Categories
Neo-colonialism Russia U.S.

The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people

I’ve learned to always be skeptical of stories that are too black and white – especially ones with good guys and bad guys – told by the “good guys”. As I suspected that the Ukraine/Russia story we’re getting from most mainstream media is such a story, I asked my African history teacher if he could point me to some sources that could give me a broader perspective on the conflict. He pointed me to Black Agenda Report which provides “news, commentary and analysis from the black left” where I quickly found what I was looking for: Bryce Greene’s article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.

The article started by describing the official line being parroted by most mainstream media: “Russia is challenging NATO and the “international rules-based [and democratic] order” by threatening to invade Ukraine, and the Biden administration needed to deter Russia by providing more security guarantees to [Ukraine]. The official account seizes on Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula as a starting point for US/Russian relations, and as evidence of Putin’s goals of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.” Greene then provides the all important context, including U.S. involvement in the 2014 coup that toppled Ukraine’s democratically president Viktor Yanukovych, involvement that would have had to have the approval of U.S. president Barack Obama.

Greene explains U.S. efforts, prior to the coup, “to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations.” The main tool for this was the International Monetary Fund, which loans countries money in exchange for them adopting policies friendly to foreign investors. “The IMF is funded by and represents Western financial capital and governments and has been at the forefront of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The civil war in Yemen and the coup in Bolivia both followed a rejection of IMF terms”, Greene writes. In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms  to make the country more attractive to investors. “These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. In 2013, after early steps to integrate with the West, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned against these changes and ended trade integration talks with the European Union. Months before his overthrow, he restarted economic negotiations with Russia, in a major snub to the Western economic sphere.”

Greene details how, after Yanukovych started talking with the Russians, the U.S. supported his opponents, including far-right and openly Nazi groups, and fueled anti-government sentiment that led to the coup which removed him. Greene then explains why Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

From Russia’s point of view, the 2014 coup meant a longtime adversary had successfully overthrown a neighboring government using violent far-right extremists – and those extremists now controlled Crimea. Greene explained that, “the Crimean peninsula, which was part of Russia until it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954, is home to one of two Russian naval bases with access to the Black and Mediterranean seas, one of history’s most important maritime theaters. A Crimea controlled by a US-backed Ukrainian government was a major threat to Russian naval access.” So Putin took over Crimea but hadn’t advanced any further – until now.

Greene argues that the change was due to the U.S.’s continued efforts to get Ukraine to join the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), “an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance”. Greene poses the question, “Imagine for one second how the US would behave if Putin began trying to add a US neighbor [like Mexico for example] to a hostile military alliance after helping to overthrow its government…” The answer is clear.

What is also clear are the parallels between the U.S. treatment of Putin and how various levels of the U.S. state have historically treated Black people in U.S. and Africa.

The U.S. has been involved in coups that led to the removal of African leaders that chose polices favoring their countries’ people over Western interests. This included Ghana’s democratically elected president Kwame Nkrumah, and Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. The U.S. and Canada were also involved in the removal of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

As the full context shows Putin defending against American economic and military aggression, the U.S. labelling him as the aggressor is an example of the U.S. government using a central technique of systemic anti-Black racism (although, in this case, against a white guy): labelling Black people who defend themselves from systemic discrimination by calling it out, as aggressive. The label is almost always accompanied by half truths about all bad things the accused Black people have done. The subtext of these claims is that the Black folks are the bad guys and the people whose discriminatory behaviour they’re calling out are the good guys.

The U.S. is doing the same thing by labelling Putin as the aggressor who wants to expand his “dictatorial” control while portraying itself as protectors of democracy.

The reality is that the only place Putin took over since coming to power is Crimea. However, while Putin has been in power, U.S.-initiated attacks have included Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. As for the U.S. – nothing is more anti-democratic than helping overthrow democratically elected leaders which the U.S. has a long history of doing.

The U.S. also has a long history of using black and white narratives to label itself the angel of democracy defending the world against the world’s devilish strong men. From Saddam Hussein to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to Putin, the U.S. has used the narrative to obscure its own role, driven by its expansionist economic interests, in helping create and empower such men. (In Gaddafi’s case, the narrative leaves out the truth about how he improved the lives of many Libyans by nationalizing the oil industry and using the increasing state revenues to implement social programs emphasizing house-building, healthcare and education projects.)

It’s important to understand the full complexity of history to inform our actions today. As the U.S. is, as Barack Obama said in his November 2020 book A Promised Land, the only remaining superpower, it’s particularly important to understand what it’s doing in general – and to Black people in particular – now…and what it might do in the future.

Note: Obama mentioned nothing about the 2014 removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych in his book A Promised Land even though Obama met with Arseniy Yatsenyu – who the U.S. were caught on tape choosing to replace Yanukovych – less than two weeks after Yatsenyu became Ukraine’s prime minister.

Categories
COVID Demos Police

Police response to “freedom convoy” is the strongest argument ever for abolishing the police

As I watched people attack the U.S. Capitol last January 6, I, like many Canadians, asked myself: could anything like that happen here? Well, this past week, we got our answer when we watched thousands of anti-vaccine mandate demonstrators occupy downtown Ottawa for a week – while the Ottawa police did almost nothing to stop them. And this was despite the fact that Ottawa police Chief Sloly eventually had to admit that the protest was, “intolerable [and] unprecedented.”, and that, “The range of illegal, dangerous and unacceptable activities is beyond the ability to list.” 

And, just as people around the world remarked at how American police treated the capital attackers very different from Black Lives Matter protesters, we saw how Ottawa police treated the truckers very differently from the young Black and Indigenous protesters who blocked an Ottawa intersection in November 2020, following the acquittal of OPS constable Daniel Montsion in the death of Abrirahman Abdi. 

But, unlike many people, Black people I know weren’t surprised at the OPS response. On the contrary, we saw the OPS acting exactly as expected. That’s because the OPS, like all police forces in Canada, has always had one mandate: protect the powerful – or at least don’t get in their way. And the thousands of mostly white convoy protesters, and the organizers with their millions in the bank, were the powerful. The young Black and Indigenous protesters who blocked the Ottawa intersection in November 2020 weren’t.

So, despite knowing that the young protesters had a meeting arranged with city councillors and Ottawa Police Service Board members at noon Saturday, that would end the protest, the Ottawa police moved in around 3am Saturday morning and forcibly removed the protesters, arresting and charging 12 of them. 

Those charges hung over their heads for a year. 

When asked why the OPS appeared to handle the two events very differently, Chief Sloly said the two situations were different, and that he didn’t see a connection with the scale, size and nature of what police faced with the convoy protest. So, the Chief was basically saying, “You can’t compare the two events because the convoy protest was way bigger.” However, saying the convoy was bigger is a comparison so the Chief contradicted himself in the same sentence. But, more importantly, we can compare and what we’re all seeing is that the double standard couldn’t be more blatant. Clearly, the OPS believes some people have more right to protest than others.

All the OPS could have really said about the Nov. 2020 demonstration is that it posed multiple potential safety issues because no one actually said that demo made them feel unsafe. However, there were many reports of people saying the convoy demo made them feel unsafe or actually unsafe.

The convoy blocked Joline Mallet’s 4-yr-old son Liam from getting to his brain cancer treatments. Downtown residents’ homes were vandalized for having Pride flags. Journalists, unhoused people and small business owners were harassed by protesters, some of whom carried confederate flags. Protesters parked, danced and urinated on the War Memorial and kept residents up by blowing their horns well into the night. And the convoy caused businesses in the downtown core, vaccination clinics and an elementary school to close. The Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women said members of the protest were overtly threatening and intimidating women, people from marginalized communities, and those working in precarious low-paid employment. They said they heard accounts of young women being followed, almost run over, and threatened with rape.

When challenged about the poor police response, the OPS said they considered it a success because there were no riots, injuries, or deaths. This bears repeating: their measure of success wasn’t whether women got harassed, or unhoused people got beat up or whether people were too afraid to leave their house to go to work. As long as there were no riots it was all good.

In defence of the police, Diane Deans, who both chairs the police Board and is running for Mayor, said we must trust in the police service and their “greater experience with risk and threat assessments and that they make decisions based on the information they have in the moment, with public safety clearly in the centre.” Simply avoiding riots isn’t centreing public safety.

The OPS response to the convoy backs up calls to defund and eventually abolish the OPS. This is because the main question people ask about abolishing the police is, “What about the murderers? What about the rapists? Who are we going to call for then?” Well, up until last week, people could have asked, “What if thousands of angry protesters occupy downtown Ottawa and harass people for a week? Who are we going to call then?” Well, now it’s crystal clear who people shouldn’t call: the Ottawa police.

Enough is enough. It’s time to start the process of abolishing all Canadian police forces by defunding them and starting real community conversations about what systems we can create to truly make us all safer.

Categories
Mental health NRTs OPS

2021 wins

The 613-819 Black Hub’s strategic plan starts with this:

Good evaluation is hard in any field but especially hard regarding advocacy because:

  1. Success can take years;
  2. Many people, groups contribute to success so it’s hard to evaluate the impact of your organization;
  3. There is often an active opposition working against you; and
  4. Good evaluation can be prohibitively expensive (i.e. measuring changes in public opinion).

Despite these challenges, advocacy work can, and must, be measured to:

  1. Know if strategies are working; and
  2. Demonstrate success to Black communities, potential recruits and funders.

Many people only consider final outcomes like successful policy change as “wins” but there are many other types of success that are important to measure to maintain optimism – and momentum. This post describes two big wins, and one partial win, that we lead or participated in during 2021 – and how we plan to follow up on each of them in 2022.

Compassion not Cops – In February 2021, we launched our Compassion not Cops campaign to produce a proposal for an alternative, non-police mental health crisis response system for Ottawa. We raised $25,000 in three months to pay the consultants who produced an excellent report that people continue to reference in efforts to freeze the Ottawa Police Service budget.

Getting cops out of Ottawa schools – We supported the Asilu Collective which led the successful campaign to get cops out of Ottawa schools by ending the Ottawa police’s School Resource Program. While Asilu members maintained pressure on Ottawa Carleton District School Board trustees by regularly presenting at Board meetings, we continued to raise the issue during our many presentations to the Ottawa Police Services Board. We also joined Asilu members on the OCDSB’s Review of Police Involvement in Schools working group.

Freezing the Ottawa Police Service budget – We joined many other groups in leading a year-long campaign to freeze the Ottawa Police Service budget. We presented almost every month at Ottawa Police Services Board meetings, applied pressure by demanding answers of the OPS via email and Freedom of Information requests and had supporters calling and emailing city councillors right up until the day councillors voted on the budget. In the end, the Board and council didn’t freeze the OPS budget. They gave the OPS an $11 million increase instead of the $14 million the OPS asked for. Many saw this as a loss but it wasn’t as it was the first crucial step in making any big change: legitimizing the idea that it can even happen. The $3 million reduction showed for the first time that the Board could give the cops less than they ask for.

Another success related to the police budget was the City Hall sit-in organized by the Ottawa Black Diaspora Coalition during City council’s vote on the police budget. The sit-in showed you don’t need lots of people to produce very powerful symbolic moments. One of those moments was when one of the OBDC sisters – who’s about 6ft 2 – started speaking with a megaphone right after city officials – backed up by the presence of several police officers – told the organizers they couldn’t use a megaphone. As soon as they started speaking, a police officer approached and said something to them. They stopped speaking, looked down at the officer without saying anything – then turned back to the crowd and continued speaking with the megaphone. The officer melted into the background. I spoke after them, also with the megaphone – and said that I hoped that, by risking being arrested, I would inspire young brothers and sisters to rise to a new level of militancy.

In 2022 we plan to follow up on all these successes.

Compassion not Cops – We launched the Compassion not Cops campaign partly in response to the Ottawa Police Service launching a process to create an alternative mental health response system. The problem is the police were leading it, including handpicking the “Guiding Council” that would manage the project. When we and others raised this, the OPS quickly agreed to let the City lead the process. Only they didn’t. After much asking, we got a copy of the Guiding Council’s terms of reference and saw that the OPS was now on the Guiding Council.

At the Nov. 2020 Ottawa Police Services Board meeting OPS Chief Peter Sloly made it very clear that the OPS would be at any table creating an alternative mental health response system – he just failed to mention that they were now back at the head of that table. We responded by saying that we did think there was a role for the OPS in developing an alternative, non-police mental health response system. It’s similar to the role an abusive husband plays when his wife finally decides to leave him. He needs to be around to give her the keys to the house and the car and the wifi password – but he will absolutely not be at the table with her team that will help her design her new life without him.

Chief Sloly and the police union, the Ottawa Police Association, called the police Board and City Council’s decision to give the OPS an $11 million raise a “cut”. Why would the Chief and the OPA say that? They’d say it because they know that, because the Board and Council didn’t cut large amounts from their budget and free it up to go to things that actually keep us safer, like mental health programs – that the crises will keep happening – and then the OPS can say, “You see what happens when you cut our budget?” – and ask for an even bigger increase next year. In 2022, we will use our Compassion not Cops study to counter this narrative.

Cops in schools and the police budget – Succeeding in getting cops out of schools was a huge success. Keeping them out will require continued vigilance as we fully expect the OPS to try to maintain its connection to schools through some form of layered policing.

In his March 2021 Spring magazine article, Layered policing’ expands police amid calls to defund, Jeff Shantz said:

In response to community calls to defund police and fund necessary social resources, cities across the country have instituted “layered policing.” From Lethbridge to Saskatoon to Kitchener-Waterloo, these moves would actually deploy more police throughout the community, and embed policing in everyday social life. All while presenting a model in which social services are framed as policing functions (or policing “partnerships”).

We expect the OPS will push for continued strong involvement in the mental health response system, framed as “partnerships” with social service agencies, while fighting any reductions to their budget that would free up money to go to these “partner” agencies. We also see them attempting to continue to try to deploy more cops in the community under the guise of the Neighborhood Resource Team program, which is their latest name for “community policing”.

The OPS NRT program has gone from $2.5 million and 18 officers in 2019 to over $11 million and 89 officers in 2021. And the OPS is currently leading an evaluation of the program that’s pretty much guaranteed to conclude that the program is great and should be further expanded. The project started in fall 2019 when the OPS hired Carleton professor Linda Duxbury to lead it. After we found out about the project, we met with Duxbury and asked her why no Black groups were included in the project description for her project on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council website (SSHRC gave her almost $200,000 for the project). She said she had included Indigenous groups.

Duxbury’s NRT project is yet another example of the OPS ensuring that anything that’s meant to hold them accountable, or evaluate them, produces positive reviews they use to justify asking the Board and City Council for more money. We will continue to expose this in 2022 in the run up to the vote on the OPS’ 2023 budget – and the Oct. 2022 Ottawa municipal election.

We will also work to have similar successes in 2022 in areas beyond policing by increasing our efforts to connect with – and be guided by – community members most affected by the systems we’re trying to change.

La lutta continua.

Categories
Africa Cooperation Neo-colonialism

Black to Africa

I recently returned from a trip to Ghana with my wife and two sons, aged 20 and 17. We went for a wedding and visited Accra and Kumasi (where the wedding was held). While there, I experienced things that showed me why Blacktivism is important and the links between the continent’s history and our current advocacy work.

On our 2nd day we visited Elmina Castle. The castle was used by various European countries to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped to the slave plantations to be worked to death or worse. I stood with my sons in the men’s slave dungeon. The dungeon is about half the size of a high school classroom. It has a hard mud floor, stone block walls and one small hole for ventilation and sunlight about 20 feet up. 200 men were kept there, sometimes for months, in their own waste that often rose to just below their knees. Standing there, I found myself thinking of the Ottawa Police Service whose budget we’re campaigning to freeze. Specifically, I was thinking about two key similarities between the OPS and the slave traders. The first is the immense power the slavers had to control Black people and do things that lead to them being harmed and killed. And the second is that the main reason they did it was economic.

The OPS gets millions of dollars each year from which it pays its officers starting salaries of over $60,000. The over policing of Black and Indigenous people directly contributes to generating the data the OPS uses to justify yearly budget increases. The OPS is making money – and lots of it – just like the slave catchers did.

Shortly after returning from Ghana, I spoke at an Ottawa Police Services Board meeting and said the previous two paragraphs word-for-word. The Board then approved an $11 million dollar increase to the police budget to bring it to a total of $386 million.

The day after visiting Elmina, I met with environmental activist Patricia Bekoe of 350 Ghana Reducing Our Carbon. She and her GROC colleagues face at least two major challenges. One is the emissions from thousands of cars and trucks snarled in endless bumper to bumper traffic in the capital Accra and Kumasi to the north. One Uber driver I asked said their vehicles didn’t have to pass emissions tests to get registered and the trucks spewing black smoke seemed to confirm this. The second challenge GROC faces is an oil industry that’s been active since the 1970s. One story from our trip suggests at least one foreign oil company operating in Ghana hasn’t been a great friend of environmentalists, or the environment.

Texas-based Kosmos Energy discovered oil in Ghana in 2007. In 2009, the company spilled around 700 barrels of a toxic substance into the Ghanaian sea and was fined $35 million USD by the Ghanaian Environmental Protection Agency – but refused to pay. I learned about Kosmos because I met a brother who works at Accra’s Kosmos Innovation Centre that Kosmos funds. The Centre helps Ghanaians start businesses, mostly in the agricultural sector. That’s good. Not paying for the oil they spilled isn’t…

Ghana isn’t the only West African nation to suffer environmental damage from oil companies or to have activists or the government trying to hold companies accountable for such damage. I asked sister Bekoe if she and her colleagues faced dangers like Nigerian activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Initially as spokesperson, and then as president, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland in Southern Nigeria by multinational oil companies, especially Royal Dutch Shell. At the peak of his non-violent campaign, he was tried by a special military tribunal for allegedly masterminding the gruesome murder of Ogoni chiefs at a pro-government meeting, and hanged in 1995 by the military dictatorship.

Happily, sister Bekoe said she and her colleagues don’t face such violent opposition. This is good because Ghanaians have recently become more vocal with demands for the government to address growing inequity in the country. The grassroots #FixTheCountry campaign recently saw Ghanaians take to social media and the streets. On August 4, Al Jazeera reported that several thousand protesters marched in Accra in the latest rally against President Akufo-Addo’s government. The story said the protest aimed to demand accountability, good governance, and better living conditions from the government.

Frankly, I’m surprised we didn’t see signs saying #FixTheRoads as the horrible conditions of many roads was one of the clearest signs that any tax money the government is getting isn’t being used to fix the roads.

One very visible sign of the inequity in the country was the many places that were surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire, including both our Accra AirBnB and our Kumasi hotel (both also had 24/7 guards). One of the marketing features of our Accra AirBnB was that it was attached to a small grocery store you could access from within the compound so you didn’t have to go outside security. Another very visible – and disturbing – sign of the inequity were pre-teen Muslim girls, wearing white hijabs, begging for money at intersections. One Uber drive said the girls were brought in from Niger by people who take a cut of what they make.

Another less visible equity indicator was who owned large businesses like malls and the grocery stores in them. I asked who owned Accra’s Marina Mall and Kumasi City Mall. An Uber driver told me what I was expecting to hear: Marina Mall’s owners weren’t Black Ghanaians. In fact, he said they weren’t Ghanaian at all, they were Lebanese. However, a little of bit of Googling led to a surprise: the mall is actually owned by the Nigerian-based Marina Group whose chairman is Dr. Amerie Agunwah below.

I failed to definitely confirm the owners of Kumasi City Mall except that it’s owned by Delico Kumasi Limited which is subsidiary buried under other subsidiaries that include AttAfrica, Mauritius that’s led by two white dudes, Renier Vans Rensburg and Wynand Baard.

The main grocery store in both malls is Shoprite, a large chain throughout Africa whose majority owner is South African billionaire, Christo Wiese.

Not all the oil companies are foreign-owned like Kosmos. We also saw many GOIL gas stations. According to Wikipedia, GOIL, the Ghana Oil Company, “is a state-owned Ghanaian oil and gas marketing company, formed on 14 June 1960. Currently it holds the place of Ghana’s top oil marketing company, and is the only indigenous owned petroleum marketing company in Ghana.”

The air conditioned malls packed with tech stores, seemed a world away from the many people selling along the roads that lead to them…

Kumasi City Mall
Kumasi street market life…

Some of those wanting to #FixTheCounty would perhaps see the malls as example of what’s wrong. However, according to one Uber driver with whom I had a wide ranging conversation, not everybody even cared about fixing the country. He said many Ghanaians, including most young kids, dream of leaving it to go to the U.S.. This is partly because the idealized myth of America the Great seemed alive and well in Accra and Kumasi.

My chat with the Uber driver, who said his name was Bismarck, started after I asked him why he had an American flag next to his Ghanaian one on his dash. He said it was because he loved America, especially their technology. Interestingly, the technology he mentioned was their military. Later in our chat, he said, “But they have one problem. They hate Black people. They only like Black people when they need them.” (Another Uber driver I spoke to expressed similar love for Canada which I suggested he might want to temper given Canada’s role in the violent coup that deposed Ghana’s democratically elected president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966.)

When I mentioned to a fellow Canadian Blacktivist the love for America and Canada some Ghanaians had expressed, his response was essentially, “Of course they love the places that have lots of good stuff built from stolen wealth.” As my boys and I paid our respect at the feet (literally) of the grandfather of all uppity negroes, Kwame Nkrumah, I wondered what he’d think of the state of the country he helped lead to independence.

One last point before I wrap up….We saw very few white people in Ghana. The most was 3 or 4 together, all men, at the Ghana Premier League football game we attended, sitting in the most expensive section and on the Africa World Airways flight to Kumasi. (Children seemed to confirm the rare sightings of white folks by happily yelling “Oboroni!”, the Fante word for white person, at me on my morning walks as I happily waved back to their great amusement.)

I left Ghana with a better appreciation of the challenges facing Blacktivists in the diaspora and on the continent in working together to regain control of the vast resources in the ground, and in the people, of the continent. Given how the global pandemic has redefined what’s normal, young Blacktivists working with older folks who are committed to fundamental change – and have a long view of how to make it – have the opportunity to make Africa a global economic powerhouse that shares its wealth with all people.

Categories
Chappelle Free speech transgender

Dave Chappelle’s latest TRANSgression

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or somewhere with really bad wifi) for the last three weeks you probably heard something about the controversy around comedian Dave Chappelle’s latest special The Closer, released Oct. 5 on Netflix.

Full disclosure that I’ve been a huge Chappelle fan ever since seeing him live at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival in the late ’80s when he was in his teens. I immediately loved his mix of comedy and racial commentary that remains a hallmark of his act today.

The controversy around The Closer is focused on what Chappelle says about gay and trans people. This isn’t new. In fact, at the beginning of The Closer Chappelle says he’s going to address the controversy from his remarks about trans folks in his previous specials.

The main critiques of The Closer I’ll address here are:

  1. He talks as if all gay people are white, almost completely ignoring Black gay and trans people. 
  2. He’s transphobic.
  3. His comments could could cause harm to the transgender community.
  4. He’s “punching down” on the trans community.

Regarding the first point, an Oct. 15 Vulture article said, “These intersections are blind spots for Dave. He speaks about Black and queer struggles as if they are strictly in competition, not always entangled.” An Oct. 23 Vox article says, “Chappelle rarely acknowledges that these communities contain people of colour; instead, he frames the concerns of queer and genderqueer people — especially the linguistic arguments about pronouns, anatomy, and bodily functions that often arise from conversations about trans and nonbinary identity — as solely a product of white progressive hysteria gone mad.” The overall point is mostly valid (except the “hysteria gone mad” part as Chappelle says nothing of the sort). The only time I remember Chappelle directly acknowledging the existence of Black gay/trans folks in The Closer was in one bit about a gay white guy – with whom Chappelle had an argument in a restaurant – calling the cops on him. Chappelle says a gay Black man would never do that because he knows the cops would show up asking, “Which one of you n%$#*s is Clifford?”. He also indirectly acknowledges the existence of gay Black folks when he tells the story of Sojourner Truth to highlight racism within the feminist movement and, by inference, the gay/trans movement. However, for most of his special Chappelle seems to see gay/trans folks as all white and contrast their experience against Black folks who he seems to see as all straight.

Regarding the second claim, as none of the folks calling Chappelle transphobic that I read about gave their definition of transphobic, I’m going with Google’s: “having or showing a dislike of or prejudice against transsexual or transgender people.” By this definition, the accusation isn’t valid. Chappelle goes out of his way to explain he has no issues with trans folks as a group, either for their transness or anything else. He clearly critiques the actions of white trans and gay folks saying, “Gay people are minorities — until they have to be white again.”, just after telling the story of the gay guy who called the cops.

The third point, that Chappelle’s comments could could cause harm to the transgender community, seems to imply that they could make people physically assault trans people. One problem with this critique is that it’s impossible to prove unless someone beat up or killed a trans person and said they did it because of Chappelle’s specials. That Chappelle has been making trans jokes literally for years and this hasn’t happened further weakens this point. But what weakens it most are those who accuse Chappelle of hate speech.

In Canada, it’s a Criminal Code offence to, “wilfully promote hatred against any identifiable group, by making statements.” The maximum penalty is imprisonment of not more than two years. But, as Chappelle is American, he’s bound by American hate speech laws. The problem is, there aren’t any. According to Wikipedia, “The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” So Chappelle has the legal right to say whatever he wants. Despite that, there are some things I wish he hadn’t said which I cover later.

So, there’s what people say he did wrong – and what they think should happen.

Several places, including an Oct. 6 Variety article, reported that the National Black Justice Coalition, a civil rights advocacy group serving the LGBTQ+ community, issued a statement, urging Netflix to remove The Closer, saying, “With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States — the majority of whom are Black transgender people — Netflix should know better. Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence. Netflix should immediately pull ‘The Closer’ from its platform and directly apologize to the transgender community.” (Interestingly, I couldn’t find any mention of the statement, Dave Chappelle or The Closer on the NBJC website.) It appears the folks at the NBJC aren’t familiar with either the existence of the First Amendment or the lack of hate speech laws in the U.S. Even by Canadian law, Chappelle would still be safe as he in no way wilfully promotes hatred against gay and trans people. Perhaps the NBJC should focus on getting hate speech laws passed in the U.S.

Chappelle did tell an apparently true story about beating up a lesbian – but not because she was a lesbian. He said he beat her up because she swung at him first. The fact that he didn’t end the story by encouraging others to go beat up lesbians means he didn’t break Canadian hate speech laws. But that’s not the issue. The issue is Chappelle shouldn’t be beating up women, any women, and shouldn’t be making such beatings part of his show. At the very least, I would have liked Chappelle to recognize that his power, combined with how fanatical fans and others can be in the U.S., could lead to someone following his lead and, to avoid that, telling the audience he doesn’t condone beating up any women. Or, better yet, he could have just left that story out. 

Two other things Chappelle says caused the most outrage. He said he was “team TERF” and that “gender is a fact.” TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist a term that, according to Wikipedia, “originally applied to the minority of feminists espousing sentiments that other feminists considered transphobic, such as the rejection of the assertion that trans women are women, the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces, and opposition to transgender rights legislation. The meaning has since expanded to refer more broadly to people with trans-exclusionary views who may have no involvement with radical feminism.” 

The unfortunate thing is that what Chappelle says immediately after clarifies that he only believes in one TERF idea – that trans women’s vaginas can’t produce children. Based on that, it appears he actually means sex, not gender, is a fact. Now, given comedians like Chappelle choose every word very carefully, one must wonder why he’d open himself up to even more criticism than expected by apparently choosing to communicate some of the most controversial ideas so confusingly.  

Critics also slammed Chappelle for trying to make victims out of people like comedian Kevin Hart and rapper DaBaby. Hart got fired from hosting the 2019 Oscars after old tweets of his surfaced and were labelled homophobic. DaBaby was dropped from several show lineups after complaints about an anti-gay rant he went on at a July 25, 2021 show. Chappelle laments Hart losing the Oscars after wanting to host them all his life – seemingly asking the no doubt largely middle class audience to empathize with millionaire Hart’s lost dream (which will likely just be delayed anyway). 

What the Hart bit touches on, however, is the last and most important critique of The Closer: that he’s “punching down” on trans people. Punching down means critiquing groups who supposedly have less power than yours, which raises one of the most interesting question The Closer explores: which group has more power, rich Black men or white gay/trans people?

One part of the answer is that rich Black men don’t have any power as a group. There is no National Association of Wealthy Brothers like there is the National Centre for Transgender Equality or the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Rich Black men have power individually but none as a group. Also, a key reason some gay and trans organizations have power is because many of their members are white, whereas, clearly, no rich Black guys are.

This is why one of Chappelle’s main goals in The Closer is highlighting racism in the gay/trans community. This is real as we saw in Canada when Black Lives Matter Toronto took over Toronto’s 2016 Pride parade. CBC quoted BLM-TO co-founder Alexandra Williams saying they held the sit-in because they wanted to hold Pride Toronto accountable for what she called “anti-blackness.” 

Just as there has been relatively little attention paid to Chappelle’s critique of white gay racism, there has been absolutely none paid to one glaring omission in The Closer. In all the critiques I read, no one seemed to notice that Chappelle criticizes the #metoo movement for being focused on white women and superficial actions – without ever mentioning it was started by a Black woman  – Tarana Burke.

Reading all the attacks on Chappelle – some justified, many not – leads me to offer these guidelines for critics and artists:

Critics: before you critique anything, please read or watch the entire thing.

Artists: in this day and age, please realize – and take responsibility for the fact that – most people often don’t read or view the entire thing. 

Finally, in the spirit of consistency, and on the question of punching up or down, I ask those going after Chappelle for incitement, this question: are you also going after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Or are you too uninformed – or too afraid – to punch up?

Categories
marketing Sports

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery: stop caring about pro sports

The title of this post is based on the great line from Bob Marley’s 1980 classic, Redemption Song, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”

According to the Wikipedia article on the song, Marley took these lines from a speech Marcus Garvey gave at Menelik Hall in Sydney, Nova Scotia, during October 1937 and published in his magazine, The Black Man:

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.”

The minds behind the pro sports marketing machine have made slaves of millions of intelligent people. But they haven’t done it by forcing people to stop developing or using their minds. They’ve done it, and continue to do it, in ways that train people to think certain ways about certain things – and not to think about certain other things at all.

The Machine gets millions of people to care (many of them deeply for years) about whether millionaires playing for billionaires win games and titles. The Machine does this by training fans to do a number of key things:

  1. Cheer for the “home” team, meaning the team representing the city or country they live in;
  2. See the athletes as people very much like them who care about their communities; and
  3. Never think about team owners, who are almost all billionaires.

As most fans appear to do the first two things without ever thinking twice about why, let’s take a closer look at them…

It makes perfect sense why we cheer for amateur home teams like our kids’ teams. But very few of us or our kids have ever played for professional teams so why do we cheer on professional “home” teams? Some people would argue that’s just as natural as cheering for our kids’ teams. It’s not…

We cheer our kids’ (or nephews’ or nieces’) teams because we know and love our kids and want them to succeed. Part of this is because their success is literally a reflection on us because so much of who they are and what they do is due to us. This isn’t at all the case with pro teams and athletes. The only influence fans have on pro athletes performance is how loud they yell in the stands – and we all know that has mixed results. So why are so many people more emotionally invested in pro athletes’ victories than some parents are in their own kids’ wins? Because they’ve been trained to be.

Why should we cheer for a pro team simply because we live in the same city or country – especially when many of the athletes aren’t from the same city or country? Most people don’t know the names of most of the players on the pro teams they cheer for let alone anything about them beyond how well they they play. So if we don’t actually know (or therefore care) about the individual players, then what exactly are we cheering for?

In his 2012 article in Maryland’s Capital Gazette, Psychology: Rooting for your favorite team is good for you, Scott Smith offers some insights. Smith says research has shown that people root for a sports team for many different reasons including being socialized into it by family and friends or simply liking or identifying with the name of the team, the color or style of their uniform, or their winning ways. He also says:

“It was long theorized that those who avidly root for sports teams are lonely, alienated people who suffer from low self-esteem and have no real social ties to meet their emotional needs. Research, however, is showing that just the opposite is true. A study at the University of Kansas found that sports fans are happier and actually suffer fewer bouts of depression and report lower levels of alienation than people who are not interested in sports. In fact, most sports fans are high functioning, well educated and successful people – how else could they even afford a ticket at today’s prices!” (Smith doesn’t include the links to the University of Kansas study.) So Smith offers some ideas why people cheer for teams and some evidence that doing so has some benefits.

Neither Smith nor any of the articles I found online mentioned sports marketing as something that might influence why people cheer for their home team, or any team. It seems sports marketing is so effective that everyone has joined their home team. Even NPR (National Public Radio), that doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, only had articles talking mostly about how sports marketing works – but not critiquing it. The first NPR item that came up when I Googled “NPR “sports marketing” was NPR’s The Business Side podcast, “Sports Marketing pioneer Jim Host & The Birth Of ‘The Bundle'”.

This lack of articles is a pretty big omission considering pro sports are billion dollar industries with corresponding marketing budgets.

In addition to training us to cheer for a home team full of millionaires we know nothing about, the Machine also trains us to see those millionaires as just normal folk who care about “their” communities and to rarely, if ever, think about their billionaire owners.

We see heart warming media stories about athletes visiting children in hospital and many of these athletes are no doubt sincere in their concern for the kids. However, what we almost never see or hear is athletes doing anything about or commenting on any social issue in the community – unless the issue has first gained popular support. For example, some athletes, like NHL star Sidney Crosby, joined millions of others in condemning racial injustice following George Floyd’s murder. However, most of the time, most athletes keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Is that what someone who really cares about their community does?

Now, it’s not hard to imagine why athletes stay silent when they see what happens to people like NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick when they speak out – or take a knee. Kaepernick played six seasons for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. In 2016, he knelt during the national anthem at the start of NFL games in protest of police brutality and racial inequality in the United States – and never played in the NFL again. In November 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL and its owners, accusing them of colluding to keep him out of the league. Kaepernick withdrew the grievance in February 2019 after reaching a confidential settlement with the NFL.

So athletes, even if they wanted to speak out, are forced into silence and inaction with threats of dismissal. So, in the absence of hearing from the athletes themselves, the Machine is able to sell us an image of them as just hard-working guys who take time from their busy schedule to visit sick kids (and it’s all guys because I’m referring to the Machine behind the NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB).

And while the Machine has us thinking the athletes are just great guys very much like us (well, except the exceptional athletic ability part) – it trains us to never think about the billionaires who own the teams for which the athletes we love play.

So what do we know about these folks who we help make boatloads of cash?

Well, one thing that shouldn’t be surprising is that, to become, and stay, billionaires, they do whatever they can to lower their taxes. In fact, according to a July 2021 ProPublica article, The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes, billionaire owners like NBA Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive Steve Balmer, legally use tax laws to pay lower tax rates than players and even stadium workers. Does it being legal make it right?

One way owners use all those tax savings is donating to political parties. According to an Oct. 2020 ESPN article, American professional sports owners contributed nearly $47 million in U.S. federal elections since 2015, including $10 million to Republican causes and $1.9 million to Democratic causes by the time the article was posted in October in the run up to the Nov. 2020 election. That strong Republican lean is consistent with owners’ spending in the 2018 and 2016 federal elections as well. ESPN’s research on principal owners, controlling owners, co-owners and commissioners from the NBA, NFL, NHL, WNBA, MLB and NASCAR revealed they donated $34.2 million (72.9%) to Republican campaigns or super PACs purely supporting Republican causes, compared to $10.1 million (21.5%) to Democrats over the past three elections. The research includes more than 160 owners and commissioners spanning 125 teams.

So the next time you think about buying that ticket to see that big game in person or you catch a game on TV munching away through the really expensive ads, remember who’s pockets you’ve helping fill…and remember Bob Marley’s words.

Note: One week after posting this I got an email from LeadNow asking Canadians to sign a petition to STOP RICH TAX CHEATS. CLOSE TAX LOOPHOLES. The petition followed the release of the Pandora Papers which revealed that at least 500 wealthy Canadians have been hiding money and dodging taxes in offshore tax-havens.

Categories
Elections Politics

Why minority governments are better for Black Canadians

Federal election polls currently predict a minority Liberal or Conservative government on Sept. 20 and that’s good for Black Canadians as minority governments have a history of delivering things that have been – and in many cases still are – good for Black folks. Here are some, paraphrased from a great 2019 Policy Options article by Geoff Norquay.

The Lester B. Pearson minorities (1963-65 and 1965-68)

“Supported by the NDP, Pearson’s Liberals put in place a bounty of progressive programs and initiatives, including universal coverage of hospitalization and medicare, the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans, the Canada Assistance Plan, the Canada Student Loans program…and groundbreaking labour legislation that pioneered the 40-hour work week.” As many Black Canadians face economic challenges partly due to systemic anti-Black racism, they needed programs like Medicare and the Canada Student Loans Program more than others. As part of the economic challenge was being in low paid jobs with few protections, the 40-hour work week also benefited them more.

The Pierre Elliot Trudeau minority (1972-74)

“The Trudeau government amended the Elections Act to regulate election expenses for the first time. This was landmark legislation that established most of the principles still at the heart of Canada’s party financing regulatory regime: a tax credit system for donations, disclosure of donations over $100 and reimbursement for political parties’ election expenses. Limits were also placed on the amounts that candidates and parties were allowed to spend on campaigns.” As these changes curbed the power of big business to influence elections, it helped Black folks because big business then, as now, isn’t controlled by Black folks. The problem now, is that Big Tech businesses make money by allowing disinformation that affects elections in ways that haven’t benefited Black folks.

The Joe Clark minority (1979-80)

“Despite its short time in power, the Clark government can claim at least partial credit for one significant policy advance, Canada’s first access-to-information legislation. Clark’s Bill C-15, to create the Freedom of Information Act, established a broad right of access to government records.” Under the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, the right to submit Access to Information and Privacy requests, or ATIPs, is one of the most powerful tools Black folks have to confront discrimination they face from the federal government or federally regulated workplaces. That’s because documenting discriminatory treatment is essential to ending it. Information requests only cost $5 and privacy requests (i.e. information dealing personally with you) are free. Provinces have their own versions. Black folks in Ontario can use the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to get information from the Ontario government or places it regulates. Regulated organizations include the Canadian and Ontario human rights commissions.

The Paul Martin minority (2004-06)

“Early in the Martin government, the Prime Minister reached a 10-year deal with the provinces and territories to increase federal health care funding by $41 billion, to lower their cost pressures and reduce wait times for essential services. The federal commitment included a 6-percent annual increase in federal transfers. A divisive and years-long debate was concluded with the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005.” Any improvement to healthcare disproportionately benefits Black folks because many Black folks have health issues related to the economic challenges flowing from systemic anti-Black racism. Legalizing same sex marriage directly benefited Black LQBTQ2+ folks – which was particularly important since homophobia was, and still is, an issue in Black communities as in the larger society.  

The Stephen Harper minorities (2006-08 and 2008-11)

“When the government’s 2008 fall economic update failed to announce stimulus measures in the face of the rapidly developing world credit crisis and recession, the opposition leaders threatened to topple the government. The Liberals and the NDP proposed a coalition government supported by the Bloc Québécois. After several days of crisis, Harper secured a highly controversial prorogation [pause] from the Governor General. A notable Harper accomplishment was his eventual response to the…financial crisis. Chastened by their recent near-death experience at the hands of the opposition and forced to play against their conservative fiscal instincts, Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, [included in the 2009 budget] $40 billion in stimulus and $20 billion in personal income tax cuts…taking the country sharply into deficit. The government’s aggressive response enabled the Canadian economy to recover more quickly and come out of the recession stronger than other G7 countries. 

At the 2010 G8 Summit hosted by Canada, the Conservatives launched a signature commitment to the summit’s initiative on maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH). Starting with a leadership pledge of $2.85 billion for 2010-15, the government followed up with an additional $3.5-billion commitment for 2015-20.” Just as with the COVID pandemic, Black folks were disproportionately negatively impacted by the global financial crisis so they would have benefited more than many from these measures to address it. Improvements to maternal health would also disproportionately help Black women since the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, in pre-pandemic times, Black women in the U.S. died of pregnancy-related causes at a rate three times higher than white women, and Black babies were twice as likely to die before reaching their first birthday than white babies, regardless of the mother’s income or education level. According to a 2020 Huffington Post article by Eternity E Martis, because Canada doesn’t collect race-based health data, we don’t have an accurate picture of Black maternal mortality in this country. The Liberal government’s 2021 budget included almost $200 million over five years for Statistics Canada to collect data on “diverse populations, and support the government’s, and society’s, efforts to address systemic racism, gender gaps.” It’s crucial that include health data.

Minority governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have delivered lots of good stuff for Black Canadians and can be expected to continue doing so. Majority government have delivered some good things too like the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act and the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, both enacted by Pierre Trudeau majorities, but minority governments have delivered much more according to my (limited) research.

So Black folks need to discard the idea that voting for a candidate of a party that has little chance of gaining power is a “wasted vote” because, in a minority government, that party could end up holding the balance of power. Black folks can then push all parties to deliver the goods with a higher chance of success.

Categories
Media Racism TV

Why white people can’t wait for the zombie apocalypse

Like many people, I’ve watched a lot of TV during the pandemic including recently finishing all nine seasons of The Walking Dead. TWD follows the lives of groups of people near Altanta, Georgia trying to survive following an apocalypse that’s turned most of the world into flesh eating zombies with poor motor skills (they can’t climb, swim or move faster than an average Tim Horton’s lineup).

Life is pretty bad, except for one thing: there’s no racism. There are “good” and “bad” people of different races but no racism. In fact, in the 131 TWD episodes I watched, there was only one reference to race in one early episode when one of the minor bad white characters called one of the good Black characters the n-word and then the main good character smacked the bad guy and told him “There are no more n%$#s and there are more dumb as shit, inbred, white trash. There’s just us.” After that, nobody ever mentioned race again. So, to repeat: this story, set in Georgia, about groups fighting for scarce resources to survive, has no racism in it. Well, no blatant racism.

The leaders of all the major warring groups are white men, two are “bad” and the third, the star of the whole show, is “good”. Rick Grimes is a former sheriff from a small Georgia town who doesn’t seem to have a racist bone in his body (and, to his credit, manages to keep all his bones in his body for nine seasons). Rick leads his group in defending themselves against the walkers (as they call the zombies) and the other groups. They do some pretty bad stuff but always only in immediate or proactive self-defence. No one in Rick’s group or any other one ever does or says anything to suggest they see other groups as anything but bad people. They only see the walkers as sub-human. There aren’t any groups that hate people because of who they are and justify taking their stuff based on that. Sure, they kill each other for each other’s stuff and self-defence but all while respecting each other’s basic humanity – which is much easier to do when you’re literally surrounded by zombies. [Of course the zombies aren’t racist. They’ll eat anyone…although comic duo Key and Peele envision what things might look like if the zombies retained a little more of their former selves in their sketch White Zombies.]

There are many other times in TWD that scream for race to be raised only for the characters to remain silent.

  1. Rick hooks up with Michonne, a dark-skinned, dreadlocked samurai sword wielding warrior and they have a brown kid but they never mention race in the past, present or future.
  2. After Rick’s group defeats another group, some of the surviving former bad guys join Rick’s group at Rick’s urging and over the objections of some of Rick’s group who want to just kill them. Shortly after, the former bad people start disappearing. Two of Rick’s group investigating what’s happening discover members of their group about to execute a Black woman who was formerly with the bad guys and find out they’re responsible for killing the other missing people. After briefly trying to dissuade their comrades from killing the woman they walk away and let them execute her. However, a white woman who was with the bad folks before, including trying to kill members of Rick’s group like the Black woman did, is allowed to stay on as a trusted member of Rick’s group.

In addition to not mentioning race or racism on a personal level, no one mentions the role they may have played in starting the apocalypse. In fact, no one seems to know what caused it. This isn’t surprising since TWD creator Robert Kirkman only revealed the source of the outbreak in 2020. Comicbook.com reported Kirkman “said the zombie outbreak occurred because of a “space spore” when asked on Twitter, which is likely another homage to the godfather of the zombie-horror genre George A. Romero. In his classic [1968] film Night of the Living Dead, scientists speculated the creation of zombies could have been caused by a space probe to Venus bringing back radiation with unintended effects.”

Space spores? In all 131 TWD episodes, only one character ever mentions anything suggesting that the outbreak could have been caused by humans in, say, a lab designed to create viruses. In the last episode of TWD season one, the last surviving scientist at the U.S. Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta infers the disease might have been created by the CDC – before he blows up the entire place and himself to avoid anything (else?) getting out.

No other character ever questions if the outbreak could have been caused by something like a military bio-weapon gone bad or a drug company rushing a vaccine to market for profit. They don’t even wonder if it came from natural causes or not, unlike the media reports on the current debate over the origins of the COVID-19 virus. It’s like centuries of race-based capitalist exploitation that led to things like slavery and the decimation of Indigenous people and land never happened. There’s no memory, no accountability and best of all – no guilt.

Also, despite Atlanta’s almost 500,000 people being half Black, TWD has no groups of Black people roaming the countryside, some possibly looking for payback. The TWD world is essentially a massive chance for white folks to start over, blameless – and still in charge.

This wasn’t the case with the film that launched it all: George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. In NLD, the main protagonist is a Black man named Ben who gets trapped in a house with a group of white people just as the zombie apocalypse starts. After leading the group in fighting off the zombies, Ben is shot by a white sheriff. So, NLD’s white sheriff shoots the Black hero and TWD’s white sheriff is the hero. How things have changed…

Now, don’t get me wrong. TWD was great TV. That’s why I watched 131 episodes and eagerly await season 10 hitting Netflix in July. But, as I watched it, I had the same feeling as I did while watching Game of Thrones that I blogged about. I was disturbed that so many people watched it with almost none appearing to notice how blatantly racist it was.

This brings to mind a quote by Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin:

“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to look for it on the bloody floors of Charleston churches and in the dashboard cameras on Texas highways, and overlook it in the smart sounding logic of textbooks, policy statements, court rulings, science journals and cutting edge technologies.”

Her quote could be revised for the Canadian context as:

“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to only see it on bloody London, Ont. street corners and residential school mass graves and overlook it in our technologies, policies, hiring practices, staff, management and the massively popular American TV shows we all happily consume.”

Comicbook.com also reported that, when asked about the origin of the zombie virus during a 2018 Q&A on Tumblr, TWD creator Kirkman said, “It couldn’t be less important to the story and the lives of these characters.”

It appears the other thing that both Kirkman and his characters have forgotten is the old saying, “Those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

These zombie shows are the dramatic representation of a future where everyone says, “I don’t see color.”, still without realizing that’s part of the problem.

Categories
#metoo Cancel culture PC Political correctness

It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture

If you consume any mainstream or social media you’ve probably heard at least one story about someone being “cancelled”. That’s when someone says or does something, or someone finds out they said or did something years ago, then lots of people criticize them on social media and something of theirs gets taken away. 

The #metoo movement resulted in a bunch of people, mostly white men, being cancelled like actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis CK and movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Although most of the high profile cancelling (as far as I can see) came from the left, people on the right do it too. In 2018, some of them attacked Asian New York Times journalist Sarah Jeong for her satirical tweets about white people she posted in response to tweets like these that she got from white people:

Right wing critics of cancel culture say it’s political correctness on steroids (like, they literally say that.) Political correctness, or PC, is one of those terms that’s often used but poorly understood. Wikipedia describes it as, “a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. In public discourse and the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.”

In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”

The term PC, as we know it today, emerged in the 1970s and folks on the right have used it since then to target everything from policies against hate speech to affirmative action hiring policies for disadvantaged groups. But the term was used earlier than that. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct”. This is particularly relevant since some folks on the right sometimes label those they see as being PC, as Nazis. This includes former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. As a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Buzzfeed quoted Carson saying, “political correctness has caused Americans to fall silent, very much like the people in Nazi Germany were silent.”  

Calling people Nazis is the clearest expression of something about the term PC that’s rarely discussed: it assumes that those being PC have both the desire – and power – to control others’ thoughts and actions. This idea is also behind the term “thought police” covered in the Dec. 1990 Newsweek article, Taking Offense: Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism? Thought Police. The irony of the right using the term “police” is they’re equating folks on the left with a state institution that has the actual power to enforce behaviour, up to and including killing people. And, even in the U.S., I can’t think of one example of folks saying the police were run by the left unlike what they often say about the media. It’s not folks on the left yelling Blue Lives Matter.

The right also has more power to influence thought, and thus action, through conservative think tanks which include the most influential ones in the U.S. and are about equal in number with progressive ones in Canada. 

The conservative American John M. Foundation funded books like Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus in which D’Souza used “[PC] terminology for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as “canon busting”).” Books like D’Souza’s, combined with social media misinformation and conservative talk radio that both overwhelmingly lean to the right, clearly give the right the upper hand when it comes to thought control.

One of the quotes that has stuck with me from my journalism degree is, “The media doesn’t tell people what to think but it tells them what to think about.” The more media “your side” has the more they shape what people think about.

So what other power does the left have?

The left has activists who put their security – and often lives – on the line every day by organizing to expose injustices that show that people in power aren’t following the principles in the documents upon which their organizations are based. The dream that Martin Luther King articulated in his most famous speech was basically that the United States would one day live up to its own constitution. When I was with the Federal Black Employee Caucus, which I co-founded, we spent our time trying to get the federal public service to follow government policy and treat Black employees equitably. We faced a lot of backlash for what we did…and we all know what happened to MLK…

Folks on the right imply that folks on the left have the power to get people cancelled but it’s not the tweeters who cancel people. In most of the high profile celebrity cases at least, it’s massive media corporations that cancel them. And I would argue that it’s the years of personally risky work of activists organizing and raising the issues that makes the companies decide that not cancelling the people could be a risk to their profits because viewers might move to their competitors. One thing backing up my argument is that Facebook and Google, both of whom essentially have no real competition, don’t cancel anything – ever.  

In my rabble.ca article COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again, I talked about how Shoshana Zuboff argues in her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that Facebook and Google’s business models lead them to aggressively fight against any law or regulation that would require them to remove anything from their platforms. That especially includes misinformation and fake news like conspiracy theories as they generate massive amounts of engagement – and massive profits.

Luckily, most companies have competition and are still very sensitive to anything that might damage their brand, especially ideas spread via social media. But folks taking to Twitter to shame the latest celebrity raises some key questions – if you buy my argument that decades of organizing by activists has been key to causing companies to cancel people. Do those calling for people to be cancelled live their lives each day in ways that actively support activists’ work or do they make that work harder through their own inaction? And if those same people aren’t doing anything in their own lives to address systemic inequities but tweeting, then isn’t demanding apologies from those they shame letting society (of which they’re a part) off the hook for creating the conditions that allowed the people shamed to think that their comments were OK in the first place?

If you really want to show you’re down with the cause, get off the cancellation bandwagon and sign up for monthly donations to a local group working to improve Black and Brown lives.

Note: I took much of the PC info from Wikipedia’s Political Correctness post. 

Categories
Blacktivism Measurement

How do Blacktivists measure success?

We’ve all heard it before, “If you want to achieve anything you gotta set goals, preferably SMART ones.” This post is about the M in SMART: measurement. SMART goals include ways to measure progress towards your goal and when you’ve achieved it. (The other letters stand for Specific, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.)

Measuring goals like fundraising campaigns is easy – you just look at your GoFundMe page (or whatever you’re using). However, measuring the success of political advocacy isn’t as easy for several reasons:

  1. Successes can take years;
  2. Many people and groups contribute to successes so it’s hard to evaluate the impact of your organization;
  3. There is often an active opposition working against you so, like fighting a strong current, success might be measured by how little you go back rather than how much you advance;
  4. Good evaluation can be expensive (i.e. measuring changes in public opinion); and
  5. Many people who are judging your success only consider final outcomes like successful policy change as “wins”.

Despite these challenges, advocacy work can, and must, be measured to:

  1. Know if your strategies are the rights ones;
  2. Know if your strategies are working; and
  3. Demonstrate success to the communities you’re trying to help, potential recruits and funders.

Advocacy efforts almost always involve a fight against a strategic adversary capable of learning and adapting over time. In some cases those counter-strategies come from interests who benefit from things as they are and resist change. Blacktivists are up against systems of discrimination and anti-Black racism that benefit, at one time or another, pretty much everyone except Black folks. What really distinguishes one group from another is the nimbleness and creativity it displays when faced with unexpected moves by its rivals or the reduced effectiveness of its key tools. Given this, adopting a “best practice” can sometimes be a disadvantage, if it means that one’s moves are easily predicted and countered. Advocacy, like war, rarely stays at equilibrium, and so success requires constant innovation to keep one’s adversary off-balance and force it onto the defensive.

Measuring success as a Canadian Black political advocate is particularly challenging as there are far fewer examples than in the U.S. of successful Black political advocacy organizations from which to learn. Also, similar to our American counterparts, some of our fiercest opposition comes from other Black folks. This is because generations of successful divide and conquering by white folks has trained many Black folks to see Black political advocacy organizations as uppity trouble-causing negroes – especially when we critique Black leaders. The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t always enjoy the widespread support it has now – from white folks or Black folks. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were both critiqued, at points in their careers, by members of the Black community. And it’s not just Blacktivists leading organizations who face critique. In Canada, activist, journalist and best-selling author of The Skin We’re In, Desmond Cole, has been harshly attacked by Black people for reporting on the Federation of Black Canadians. Since publishing their recent pieces critical of the BlackNorth Initiative, Cole and Nova Scotia-based activist, poet and educator, El Jones, “…have faced predictable push back by some members of the Black community who claim that asking questions or making critiques of Black people’s public actions equates to a malicious “destroying” of other Black people.”

Given all this, while striving to achieve the big, final goals, how else should Canadian Blacktivists measure success? Here are 10 suggestions:

  1. The media is calling you. – If your local media regularly calls you for comment, you’re probably doing something right. Use those opportunities to communicate your key messages, even as you know they’ll shape them to fit their agenda.
  2. People attend your meetings. – If you regularly get good attendance at your meetings, that’s good. If not, ask folks why they’re not attending and what you could do to make things more relevant.
  3. People in power meet with you when you ask them to.
  4. You are building new mutually beneficial relationships. – We have to work together to win so building relationships with other Black and ally groups is key (i.e. Indigenous, LGBTQ+, women’s groups, etc.)
  5. People attack you for asking tough questions. – One of the main things Blacktivists do is ask tough questions of people in power – and keep asking until we get credible answers. This often leads to people calling us aggressive or bullies, saying we have “agendas” or saying we’re trying to “shame” people. What they rarely, if ever, do is answer our questions. Keep asking.
  6. You’ve got haters on both sides. – If you’re following your principles and still occasionally get attacked by both white and Black folks, you’ve probably found a good middle ground.
  7. Other Blacktivists defend you when you’re attacked. – Being attacked is part of being a Blacktivist. If other Blacktivists defend you when you’re attacked, especially when they see things online, that’s a great show of support.
  8. People give you money. – One of the best measures of success is folks opening up their wallets – especially to sign up for monthly donations.
  9. People join – and stay with – your group.
  10. People thank you for helping them. – The best indicator of all.

As an example, our group joined many others in fall 2020 to lobby the Ottawa Police Services Board and Ottawa city council to reject the $13 million budget increase requested by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). We didn’t succeed in blocking the increase but that was only one measure of success. We increased our group’s profile and credibility, made connections with other groups, learned lots about who’s with us and who’s not, educated people about what “defunding the police” really means in Ottawa and got council to commit to look at freezing the OPS budget next year – something we can now hold them to account for.

One final point…

To be an effective Blacktivist you have be as independent as possible from the people you’re lobbying. That’s not easy to achieve for a lot of Black folks as the current system leaves many individuals and organizations dependent on income and funding that limits their ability to speak out.

As more of us break free of those financial chains, the more powerful – and unstoppable – we will become.