20)

CW: Absolutely. Alicia works with a lot of media makers every day, and I’m sure will have thoughts. For me, it was the fact that she was doing such great work. And there’s a quote in the film where she says, “I’m making y’all look real good out in the street.”

And I love the way she said it, because so much of any newspaper or media organization’s ability to exist is its relationship with its community and its reputation.

And Elizabeth was covering these incredible stories of the Black bookstore, the only one in Arizona. We talk about that. She was covering this wonderful Black woman resident of the greater Phoenix area whose ancestors were among the first people transported to this land as enslaved African folks.

And that’s just a tiny fraction of the coverage she was providing, and really enabling her newsroom to represent the community in a way it had not, prior to her taking on that reporter role.

And despite that stellar work, despite that real community impact that was bringing to life what this newsroom says it wanted to be about, despite all of that, she was really being mistreated. And I think that that’s an experience that a lot of Black folks in media can identify with.

AB: One thing I’ll add to that is that I met Elizabeth when she was a reporter working at a newsroom in Wilmington, North Carolina. And so when I met her is when she moved and went to another newsroom in Arizona, and I was able to introduce her to Collette and they were able to meet; she had similar experiences.

And the fact that this story of her being a Black journalist who was doing excellent community-rooted reporting, answering questions that folks had, sharing stories so that people could see themselves in the coverage, and lifting up issues that were previously not being lifted up, that was something that she was doing in North Carolina, and it’s something that she was doing in Arizona.

And the fact that in both of those places and spaces, that she was undervalued and underpaid, I think is indicative of the fact that this is not a one-newsroom fix issue. It means that it’s not a regional issue. It’s not just specific to her. And it’s something that carries across the United States, across a variety of Black experiences that folks have going into newsrooms.

And the other thing I’ll add is that we also have data and information to contextualize this story within, right? We have some salary data that shows that Black folks, and especially Black women, are underpaid.

We have the work that Meredith Clark was doing recently with the journalism and diversity surveying work, where folks were just not responding and sharing their demographic information, or sharing salary information, or anything like that.

And so we also knew that this was only a microcosm of a larger issue, because we were able to situate it within data that was existing, and data that folks didn’t want to release, likely because it tells a really terrible story about how Black folks are treated and valued within journalism.

Jill Nelson (image: Charlie Rose)

JJ: Back in, I guess it was 1993, Jill Nelson wrote in the book Volunteer Slavery, she talked about how, when she was at the Washington Post, she wanted to tell stories about the Black community that she suspected and worried would be done less well if somebody else did them. And then at the same time, she was irritated when anything would happen involving Black people, and everyone would kind of look at her like: “So this is you, right? You’re going to do this one, right?”

She wanted to do right by her community, but she also wanted to do any kind of story and be a Black reporter doing it, you know? And it was about that dual or even multiple layering of work that Black journalists have to do within these organizations.

And that’s why hiring and retention are not the same thing, right, why folks will take jobs but not stay?

CW: Absolutely. And all of that plays into a sort of dehumanization that folks experience in newsrooms. Another reason that we honed in on Elizabeth’s story was because, around the time that she was publicly testifying about her experience, a study was released by the NewsGuild that showed that 14 different Gannett newsrooms were underpaying women and journalists of color, by as much as $27,000 annually, in comparison to their white male colleagues.

So you’re underpaid and you’re experiencing this sort of hyper-visible hyper-invisibility in the newsroom, similar to what you were describing with Jill Nelson.

Source (8/26/20)

The experience of that, and also not having the leadership that’s needed to ensure that folks’ full humanity is being recognized, that there’s care in the newsroom during those traumatic storytelling experiences—all of that becomes very dehumanizing, and therefore folks leave the field.

And Carla Murphy has done incredible work around that, which we touch on in the film, with her “Leavers Survey.”

And what that results in is really a lack of Black leadership, of folks of color in leadership positions, and people really leaving at the mid-career point, just when they would have been able to step into those leadership positions, and really maybe change the direction of a newsroom.

And so when we lose folks at that mid-career point, we lose so much more. We lose the ability for these newsrooms to evolve.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, we have seen some efforts toward what is forever being called “reckoning,” but outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has this “A More Perfect Union” project headed by Errin Haines that is examining systemic racism in, in particular, institutions that are rooted in Philly.

But we see outlets around the country at least saying that they believe that they have a responsibility to examine their own institutional racism. I’m not exactly sure what I make of it.

I wonder what your thoughts are about the seriousness, or even what would be the proof in the pudding, of this self-reckoning that we see some media outlets at least saying that they’re doing right now.

Alicia Bell: “We have so much more work to do and so much more to fight for, because we have not had anywhere near an adequate amount of accountability and restitution.”

AB: I think that it does garner a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions. When I think about the work of media reparations, I think about something that our colleague Diamond Hardiman lifts up quite frequently, and Collette lifts this up as well, that reparations is already happening.

It’s already been seeded and it’s already blooming. And so the way that I understand that, and the way that we understand media reparations and reparations more broadly, is that it requires at least four kinds of actions.

It does require reckoning, and that kind of knowledge, study, publication. It requires acknowledgement, to say, “This is what we did and it was harmful, and it did this, or it had this impact.”

But the thing that we don’t see happening right now in this journalism reckoning space, and more broadly in any sort of space and place where we see folks commissioning studies around systemic racism or racist histories or anything, we don’t see the next two pieces, which is accountability and restitution.

So accountability being: How do I make up for this harm now? How do I heal it now? How do I stop it now?

And then the restitution part of: How do I make sure that it doesn’t have soil to grow in in the future?

Very often, we see folks stop after the reckoning and after the acknowledgement, and they’ll say like, “We did the thing: We published the report, we published the information. We apologized, even.”

But if there’s none of that in conjunction with stopping the harm and disrupting the soil that the seeds grew in in the first place, to ensure that it doesn’t happen into the future, then it’s not enough.

So I know that reparations have been seeded, and I know that reparations are already blooming and are already coming, because I see the reckoning and the acknowledgement work happening.

But I also know that we have so much more work to do and so much more to fight for, because we have not had anywhere near an adequate amount of accountability and restitution into the future.

And I see that in journalism, but I see that more broadly across a lot of different kinds of reparation work.

JJ: Absolutely. Reparations are so often presented as backward-looking, instead of as a generative idea, as an idea about the future. And Alicia, I know when we spoke back in 2020, in the midst of public protest after the police murder of George Floyd, we were saying how people are talking about building relationships between police and community.

And you were saying, “Well, what about building relationships between media and community?” That needs to also be a real relationship, with real accountability.

And so, you’ve just done it to talk about what reparations might look like, but just the idea, if you want to say any more, either of you, about how it’s a forward-looking, generative thing. It’s about things changing, now and in the future. And it’s a very positive, joyful potential thing about dreaming, and about forging a shared future.

Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922)

CW: Absolutely it is. That’s why we named our project Media 2070. We understood that 50 years ago with the Kerner report, and 50 years before that was the Chicago Race Relations Commission and the report it issued after the Chicago race riots, that we were in an every-50-years cycle of unrest followed by analysis, that in each case honed in on media as a key aspect of the systemic oppression that Black folks experience in this country.

And so we want to break that cycle, and in 50 years, we want be in a time when we have truly transformed our media, and created a future in which there is abundant resources for Black folks to be able to control our own narratives, from ideation through creation into production and even out into distribution.

And that is a future that is not only abundant with Black narratives, power and control, but also with Black media makers having the resources and the care and support that’s needed in order to tell stories in ways that are truthful and nuanced, and really contribute to our shared truths as a society.

And so when we look toward 2070, it’s not that we’re waiting until then. We’re starting now. As Alicia said, the seeds have been planted, and we understand reparations are inevitable, and we want to know what is the media system that gets us to that future. And that’s the journey that we’re on together.

AB: I really appreciate when you’re lifting up that it’s a joyful thing, that there’s a lot of jubilance and healing that’s there in reparations, because we do understand that to be true. We understand it to be a practice of creating a culture and a society that is more caring for everybody, that is more nimble and responsive and accountable when harm happens, when conflicts happen.

This is not an expectation of perfection, it is not an expectation that there will never be harm again, but it is an expectation that we do better, and that we maintain a certain level of buoyancy.

And as someone who’s raising children, I have never met, and I’m sure these people exist, but I have never met a single parent, across races, across ethnicities, who does not want to raise caring children.

And yet, somehow we allow, we are co-creators of, we are complicit in maintaining a society that does not care for all people.

And so reparation is really looking at what are the infrastructures, the institutions, the policies, the practices that we need to have that care be permeable and felt by everyone.

And what I know is that when all of our folks are cared for, and all of our folks are able to navigate things, to navigate conflict nimbly, have access to joy, to leisure, to work that is serving, work that is fulfilling, that that’s a better society for everyone.

(image: Media 2070)

JJ: Finally, let me just say to you both, Black in the Newsroom I know is not just a film, but an opportunity, an opening, for conversation. I think that’s how you see it.

And I wonder if you could tell us about how Phoenix went with the debut, and how you hope to use this film going forward as you travel with it around the country.

CW: You know, thank you for asking. Phoenix was beautiful. We had such a lovely room and conversation after the film screening, we had a panel of organizers and artists and journalists who really talked in a real way with each other about the challenges of being Black in the newsroom, and also the challenges of connecting and telling Black stories, despite so many of the institutional barriers that we face in just trying to exist, much less be in community with each other.

And I think that as we go around the country with this project—we’ve been privileged to be selected for a few film festivals and invited to a few university campuses and things like that. As we move around with this project, it is definitely an invitation, Janine, I’m so glad you put it that way, into extended conversation between community members and the journalists, who are also members of their communities, and for folks to understand that the solution we’re offering is solidarity.

Collette Watson: “Myths of Black inferiority have been baked into our media system and its practices since the very, very beginning.”

Because we often get asked, “What’s the solution? What’s next? How do we solve it all?” It’s solidarity between community members and organizers who are agitating for that future in which everyone has the care they need, that beautiful future Alicia just described, in solidarity with journalists and other media makers and artists.

And for us to be co-creating this shared future and the narratives that will get us there, because we understand that narratives and myths of Black inferiority have been baked into our media system and its practices since the very, very beginning, as we outline in our Media 2070 essay.

But the reparations framework invites us, as Alicia so beautifully laid out, to acknowledge and reckon with that history, and then to go about truly building that shared future.

And we believe that the Black in the Newsroom conversation, and the lens of understanding the unique experiences of Black journalists, and the care that they deserve as they try to tell Black stories, brings us into a larger conversation of how we can understand our solidarity as we forge that future that’s ripe with reparations, and the just media that we deserve.

So it’s an entry point into the world of Media 2070, into a beautiful shared future. And, really, it’s been an honor to help tell Elizabeth’s story in a way that invites us all into being in relationship and building with one another.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alicia Bell and Collette Watson. For more information on Media 2070 and Black in the Newsroom, you can check out the website MediaReparations.org. Alicia Bell and Collette Watson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thank you.

CW: Thank you.

The post ‘There’s a Lot of Jubilance and Healing in Reparations’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Newspaper ad from the Freedom on the Move database.

This week on CounterSpin: If US news media never used the terms “wake-up call” or “racial reckoning” again, with regard to the latest instance of institutional white supremacy brought to light, that would be fine. Far better would be for them to do the work of not just acknowledging that US news media have supported and inflicted racist harms throughout this country’s history, but shedding critical light on the hows and whys of those harms—and taking seriously the idea of repairing them and replacing them with a media ecosystem that better serves us all. The Media 2070: Media Reparations Project encourages conversation and action around that vision. We’ll hear about the work from Alicia Bell, a co-creator and founding director of Media 2070 and current director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, housed within Borealis Philanthropy. And from Collette Watson, director of Media 2070 and vice president of cultural strategy at the group Free Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of student debt relief, China’s zero-Covid policy and Afghan sanctions.

The post Alicia Bell and Collette Watson on Media Reparations appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Fox News (7/19/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen.

The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years.

And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward.

We  hear these conversations again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina.

The post Matt Gertz and Eric K Ward on White ‘Replacement’ Theory appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent).

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest you be confused—in the locker room before games and on the field. The Supreme Court that we have today, for reasons, determined that Kennedy was protected in his right to express his personal religious beliefs—by dropping a knee, on the 50-yard line of a public school playing field, and calling on players to join him—and that they presented no harm to anyone, or to the nominal separation of church and state.

It’s another Supreme Court ruling that bases itself in a reality that doesn’t exist. This ruling in particular irritates meaningfully, because of course we know that “taking a knee” is the sort of gesture that is either a fresh wind of free expression, or a horrible affront to the values we hold dear, depending on who does it.

So we’ll hear today from Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of many books, including, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World.

Paul Robeson

And we’ll get a little corrective background for corporate media’s current conversation, about the voices of athletes or performers who are mainly told to “shut up and sing,” and their actual historical role in social change, from journalist and author Howard Bryant.  CounterSpin talked with him in June 2018, and we hear part of that conversation this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Supreme Court nominees.

The post Dave Zirin on Football Prayer Ruling, Howard Bryant on Black Athletes & Social Change appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson interviewed Helen Zia about the legacy of Vincent Chin for the June 17, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Vincent Chin (1955-1982)

Janine Jackson: Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit in June 1982, by two white auto workers who reportedly said it was because of him that they had lost their jobs. At the time, listeners may recall, Japan was being widely blamed for the collapse of the Detroit auto industry. Chin was Chinese-American.

Elite media, as reflected by the New York Times, didn’t seem to come around to the story until April 1983, with reporting on the protests emanating from Detroit’s Asian-American community about the dismissive legal response to the murder. Chin’s killers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were given probation and fines, with Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Charles Kaufman infamously saying they “weren’t the kind of people you send to jail.”

It took protest for big media to attend to that legal perversity, and the broader context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating. And it’s civil rights activism that has been the legacy of Chin’s death, 40 years ago this week, activism of which our guest is a key part. Helen Zia is co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, among other titles. She joins us now by phone from Detroit. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Helen Zia.

Helen Zia: Well, it’s my honor to be with you, Janine.

JJ: I saw you speak recently in Detroit and say that Vincent Chin’s horrific murder, its circumstances and then the legal failures, are all extremely important, but that that’s not the whole story that’s being acknowledged right now with this 40th remembrance and rededication. The story of Vincent Chin’s killing is also about what came after, what grew from it. Can you talk a little about what that was, and is?

HZ: Oh, absolutely. It was a horrific killing, and not only that, but a continued miscarriage of justice, where the justice system failed at every turn, for a young man who was killed and attacked on the night of his bachelor party, because of how he looked, at a time of intense anti-Asian hate. And all of that was very important. It brought attention to the whole idea that Asian Americans are people, that we are humans, that we are Americans, and that we experience racism and discrimination.

But that’s not all that was important, because that event and the miscarriage of justice catalyzed a whole movement, a civil rights movement led by Asian Americans, with Detroit, Michigan, as the epicenter of that civil rights movement that reached all across America for Asian Americans, and also had a huge impact on, really, democracy in this country, in many, many different ways. And it represented the solidarity of people from all walks of life.

Helen Zia: “An injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety.”

We were in Detroit, now a majority Black city, back then was a majority Black city, and we had incredible support from the Black community, as well as the Arab-American community, multi-faith, multi-class, people from all walks of life, not only in Detroit. And then it became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.

And that’s why we’re talking about this. It’s to remember that moment, but the legacy as well—of people coming together in solidarity, with the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety. That we are part of a beloved community, that no community should live in fear of violence or hate. And this notion of all our communities being so divided, can we ever be allies, let alone come together…

And so that’s what we’re remembering: Let’s not forget that, actually, we have been in solidarity. And let’s take the lessons of that and move it forward to today, because we need that desperately.

JJ: When you say remembrance and rededication, which is what this event series is about, I really like that rededication part, which has to do with acknowledging that, as you say, an injury to one is an injury to all.

HZ: And that’s completely right. And that’s why we are saying it’s more than remembrance, it’s about rededication. It’s about taking the hard work that happened, and coming together in unity and in solidarity and building a movement. There’s nothing simple about that; there’s no Kumbaya. It really takes people working hard together to bridge understandings and undo misunderstandings, break down stereotypes and build a common understanding and a common bond between communities.

And so when, as you say, communities are portrayed in the news or in TV or in movies, that this is just that community’s concern; it doesn’t involve other people… Anti-Asian violence, well, hey, “that’s just Asians. And we don’t even know that they’re Americans. We don’t even know that they were on this continent for several hundred years.”

And so I think you’re right, that’s a way of sort of pigeonholing people and keeping us apart, instead of looking at the true commonality. If we talk about Vincent Chin or violence against Asian Americans, we also talk about Buffalo and we talk about Coeur d’Alene, and how ideas of white supremacy and even active white supremacist groups, they lump us together. They don’t see us as separate groups. They connect the dots in a very negative way. And so it’s really incumbent on all thinking people, and especially our media, to be able to connect those dots too, and not keep us separate.