DEI: The Right's Main (and Very) Racist Attack on Kamala Harris

 

Mother Jones

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#FoxNews #KamalaHarris #DEI

► For more, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/ “You hear ‘DEI,’ and you probably think of your job’s HR department,” explains Kat Abughazaleh. “But for your QAnon uncle, ‘DEI’ is an activation phrase to send the most unhinged memes in the family group chat.” In her new video for Mother Jones, Kat dives into the right’s obsessive co-opting of the term “DEI”—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—to attack Donald Trump’s new 2024 foe, Vice President Kamala Harris: Kat dissects how this innocuous little acronym became the latest dog whistle for Fox News hosts and elected Republicans, drawing parallels to Nixon’s Southern strategy, which also deployed coded language to appeal to old bigotry. Earlier attempts to caricature Kamala Harris caught right-wing pundits somewhat flat-footed when compared to their other misogynistic masterpiece: their attacks on Hillary Clinton (a phenomenon documented by Kat in her first video for Mother Jones). But in the days since Harris locked up enough delegates to be the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, talking heads have filled the airwaves with what is now considered a three-letter epithet, twisted by figures like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk to mean people who got jobs even though they are talentless and incompetent, especially from minority groups. Harris is their new prime example. “Because, sure,” explains Kat. “You can hold six elected offices, you can have an entire law career before that, you can even be the Vice President of the United States, but if you just add those three little letters, DEI, it is instantly invalidated by the assertion that every single one of your accomplishments is because of how society treats your race and gender rather than despite it.” With DEI being used as a scapegoat term for societal issues, from bridge disasters to aviation policy failures, the pundits have found their term d’art and appear to be sticking with it. “Now it’s in the hands of right-wing assholes,” Kat jokes. “So like Pepe the Frog, fedoras, and the okay symbol, these losers have perverted another innocuous thing.” #KamalaHarris #DEI #FoxNews #RightWingMedia -- For more award-winning independent reporting, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/ Facebook:   / motherjones   Twitter:   / motherjones   Instagram:   / motherjonesmag  

RSN: Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner | Blowing the "Anti-Woke" Dog Whistle

 

 

25 August 22

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Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner | Blowing the "Anti-Woke" Dog Whistle
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner, Steady
Excerpt: "Let’s get something straight. The weaponization of the term 'woke' by the political right is not a joke. Far from it. It provides a window into the low regard (to say the least) these people have for human rights, empathy, and the truth."
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At Least 22 Civilians Killed in Russian Strike on Rail Station on Ukraine's Independence Day
Isobel Koshiw, Emma Graham-Harrison, and Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Rocket attack in Chaplyne wounds 50 people as country marks six months since Moscow's invasion."
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Abortion 'Desert' in US South Is Hurting Black Women the Most
Taylor Johnson and Kelsey Butler, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "In the states that have moved quickly to enact restrictions, Black women make up a far larger proportion of abortion seekers than in places where abortion remains legal."
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California to Ban the Sale of New Gasoline Cars by 2035
Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman, The Boston Globe
Excerpt: "California on Thursday is expected to put into effect its sweeping plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, a groundbreaking move that could have major effects on the effort to fight climate change and accelerate a global transition toward electric vehicles."
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Democrats' Hopes Rise For Midterms Amid Backlash Over Abortion Access
Lauren Gambino, Guardian UK
Gambino writes: "After months of bracing for staggering losses, Democrats are suddenly filled with a sense of optimism that the 2022 midterm elections could defy historical precedent and see them perform strongly, especially by highlighting the Republican threat to abortion rights."
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Biden Administration Moves to Formalize DACA and Shield It From Legal Challenges
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News
Montoya-Galvez writes: "The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized a rule to transform the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy for more than 600,000 so-called 'Dreamers' into a federal regulation, a move aimed at protecting the program from legal challenges that imperil its existence."
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Native Groups Seek to Repair Lands Damaged by Colonization
Philip Marcelo, Associated Press
Marcelo writes: "The Wampanoag Common Lands is part of a growing movement of Indigenous-led conservation efforts helping to preserve and reinvigorate Native culture and identity."
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Blowing the "Anti-Woke" Dog Whistle An assault on the very notion of truth and all who seek it Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images) Let’s get something straight. The weaponization of the term “woke” by the political right is not a joke. Far from it. It provides a window into the low regard (to say the least) these people have for human rights, empathy, and the truth.  You can see the self-satisfaction, if not outright glee, as they appropriate a term that began as an aspirational notion of justice for Black activists and their allies into a slur hurled right back at the community from which it came. The fact that “woke” “originated in African American English” (according to Merriam-Webster) only increases the joy of those who spit it out with derision.  This is saying, in effect: “Try to come get it and feel your powerlessness.” The latest example comes courtesy of the mean-spirited oration of Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of Florida: “We can’t just stand idly by while woke ideology ravages every institution in our society. We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.” The Hill @thehill .@GovRonDeSantis: "We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never, ever surrender to woke ideology. [...] The state of Florida is where woke goes to die." trib.al/FCq3C7V August 20th 2022 721 Retweets3,215 Likes If the sentence constructions sound familiar, you might be remembering the famous World War II speech by Winston Churchill that included these stirring lines: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Texas activist Olivia Julianna recognized the similarities — and the important difference. ​​ Olivia Julianna 🗳 @0liviajulianna This speech is even more chilling when you realize he is trying to emulate Winston Churchill’s “Fight them on the Beaches” speech. Churchill was speaking of the Nazi regime,DeSantis is speaking about normal Americans. The contrast here is terrifying. August 21st 2022 6,736 Retweets28,056 Likes Returning to the dictionary, it defines “woke” as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” So, in other words, a positive. But the dictionary also mentions that while the term came to prominence in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter movement, “By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.” If you watch Fox News, some has now become many. That imbalance in the two definitions above gets to the heart of the issue. On the one hand, we have a way of thinking, an approach to gaining a better understanding, a grappling with “important facts.” To be “woke” is to be aware. On the other hand, to be “woke” is to be a type of person, one to be shunned, stigmatized, and vilified.  It makes you wonder, when the crowd cheers DeSantis’ incitement, whom they picture in their minds. Is it a Black mother marching in the street for racial justice? A gay parent? A college professor? A scientist? A person of Jewish heritage? A librarian? A teacher? I can already hear the hackles of rationalization rising from the “anti-woke” crowd. They will say that they don’t demonize all Black people, or gay people, or Jewish people, or librarians. And there are undoubtedly some members of these groups who are themselves fueling this assault on “wokeness.” But it is more complex. In the eyes and objective analysis of many people, the political right is using “woke” to attack “the other,” or basically anyone who has the temerity to not agree with them.  To be sure, there are some examples of actions under the banner of “woke” that in my opinion go too far. Are there excesses on the left? There are excesses in any group on the planet. Does some of it get ridiculous? I think so. You can cherry-pick people, moments, and situations that seem absurd. But doing so does not invalidate the general thrust of what “woke” was originally meant to convey. It is about a core truth: that the U.S. has a long way to go to turn our perception of ourselves as a nation of freedom and justice into reality for all citizens. Americans' life experiences are vastly different. We need to grapple with our history, even when it is ugly. We should not become inured to imbalances of power. We are more resilient when we challenge our own assumptions. The truth can be elusive, but that makes the journey toward it all the more urgent.  The rants of DeSantis are thus an assault on the very notion of truth and all who seek it. His behavior cheerleads a malignant ignorance that utterly dismisses the lived experiences and aspirations of large swaths of society. It is an assault on science, on reason, and on the impartial rule of law. Historically, many on this path have followed it to very dark destinations.  Thinking of DeSantis and the “anti-woke” crusades, my mind turned to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had the great fortune of covering Dr. King in the early days of the civil rights movement. But in recent years, I find myself thinking more about the end of his life and how he was viewed at the time of his murder — something we wrote about here in commemoration of his birthday: “It is important to remember that he was a deeply contentious person at the time of his death. Dr. King would not, could not, suppress the moral clarity with which he saw the world. His messages about racial prejudice and social justice were not welcome in most corridors of power. He was a danger to the status quo and many who benefited from it. He not only preached powerfully about the necessity for racial healing and desegregation; he also issued stirring rhetoric from his pulpit on the need for economic fairness across racial lines. And he was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War. To reread his writings and listen again to his speeches in today's political climate is to reconnect with the hard truths he eloquently levied at the American establishment. If he had survived the assassin's bullet and continued on his life path, there are reasons to believe he would have remained a divisive figure. Many who now pay homage to his legacy with florid paeans might well be singing different tunes if he had spent additional decades actively rallying civil disobedience toward the twin causes of racial and economic fairness for the marginal and dispossessed.” With this in mind, I tweeted out the following: Dan Rather @DanRather Make no mistake, if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be stigmatized as “woke” and attacked accordingly. August 21st 2022 14,939 Retweets111,055 Likes The tweet has received over 100k likes, and many agreed, including Dr. King’s daughter: Be A King @BerniceKing He was stigmatized then. He’d be stigmatized now. He was a love-centered revolutionary who made it his business to dismantle imperialism, nationalism, racism, poverty, and militarism. Some who quote him to malign justice work today would have plotted to kill him in 1968. https://t.co/UMHsFn25au Dan Rather @DanRather Make no mistake, if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be stigmatized as “woke” and attacked accordingly. August 22nd 2022 1,061 Retweets4,934 Likes From musician John Legend: John Legend @johnlegend “Anti-woke” just means STFU and take this racism. Dan Rather @DanRather Make no mistake, if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be stigmatized as “woke” and attacked accordingly. August 21st 2022 314 Retweets2,106 Likes But not surprisingly, the tweet also garnered attention from people with MAGA in their Twitter bios. There was a fair amount of expected derision. But there were also a lot of claims that I had it all wrong, that Dr. King was, in fact, “anti-woke.” People selectively quoted his writings and suggested that because Dr. King preached about seeing past racial divisions, that he would oppose the political left today because it promotes mindful recognition of race's role in our society. Some responses went so far as to claim that if Dr. King were alive today, he would vote Republican, as in the party of Donald Trump.   The absurdity of this historical revisionism is almost beyond belief. Except I think some people actually do believe this craziness. It’s all the more reason we need the history taught in our schools that they would dismiss as “woke.” Politicians like DeSantis, however, know better. They take another lesson from the civil rights era, that attacking the “other” can be a path to power. But maybe they also need a refresher course. Time and time again, demagogues have risen up in American history. And time and time again, they have been defeated because America “woke” up.

FAIR: Morningside Case Shows Media Learned Few Lessons From Exonerated Five

View article on FAIR's website Morningside Case Shows Media Learned Few Lessons From Exonerated Five Teddy Ostrow Many Americans now recognize the racism at multiple junctures of the criminal punishment system. Especially now, as our leaders refuse to release the disproportionately black and brown incarcerated people from prisons and jails, despite their being sites of serious COVID-19 outbreaks across the country.  But even before the pandemic, some media have played a significant role in that recognition. Jharrel Jerome and Asante Blackk portraying the falsely accused Korey Wise and Kevin Richardson in Netflix's When They See Us. Take director Ava Duvernay’s 2019 drama series When They See Us, a moving depiction of the 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which five black and brown boys were intimidated by police into false confessions of raping and beating a young white woman nearly to death. The show quickly became Netflix’s most-watched series, and pushed more frequent usage of the “Exonerated Five” to refer to the five men who were absolved of the crime in 2002, after enduring 5–12 years in prison. (Previously, they had been dubbed the “Central Park Five.”) But as FAIR (6/7/19) noted last year, there was an “absence of reflection” in media over their own role in real time in fabricating a racist moral panic, in New York City and beyond, around “wilding,” an ill-defined dog whistle used to propagate the criminal stereotype of black and Latinx men and boys. This lack of self-examination is evident in the widespread coverage of the December 2019 murder of Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors in Morningside Park, which separates Columbia University and East Harlem. Tabloids and other outlets were quick to draw parallels between the Central Park jogger case and Majors’ murder in the NYC park, for which one 13- and two 14-year-olds are being charged. Majors, who some early reports said was on a jog at the time, was a young white woman, and all the accused are African Americans. What’s more, the 13-year-old was aggressively interrogated without an attorney present, by a detective who had been sued multiple times—including for breaking into a man’s home without a warrant and falsely arresting him. Internal NYPD disciplinary findings also suggest that he beat a woman in custody so severely that she needed hospitalization—a history on the force that the New York Daily News (2/25/20) ineptly described as “checkered.” But media consistently ignored the striking similarities between their own coverage of the cases. Consider the tactics employed in each case to drum up panic and dehumanize the children who haven’t even been convicted yet. In 1989, tabloids used racially coded and sensationalist language like “uncivilized,” “vicious” and “wolf pack” to describe the Exonerated Five. Newsday (5/5/89) published an opinion piece by prominent conservative (and African-American) economist Thomas Sowell, headlined “Society Lets Barbarians Off.” Sowell decried the “flood of sociological excuses for barbaric acts,” and a “growing tolerance of uncivilized behavior” in the face of a “re-barbarization” process in American society. For the Majors case, outlets picked up the torch by calling the accused teens “predator[s]” (New York Post, 2/15/20) or “bandits” (Daily News, 2/15/20). One New York Post (2/2/20) report depicts one of the boys with animalistic strength: Detectives have theorized that that desperate bid for survival enraged the mugger, who stabbed Majors multiple times — and with such ferocity that feathers flew from the lining of her winter coat. The message of the Daily News' front page (12/27/19) was that the release of a 14-year-old boy delayed "justice." As they did in 1989, the Post and Daily News published pre-trial photos of the two 14-year-olds numerous times, one in a media-favorite perp walk, and the other, even before charges were brought, to support the NYPD’s “manhunt in Harlem” (New York Post, 12/26/19)—language that evokes newspapers’ shameful role in catching fugitives from slavery. One Daily News (12/27/19) front-page headline dramatized the narrative when one teen was brought in for questioning: “LONG WAIT FOR JUSTICE.” The despicable practice of publishing pre-trial photos (of children no less), as Adam Johnson has explained for FAIR (1/23/19), leads to summary public shaming, firings, diminished social status—all before a trial has even taken place. In the age of SEO, it’s a form of extrajudicial punishment that largely harms the poor and people of color. Though potentially less socially damaging than the photos, tabloids published each of the teen’s full names and where they live.  Curiously, the Times named the 14-year-olds, but not the 13-year-old, “because he is not being charged as an adult” as the other two are. Apparently the paper of record believes that unconvicted teenage children are more deserving of public vilification if the state hopes to subject them to the violence of an adult prison (rather than an often similarly violent juvenile detention center). And the vilification isn’t limited to the accused. A further parallel to coverage of the Central Park jogger case is media’s invasive and ostracizing examination of their families. The Post (12/29/19) thought it newsworthy to publish a story entitled, “Mom of Suspected Tessa Majors Killer Has Old Stabbing on Her Rap Sheet,” beginning her loathsome humiliation for a 13-year-old incident with “Like mother, like son?” under a headshot obtained from Facebook. One can’t help but see the old racist and misogynist trope of blaming black mothers for their children’s (alleged) criminality. The New York Post (12/14/19) reports on teenagers in Harlem's Morningside Park: “They travel in packs.” Media rightfully placed the incident in historical context—but told the wrong narrative. Majors’ murder prompted several outlets to note an increase in crime in and around Morningside Park. The New York Times’ story “A Park Shed Its Reputation. Then Came the Tessa Majors Murder” (12/14/19) found that the incident “has shattered [a prior] sense of safety and jolted [Morningside Heights and Harlem], recalling a time decades ago, when the city had more than 1,000 homicides a year.” The Post’s “Spiraling Morningside Park Crime Stats Show a Neighborhood Gripped by Violence” (12/14/19) reports: The park was the most dangerous in the city for muggings in the first nine months of 2019, logging 11 robberies in that period, according to NYPD statistics. By comparison, there were 10 reported muggings in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and nine in Claremont Park in the Bronx in that same period. Reports of violent crime and sex crimes spiked 82 percent in Morningside Park and on its perimeter in the past year ending December 8, according to the NYPD. While crime appears to have risen in and around the park, aside from a few buried reminders, such fear-mongering ignores that present crime rates are a small fraction of what they were in their height in New York in the ’80s and ’90s, the period media repeatedly reference, and they don’t necessarily suggest an upward trend.  But naturally, a promising, young white woman’s murder is cause for media alarm, warranting mention even in a separate alarmist report about rising crime in Central Park (New York Post, 1/13/20). One 1989 Daily News article about the Central Park case described the “collide” between the “crack-littered” world of Harlem and that “of a young Ivy League investment banker from Upper Saint Clair Pa. and the upper East Side.” Similarly today, we read of the division of a declining park with “roving bands of violent youths” (New York Post, 12/14/19) “considered off limits” (Daily News, 12/14/19) to prestigious Columbia and Barnard students. If there are "two Harlems," as The Nation (5/19/20) observed, aren't they already divided? Instead of sensationalizing a relatively rare tragedy and acting as police stenographers, perhaps media should spend more time magnifying why such incidents happen. Especially when neighboring Columbia University has a consistent past and present history of anti-black violence in Harlem, which includes Morningside Park, a place journalists are quick to remark—in not-so-subtle dog whistles—was “once strewn with crack vials” (New York Times, 12/14/19). Though less extreme than in 1989, such descriptions of the park, “which slopes downward toward Harlem...demarcated by an imposing rocky wall,” evoke a wilderness occupied by dangerous predators from a predominantly African-American Harlem.  More helpful would be better upward-looking reports on the university at the top of the hill that has explicit connections to American slavery, and a more recent violent history that spans a Jim Crow–era cross-burning, segregation in 1968, and the present invasion of West Harlem for a  $6.3 billion expanded campus. As Columbia University’s Black Students’ Organization wrote in the Columbia Daily Spectator (1/27/20): In order to help create a community that is truly safe for all students and all people, Columbia must recognize the want of better safety for the Harlem community and Black students on campus. It must also acknowledge its own violence and make a commitment to redressing the harm that it has caused to the historically Black community in which it resides. The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote a piece (5/19/20) headlined “A Murder that Threatened to Divide the Two Harlems”—though one might argue the two Harlems are already divided, seeing as there are two of them: the gentrified and the gentrifying. While Walsh grapples with her own position as a white gentrifier in Harlem, she downplays Columbia’s fundamental role in its gentrification. She rightfully mentions the devastating impact of white flight in the 1960s, but oddly, there is no further structural analysis of how and why Harlem is gentrifying—and how such factors might influence punitive responses to threats to white capital, like the NYPD’s subsequent “occupation” of the neighborhood, as Walsh accurately describes it. New York (3/16/20) presented an image of Morningside Park that looked like the cover of a pulp novel. Taxonimized under the tag “CRIME,” New York magazine (3/16/20) published a nearly 8,000-word piece on the murder, subtitled, “Every generation, a crime tells a new story about New York. The murder of Tessa Majors is ours.” To be fair, the article addresses some harms caused by the Columbia-driven gentrification of Harlem, the police invasions of the area and general racial tensions. But its arc relies on dramatizing the incident: Emotional, narrative-driven retellings obscure that many of the facts are not confirmed by legal conviction; descriptions of the “overgrown,” poorly lit Morningside Park verge on dog whistles; the featured image depicting the park’s stairs, which, “in its absence, travelers would have to scale a cliff,” looks like it came straight off the cover of a pulp novel; and the author includes a quote by Columbia undergrad and Quillette columnist Coleman Hughes that belittles peoples’ legitimate fears of a racist, armed police presence in Harlem—and racially profiling, abusive security officers on Barnard’s campus—as a “dismissive attitude about proactive safety.” To top it off, the article touches on the impact of distributing one teen suspect’s headshot, but then proceeds to publish perp walk photos of the two 14-year-olds. Media’s cartoonish crime reporting contributes to prejudiced fears and overt racism, like the violently anti-black robocalls sent to Barnard faculty and staff in response to Majors’ murder from the white supremacist group Road to Power. Or the increased presence in and around the park of police and the Guardian Angels, a volunteer vigilante organization founded by known racist Curtis Sliwa, who Liza Featherstone (Jacobin, 12/31/19) explains “played a sinister role in fanning the flames of white racism in the '80s and has even admitted to fabricating accounts of his own kidnapping.” One New York Post report (12/21/19) lionized the group’s crime-fighting, which included putting up fliers with the same pre-trial photo of the “violent” 14-year-old “on the loose” published by media. Though there was much praise in corporate media for When They See Us, when outlets were given a chance to show they’ve learned something these past 30 years on how to not stoke racist fears, how to not damage the lives of the uncharged and unconvicted, or how to look at blatant inequality and other forces at play in crime, they blew it. And now, the three boys wait in a Brooklyn jail—sitting ducks in the epicenter of the deadliest pandemic in a century—for unforeseeable trials. Yet, as is common after such initial pre-trial censures, we don’t hear a peep from media. But what’s to be expected of outlets that so often crave clicks over justice?

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