Category Archives: Political Correctness

History is contested because the telling of history is powerful.

President Joe Biden brought eloquent leadership to a national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of a massacre in Tulsa, Okla., this month. In 1921, hundreds of Black men, women, and children were murdered, and a thriving community was destroyed in a singular racialized mass murder.

These murders took place as the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent, energized by the vehemently racist 1915 filmBirth of a Nation, which promoted the false pro-Confederacy Lost Cause version of the history of slavery and the Civil War.

The truth was systematically covered up, deliberately erased from our collective memory, by public officials, news media, and textbooks.

It would be tempting to think that a cover-up of this magnitude could never happen today. But we may be on the verge of an even greater historical cover-up. Republican legislators instateslikeTexas,Iowa, andOhio, egged on by right-wing cable TV and social media personalities, are trying to outlaw honest teaching about the racial violence in our history and the structural racism that harms Black people and other people of color today. Republicans in Congress aremovingto restrict discussions of racism in military and federal government training.

Right-wing alarmism about openly addressing racism is this election cycles version of the war on political correctness waged by right-wing media and former president Donald Trump. It is a rhetorical strategy with a partisan purpose. It is meant to convince a segment of white voters that they should fear and fight our emerging multiracial and multiethnic democratic society. It is meant to help far-right politicians take and hold power, no matter the cost to our democracy.

Throughout American history, political operatives like the promoters of pro-Confederacy revisionism to countless boards of education have understood that controlling the narrative about the past was a key to shaping the future. That is why right-wing forces have fought so hard to dictate the content of textbooks, purging progressive leaders and whitewashing history in order to promote a certain kind of politically advantageous patriotism among students. And it is why Republican senators blocked the creation of a commission to examine the truth about the deadly Capitol insurrection, which many right-wing politicians and pundits are now pretending was no big deal.

The online publicationThe Rootrecently undertook a fascinatinginvestigation. It tracked down the educational standards and history textbooks that would have been in place when politicians who are now fighting schools use ofThe New York Times 1619 Projecta deep inquiry into the role of racism and slavery in US historywere in school themselves. The results are as revealing as they are repugnant. Materials used in public schools across the South for decades taught that slave masters were a kindly lot, that the war for Southern independence was not about slavery but resisting Northern tyranny, and that the KKK was formed to keep the peace by keeping Black people in their place.

It is no coincidence that the right-wing war against history and truth is being waged at the same time that new voter suppression laws are being justified by false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump by Black and brown voters casting fraudulent ballots.

Todays manipulators of history are pursuing a dangerous strategy. They want to weaponize fear and anger to help them win elections in 2022 and 2024. But once fomented, hatred is difficult to control.

Witness the rise of overt white nationalism and hate crimes that accompanied Trumps intentionally inflammatory rhetoric.

America is on the cusp of something new. We are becoming a democratic society in which no one ethnic or religious group makes up a majority of the country. Some see that as a threat. I see it as an opportunity to fulfill Frederick Douglasss vision of the destiny of the United States to be the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.

We can only get there through honesty about our past, openness about the challenges of the present, and commitment to a future in which we, the people means all the people.

Ben Jealous is currently president of People For the American Way and the former national president and CEO of the NAACP.

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There is a cover-up underway in America - St. Louis American

While crisscrossing the state in my campaign for U.S. Senate, I hear from Ohioans in all corners about the issues they care about. Lately, the issue of Critical Race Theory is front and center as concerned parents are worried about the curriculum that schools are teaching children.

These concerns became so prevalent that I launched a statewide listening tour on education to hear directly from parents about what is really going on behind classroom doors and whether or not Critical Race Theory is seeping into our schools.

The answer? It is.

Democrats and many in the media are trying to discredit this claim from myself and other conservatives in Ohio and across the country. They want to chalk it up as a fabricated culture war or say that Republicans dont want Americas full history taught.

That is unequivocally false.

Americas history should be taught the good, the bad and the ugly in order for our children to understand our nations history, learn from our mistakes, and be better for tomorrow. No one is disputing that.

But that doesnt mean that Critical Race Theory is good policy for our children in fact, it is the exact opposite. Critical Race Theory is born of a Marxist doctrine that seeks to otherize our children and put society into boxes White, Black, Oppressor, Oppressed, etc. If we look back through history, when has otherizing a segment of our population ever turned out to be good?

This theory, and others like it, become dangerous once we use it to assign labels to students based solely on their skin color or ideology, not on their character or how they treat people. This labeling race, gender, and identity politics is taking hold in Ohio schools.

A second grader taught to draw himself as a different race. Anti-police rhetoric causing one young child to ask their Grandpa, a veteran of the police force, if he did bad things to Black people. A civil disobedience walkout where if a student didnt participate quick enough, they were labeled racist by their peers.

Grade-school children being forced to memorize 80 different genders. Gender-neutral bathrooms unilaterally implemented in elementary schools. A teacher dividing a high school classroom into those that believed biological males should compete in girls sports and those that didnt.

These are just some of the stories I have heard while traveling Ohio that have left young children feeling marginalized, peer pressured, guilty and confused.

No, schools arent often plastering a curriculum on their website for the media to examine that says Critical Race Theory taught here but it and other radical teachings are happening, and that also gets to the core of the problem. Parents all across the state are complaining that they cannot get access to what is being taught to their children. There is no transparency, no sunlight on the curriculum.

This debate isnt just about the three words, Critical Race Theory. Its about the future of our country.

Our schools are already falling behind, magnified by a year of virtual learning, and we have a major workforce crisis in this country. We need to be doubling down on math, science, and reading, focusing on skilled trades and connecting students with businesses and mentorships things that will prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. China is laughing all the way to the bank that our schools are more focused on political correctness than competing in a global economy.

Its about school reform. The outrage over Critical Race Theory highlights the need to expand educational opportunities and access through school choice. No child should be confined to a school that is failing them solely because of their zip code.

And most importantly, I believe its about the soul of our nation.

God created us all equal. The tenants of America are that we all have equal opportunity. We should be teaching the ideals of America that have made it a beacon of hope for people all across the world who have come to achieve a better future for themselves and their families.

A good education is what allowed me, a daughter and granddaughter of immigrants, to achieve my American Dream. As a U.S. Senator, I will unapologetically and fiercely defend your childrens right to the best education so that they can live theirs.

Timken

Jane Timken is a candidate for the United States Senate. She was formerly the chair of the Ohio Republican Party.

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Debate on Critical Race Theory is about future of country - Delaware Gazette

An ex-top trustee of Manhattanselite Spence Schoolsays she yanked her daughter out over her growing disgust with its racial indoctrination capped by a class video that tarred and feathered white women.

Hispanic tech exec Gabriela Baron fired off a scorched-earth letter to the prestigious Upper East Side institution last week seething that the video shown to her eighth-grade daughter and classmates on graduation day openly derides, humiliates and ridicules white women.

They sat there in their graduation dresses while the white mothers of the white students many of whom volunteer, donate, call, email and do whatever the school asks of them were tarred and feathered in a video their teacher showed them. While their white female teachers were mocked, Baron raged in the missive, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.

Baron said the footage, featuring racially charged comedianZiwe Fumudoh, was just another indication of what she and her husband see happening at Spence (and many other schools in NYC).

Over the last several years my husband and I have grown increasingly concerned about certain trends at Spence, including what we believe is a de-emphasis of academic rigor and a single-minded focus on race, diversity and inclusion that is now driving the School and everything that goes on within its walls, wrote Baron, the daughter of Cuban immigrants.

Spence is among a slew ofposh woke private schoolsin New York City that have come under fire for allegedly putting political correctness before actual learning and common-sense.

Baron who confirmed to The Post on Tuesday that she sent the letter is an alum of Spence, which includes actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Kerry Washington and Michael Bloombergs daughter Georgina among its graduates. The K-12 schoolcharges more than$57,400 a year per student.

The blatantly racist video, shown during her daughters last middle-school history class was ofFumudohs premiere episodeof her Showtime talk series Ziwe, which aired last month, Baron said.

It featured sit-downs with writer Fran Lebowitz, womens rights icon Gloria Steinem and four white womennamed Karen.

The caption to introduce Lebowitz read, Author, Public Speaker, White Woman. At one point, Fumudoh remarked to her, I believe that you are not concerned with how annoying white women can be.

The host also said, What percentage of white women do you hate? And there is a right answer.

Fumudoh asked Steinem how many black friends she has, then read her obscene lyrics fromthe rap song WAPbyCardi B and Megan Thee Stallionand wanted to know whether the activist felt empowered by them.

Before the Karens took the stage, Fumudoh read what she said was an Urban Dictionary meaning for their name, which included obnoxious, angry and entitled, often racist, white women.

At the end of the segment, Fumudoh gave the women temporary tattoos that said, Karen & Proud.

It astounds me that a Spence faculty member felt comfortable showing this to students and thought it was acceptable to do so, Baron said of the mocking, cringe-worthy footage.

Had the video derided and ridiculed Asian women, Black women or Hispanic women, the Spence community would declare with one voice that it was blatantly racist, said the mom, executive vice president of strategy at the tech software firm KLDiscovery,according to her LinkedIn page.

In fact, had a similar video been shown making fun of ANY OTHER racial group, Spence, its faculty, the Board and the entire community would be whipped into a frenzy, Baron said. Is Ziwes video somehow not racist and acceptable to Spence because it attacks whites?

Podcast journalist Megyn Kelly tweeted out a copy of Barons letter Tuesday while noting her familys own saga with the Big Apples ritzy ultra-liberal private schools.

(Another) Spence parent pulls her kid after grossly racist episode attacking white women is forced on girls in class on last day of school, Kelly tweeted.

We just left this school bc of its growing far-left indoctrination, wrote Kelly, who reportedly pulled her daughter from the institution, as well as her two sons from the prestigious all-boys Collegiate School, this past winter over the academies woke policies.

This is a place weve loved-breaks my heart theyre doing this, Kelly added of Spence.

Baron said Spences showing of the video to its middle-school students on their special day earlier this month was only the final straw for her and her husband at the PC-obsessed all-girls institution which has a task force to make sure it is the anti-racist institution it aspires to be.

She said that several years ago, students in Spences lower school were required to make politically-oriented protest posters. Baron said that when she protested, she was falsely told by school officials that this was not the case.

In 2019, a Manhattan couplesued the schoolfor allegedly buying into a Mean Girls scheme in which two students branded their daughter a racist over an innocent Instagram post.

I believe this

incident is emblematic of a larger problem and a sad reflection of the current climate at Spence, Baron wrote in her June 11 letter to Board members, administrators, faculty members and fellow parents.

When our daughter was accepted to Spence, I wept, she said. I was so proud to be able to give her a Spence education.

But as some of you know, my concerns about Spences direction led me to resign from my position as an Annual Fund co-chair in 2018, she said. Those concerns also caused us to vote with our feet and make the difficult decision to have our daughter attend high school at a different school.

Baron listed her long association with the tony academy.

I attended Spence from 8th grade through 12th, graduating with the Class of 1989, she said.

For more than 25 years I was one of the Spences most involved alums, serving on its board of trustees for eight years and constantly co-chairing its Annual Fund.

I believe that the family of every student in that class is owed an apology from the school, she said, referring to the video.

Racism is racism.

The school responded in an e-mail to The Post,This satirical video is not a part of our curriculum.

We trust our dedicated teachers and stand by their professionalism and commitment to our students, it added.

Baron declined comment to The Post.

See original here:

NYC's Spence School showed video that 'tarred and feathered' white women: ex-trustee - New York Post

OPINION: There are periods of time glued into our collective psyche.

The Chinese had their dynasties, and the Cultural Revolution, (more like the cultural annihilation). Picasso had his blue and rose periods, and England, the Elizabethan, Victorian and Edwardian eras. Never to be forgotten for those of my generation: the lingering Cold War era.

Now it appears to me that we are deeply entrenched in a time period not as clear, but just as terrifying. We seem to be chin deep in a new terrifying era. The Era of Fear.

Mankind has always had great periods of fear, generated by fear of war, pestilence and fundamental religions. Now it would seem we fear everything. As I drove through Christchurch last week I began to think about the relentless feeling of fear so many of us allow ourselves to wade in.

READ MORE:* We have become lab rats in an age of surveillance capitalism * Kirstie Alley calls Oscars' new diversity standards 'dictatorial' and a 'disgrace'* I'm still carrying the trauma of war - please let's spare others that

Will this time on Earth be just regarded like the bland early 2000s, which certainly endured the fear of terrorism? Or, is our legacy going to be the entire human race afraid of everything? I began to disassemble the fear structure. I looked at the layers, and concluded that many of us here in New Zealand, and possibly the world, are ruled by fear.

The fear of Covid-19 will quite possibly have a new name. Just like WW1, which until 1939 was referred to as The Great War, Covid-19 may be known as 'The First Wave'.

Fear of poverty. Houses are too expensive to buy, unless by miracle or through generational wealth. Food, doubled in price. Travel, too expensive for the average person to consider. Vile drugs like meth seeping into every level of society. Streets we could once walk, now more dangerous than the streets of Manhattan in the 1970s or the East End of London in the 1880s. Home invasions on people who could little afford to lose anything, perpetrated by people too cooked to care. Prisons full to bursting with people caught up in the poverty cycle.

Fear of losing money. People already exceptionally wealthy, frightened to let go of their wealth for fear they might lose it all, and therefore hoarding it or buying up everything in sight, only to sit like Smaug on their piles of gold and treasure.

LAWRENCE SMTH/Stuff

Northland Regional Council's new coastal hazard maps show flooding and erosion risks in Mangawhai, including for Alamar Cres where Bruce Rogan lives.

Fear of saying the wrong thing. We need to live our lives not causing harm, but this political correctness that has been sucked up by nearly everyone, bar the bubble-protected white male talk show hosts, who appear to be able to say outrageously offensive things, with little regard or kick back. Most of us must carefully regard everything we say on social media, on the radio, and in print. If there is offence, there are mobs of keyboard warriors ready with burning crosses, and vile vitriol ready. Thus, we have a healthy fear of saying or writing anything before passing it by HR.

Fear of HR. Who are they? I have had my opinion that has caused both offence and applause. They are the 'secret police.' Ally of the worker of the corporation? No idea. They incite fear nonetheless.

Fear of not working hard enough. Fear of losing our jobs. Fear of not making a budget, not getting the ratings, not being seen as not toeing the company line. Many of us have spent decades succeeding through the fear of not succeeding. The enjoyment of the career is eclipsed by the fear of not meeting floating expectations.

The fear of love and lust. Dating apps have made us wonder if romance has been beaten down, and now our only chance of physical love is through a fast fornication app. Fear that love and a growing relationship is no longer a commodity, and the willingness to get your clothes off quickly and move on, has become the number one way to get a bit of 'love.'

Fear that if the secret police find out we're not perfectly recycling, eating organically, ingesting gluten, carbs and meat, we'll be outed, ostracised, and put in the stocks in the middle of Civic Square. Fear of wearing anything not made of homegrown organically farmed bamboo, hemp, or hand raised alpaca fibres. Fear of cyclists arming themselves against the evil drivers. Fear of a vegan revolution. Fear of meat and its ugly sister, sugar.

Robbie Jack/Corbis/Getty Images

Did Goerge Orwell have it right all along? Pictured: Artists in an adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan at the Playhouse Theatre in London.

Fear our children will either grow up to be smart kids with good degrees but no jobs. A fear our children will drop out of society and spend their time marching for the climate. Fear the earth will suddenly become covered in ice, or a global desert. A fear of saying anything out loud that isn't scripted, edited, and had several meetings concerning the content. Fear of doing anything 'live'.

Fear of technology leaving us behind. I don't have a hybrid car. I'm not confident with the security of online shopping in China. Fear of being hacked. (Happened to me twice.) Fear of missing out. Fear of not knowing what I'm missing out on. Fear I'm on some spectrum. Fear of being irrelevant, although being relevant comes with a fear of being exposed to haters and trolls. Fear the police are watching. Fear the police are too busy catching meth criminals to watch. Fear Google can read our minds, or at very least our phone interactions. Fear of being alone, and fear our children will never leave home.

Are we now living in the era of mass fear?Did George Orwell foretell the future?

It is a mix of fearlessness and indifference that I choose not to read comments on my columns. I never do. But I would be lying if I didn't mention it also includes the fear that some wealthy, hemp-wearing vegan who owns a recycling spy camera won't come at me like a mad gold and diamond sword, trying to cut me to shreds.

I fear Cryptocurrency. I fear it's the world's largest practical joke. Good luck with that.

See the article here:

In a time ruled by fear, here are some of mine - Stuff.co.nz

Just before Englands match with Croatia, when the players knelt on one knee to express their opposition to racism and discrimination, something strange and uplifting happened. A sizeable proportion of the Wembley crowd of 22,500 stood up and applauded.

It was a vocal, highly visible, and certainly unfashionable demonstration in favour of the England players taking the knee, a symbolic act that has been ridiculed as virtue signalling, criticised as politically suspect, and derided as an example of pervasive wokeism.

Many may just have been registering their support for the team, but nevertheless, they were loud, proud, and unafraid to go against the tide of popular opinion.

A guide to today's talking points, straight to your inbox

No matter what youve heard on phone-in programmes, read in newspapers, or seen on the television, its not those who oppose wokeism who are underrepresented in popular discourse. Piers Morgan has written a book about it. The most widely-read newspapers have endless columns about it. A new TV channel, GB News, has launched, vowing to be anti-woke.

What you dont find very often in the mainstream media are people prepared to take a stand in favour of woke culture. The dictionary definition of woke is to be alert to injustice in society, especially racism, but it has come to encompass all points on the inclusiveness and inequality spectrum, including gender rights and historicalrevisionism.

In many peoples minds, woke has become little more than modern shorthand for political correctness gone mad. But political correctness, for all its well-publicised extremes, has brought enormous benefits for civil society in terms of equality, protection for minority interests, tolerance and respect.

Wokeism, likewise, seeks to redress injustice who would have a problem with that?

Well, Dan Wootton, for one. I dont want to expend too much energy on denouncing GB Newss motormouth, but it seems to me that Chris Bryant, the former deputy leader of the House of Commons, got his number when, in an interview in which Wootton was criticising the use of lockdowns, the MP told him: Youre a complete and utter nutcase. And youredangerous.

Wootton, in his debut show, speciously conflated taking the knee with the more outlandish political ambitions of Black Lives Matter when the two were decoupled some time ago. He said that booing those who take the knee doesnt make you a racist.

Of course not, Dan.Not everyone who boos is a racist. But every racist boos. Hes entitled to his opinion, as I am. Its just that his is one that is heard much more frequently these days.

GB News is, according to its chairman, Andrew Neil, giving voice to those who felt sidelined or even silenced in our great national debates. Its as if Brexit never happened. And a populist Prime Minister hadnt been elected.

The real silent majority now comprises those who believe in equality and social justice, but are afraid to proclaim it for fear of being attacked as a member of the woke brigade. Id be proud to be considered woke. Like those England fans, we should stand up and be counted.

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GB News: the row over the England team taking the knee shows we dont need more anti-woke voices - iNews

The last few years has seen the introduction of one deceptive and destructive cultural idea after another. First it was wokeness, or extreme political correctness, which places more value on how woke you are to a problem rather than looking at the problem objectively and considering the facts. This lack of free thinking is leading inexorably to another sinister tool of political radicals: cancel culture, which is the Marxist-style denouncing and public shaming of any opposing thought one finds offensive, or that doesnt fit the narrative or aims of a particular political group or movement. Now, a close cousin of wokeness and cancel culture is attempting to sneak its way into one of the most influential institutions in our society our schools and that threat is Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Critical Race Theory has its origins in Marxism and has found its modern expression in the 1619 Project, an anti-American alternative history that teaches the United States didnt start in 1776 but, rather, with the arrival of slaves in the New World in 1619. Its spiritual antecedent, CRT, is an academic discipline based on racial theory and class struggle that blames societal problems on whiteness and teaches that our law and the history of our country is inherently racist. The goal of CRT is not equality of opportunity, which is something at which America thrives. After all, more people in the United States have been lifted out of poverty than in any nation at any time in modern history. Rather, the goal is to distort American history and overturn the ideals on which this country was founded imbued in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Take, for example, the teachings of one of Critical Race Theorists biggest cheerleaders, Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. According to Kendi, (I)n order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist. Doesnt this sound like the Marxist goal of destroying capitalism through CRT and identity politics? The author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, had this to say about her motivations: (T)he white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world. Is this the message we want to send to our kids about equality and coming together as a country?

Thats really the issue, isnt it? How this affects our children. Critical Race Theory is not about equality, social justice or any other dressed up rhetoric. Its an attempt to indoctrinate our children into a false ideology that is its own form of discrimination. Students all over the country would be taught they are responsible for events that happened centuries before they were born and that the answer to discrimination against others in the past is discrimination against them in the present. Its wrong and it cant be allowed to continue.

Why, then, is CRT going forward, seemingly unabated? Its because too many Americans are afraid of speaking out about political and social issues, especially when race is involved. If someone does speak out, they are attacked with the cynical political tool I mentioned above cancel culture. Action is the answer and thats why I filed Senate Bill 586 in the Missouri Senate. This bill would ban the teaching of divisive concepts like any race is superior to another or that any persons moral character is determined by their race or that the United States is fundamentally racist. We all know these are lies and that the logic and underpinnings of these concepts is flawed. In fact, teaching one race is superior to another or a race should feel guilt or psychological distress because of their race is the very definition of racism, and it has no place in classrooms.

We cant erase the history of country and the sins of our past by creating new ones. And teaching a new form of racial discrimination in our schools would be doing just that. Critical Race Theory must be combatted for the subversive and politically-motivated movement that it is and that starts with passing public policy like SB 586. This cant wait until next year when the Legislature meets again. The governor should call an extra session, and we should join the likes of Texas, Tennessee, Arizona and others, and say NO to Critical Race Theory in our schools.

If you have any ideas, questions and concern, please feel free to contact me at the State Capitol: (573) 751-2108, rick.brattin@senate.mo.gov or by writing to Sen. Rick Brattin, Missouri State Capitol, Room 331, Jefferson City, MO 65101.

God bless and thank you for the opportunity to work for you in the Missouri Senate.

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Sen. Rick Brattin's Capitol Report for the Week of May 31: Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and the Indoctrination of America's Children ...

Jesse Brown| The Herald News

Jesse Brown, 43, of Plymouth, is a candidate for Congress.

For the past 10 years, the 9th Congressional District has been represented by Bill Keating, a professional politician who has been running for one office or another since before the day I was born. Its fair to say that there are few people who have spent so long in Washington and accomplished so little.

During his entire time in Congress, Keating has sponsored 84 bills, and not a single one is significant and substantive. To give credit where credit is due, in 2011 Keating did get one bill signed into law an act renaming the post office in Sagamore Beach. Thats the one and only bill he sponsored that became law.

A closer look at his voting record shows that he voted with Nancy Pelosi on every single vote in the last Congress. I dont agree with anyone 100 percent of the time, but it seems Keating is just along for the ride, taking his orders from on high. Its hard to imagine that the residents of Pelosis San Francisco share precisely the same interests as the residents of New Bedford, Fall River or Cape Cod.

I think the 9th District can do better than a go along to get along career politico.

I was raised by a single mom and some good friends who filled in the significant gaps while mom worked three jobs to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Life wasnt easy, and there was no such thing as just skating by.

I joined the Marines when I was just 17 because I knew that for all the challenges I faced as a kid, America had already blessed me with all the opportunity I needed to climb out and up. And thats literally what I did.

After I was honorably discharged from the Marines, I put the skills I had learned to work as a technician climbing cell towers. Its not a job for the faint of heart. After working my way up the ladder, no pun intended, I decided that to make the best life for my newborn daughter I would start a business of my own.

Today, that business, Heidrea Communications, is one of the largest veteran-owned businesses in Massachusetts employing around 70 workers and doing projects throughout New England and New York.

Along the way, I started Heidrea for Heroes, a charitable organization that helps veterans, their families and others who are in need with customized solutions for their specific challenges. Its the most rewarding work Ive ever done and Im grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and help so many of my fellow veterans who sacrificed for our country.

For all its greatness, America has some big challenges. There is a crisis at the border. Runaway spending. Socialism is on the march. They want to defund the police, and political correctness has run amok. Its because of career politicians like Bill Keating whose only mission is to hang on to the perks and power that come with public office.

Im still a young man with more to offer the community, state and nation that has given me so much. Im not one to sit on the sidelines or chirp from the back bench, and it frustrates me to no end to see the gridlock, petty partisanship and sandbox politics that dominate Washington.

Ive worked hard for everything Ive ever had, and I know we can do better. Im running for Congress because I want to help, and I think I can. Its time for a change, and if Im given the privilege of representing you in Congress, Ill bring the same determination, energy and sense of duty that Ive brought to every endeavor. And I wont let you down.

Jesse Brown, 43, of Plymouth, is a candidate for Congress.

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Opinion: Massachusetts' 9th Congressional District can do better than Keating - Fall River Herald News

With or without Donald J. Trump atop the party, the Republican strategy for the 2022 elections and beyond virtually assures race and racism will be central to political debate for years to come.

Why it matters: In an era when every topic seems to turn quickly to race, Republicans see this most divisive issue as either political necessity or an election-winner including as it relates to voting laws, critical race theory, big-city crime, immigration and political correctness.

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The big picture: These topics pit the mostly white GOP against the very diverse Democratic Party. It's unfolding in local school boards, national politics and on social media.

An Axios-Ipsos poll on race relations last month shows this starkly, Axios managing editor Margaret Talev writes:

There's a massive gulf between how Republicans and Democrats view race a 66-point gap on whether the U.S. must continue making changes to give Black Americans equal rights to white Americans.

There's a 48-point gap on whether the events of the past year led to a realization there's still a lot of racism in the U.S. and a 49-point gap on whether the protests were good for society.

Of all demographic groups, white people were the most resistant to structural reforms to address institutional racism a gap driven by Republican sentiment.

Chris Jackson of Ipsos Public Affairs says the GOP focus on race looks counterproductive at first, since a majority of Americans favor continued efforts to equalize the playing field for Black Americans.

But the pollster said a closer look reveals that the GOP's focus is more strategic around specific ideas that drive culture wars and could potentially move swing voters.

Here's where the GOP sees an opening: In our poll, just one in five white independents supports the "defund the police" movement.

Half of white independents say the media exaggerates stories of police brutality and racism.

Two in five white independents say social policies, including affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people.

Those issues prime this slice of the electorate for messaging that paints Democrats as extreme on issues around race.

Between the lines: Republicans have at times played on racial fears for decades. It became more explicit in the Trump era.

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Race central to Republican strategy for 2022 and beyond - Yahoo News

Until 1991, when Clarence Thomas was nominated and then confirmed to the Supreme Court, the most prominent black conservative in America was likely Thomas Sowell, the Chicago-trained economist and polymath. From his longtime perch at Stanfords Hoover Institution, Sowell has, through his books, newspaper columns, and television appearances, done as much to popularize free market economics and to level biting critiques of liberal thinking on race, education, and civil rights as any conservative intellectual of the past 40 years, black or white. Now, he is the subject of a new book, Maverick, by columnist and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley, who attempts to take the measure of one of the eminences of the modern Right.

Maverick is an intellectual biography of Sowell, meaning that its focus is more on its subjects ideas, as revealed in his published writing, than on the facts of his life or psychology. We get only the briefest glimpse of Sowells childhood and young adulthood: Born in rural, segregated North Carolina in 1930 and orphaned at a young age, he was adopted by a great aunt who moved him first to Charlotte and then to Harlem. After dropping out of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, Sowell worked odd jobs and then spent time in the Marines before enrolling in college, first at night classes at Howard University and then at Harvard, from which he graduated with a degree in economics in 1958. After taking a masters degree at Columbia, Sowell then followed his mentor, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, to the University of Chicago to pursue his doctorate. There, Sowell, an undergraduate Marxist, was exposed to the ideas of two other libertarian-leaning Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. Though Riley is at pains to stress that Sowell was no mere sock puppet for his white professors, it was this encounter with the hard-nosed, empirical, free market economics of the Chicago school that paved the way for Sowells shift, in the late 1960s, toward the political Right.

Maverick is structured as a loosely chronological account of Sowells career as a public intellectual, supplemented with personal details from Riley's interviews with Sowell and some of Sowells own correspondence, published in 2006 under the title Man of Letters. Broadly speaking, we see Sowell moving from an early interest in classical political economy and the history of economic thought his early scholarly publications included essays on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx and a book, based on his dissertation, on the 19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say toward the more general inquiries into subjects such as racial inequality and political theory for which he is best known today.

Sowell is an absurdly prolific author (he published 36 books between 1971, when he turned 41 years old, and 2018, when he turned 88) who has tried his hand at a vast array of subjects, meaning that Riley faces a difficult task in providing a concise survey of his thinking in less than 250 pages. But on the whole, he does an admirable job, introducing readers to not only Sowells better-known arguments for instance, that unequal outcomes among minority racial and ethnic groups are better explained by cultural traits than by discrimination, or lack of discrimination, on the part of the majority but also works such as Knowledge and Decisions (1980), in which Sowell both popularized Hayeks theory about how market prices work as a decentralized means of communicating information and broadened the theory's application beyond the field of economics. We also get an ugly glimpse of the way that Sowell has at times been treated by the black liberal establishment, which has accused him of being an Uncle Tom, an unthinking mouthpiece for white conservative interests, and much else that isnt fit to print.

But if Maverick serves as a useful survey of Sowells ideas, it at times sacrifices depth for breadth. Riley emphasizes over and over again that Sowell is, as his title suggests, a maverick and a contrarian who likes to think for himself. But too often, these assertions of Sowells uniqueness serve as a substitute for any meaningful engagement with the broader social and intellectual currents that shaped his work. To cite one small but frustrating example, we are twice told that Stigler threatened to resign as Sowells doctoral adviser because he believed that Sowell had a mistaken interpretation of "Says Law," the idea, in economics, that supply creates its own demand. The point of the anecdote is to illustrate Sowells independent-mindedness, but Riley never, at any point, explains the substance of Stigler's and Sowells disagreement. Perhaps it was over some minor technical point that would bore the general reader, but this is, after all, an intellectual biography of an economist. Those who are easily bored wont be reading it in the first place.

The greater missed opportunity, however, comes in Rileys cursory treatment of what is surely the most obvious and unavoidable fact about Sowell: that he is a black conservative. Riley notes in passing that Sowell, like Clarence Thomas and Glenn Loury, came from a distinctly working-class background and so was always socially separated from the politically liberal black middle class. And Riley mentions the influence on Sowells thought of an earlier generation of black intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, John Hope Franklin, and Kenneth Clark. But it is only that a mention. We are given little sense of how Sowells ideas fit within this tradition of black thought (indeed, only Fraziers ideas are even briefly summarized); rather, we are made to understand Sowells departure from mainstream black thinking as a matter of his prioritizing facts and evidence over emotion and political correctness. Consider, by contrast, the following passage from Corey Robins The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, on how Sowells brand of free market conservatism fit within a certain strand of black thought that stressed the need for black people to achieve autonomy from a white-dominated political process:

In the black experience, argues Sowell, economics has always been more important than politics. Politics is the sphere of white domination and rule; economics, the medium of black transformation and progress. At the moment of African Americans greatest degradation and despair, at the moment of their most acute powerlessness, it was the laws of capitalism that did the most to mitigate and constrain the despotism of white America. With all his supremacist hauteur, the white man was not the master of his house. His posture of superiority, his sense of power, was pushed and pulled by forces beyond his control: by the laws of nature, as refracted through the imperatives of the capitalist market.

Whether one agrees with Robins analysis or not, such attempts to explain how Sowells black identity informs his conservatism and vice versa are especially welcome today, when racial politics threaten to swallow the whole of national politics and when, at the same time, some of the most perceptive and influential critics of the anti-racist establishment are black conservatives and classical liberals, including Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Kmele Foster, as well as, in a different register, Kanye West and Candace Owens. Some of these figures embrace a post-racial identity Foster, for instance, refuses to identify as black but others, such as Loury, West, and Owens, put their blackness, and their concern for the welfare of black people, front and center in their politics. I had hoped that an intellectual biography of Sowell, one of the earliest and most prominent figures in this minitradition, might help me understand the present by casting light on the past. Maverick is fluent and informative, and useful for anyone approaching Sowells work for the first time. But it leaves these larger questions not merely unanswered, but unasked.

Park MacDougald is Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.

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The enigma of Thomas Sowell - Washington Examiner

On May 25, 2020, footage of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set the internet ablaze, igniting a fervor for justice among the attentive and then-quarantined online masses. In the now widely circulated video, George Floyd can be heard pleading, I cant breathe the same three words Eric Garner had yelled not six years prior 28 times before he became unconscious and later died. What followed was nothing short of a wildfire.

Compounded by the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and, later, the killing of activist Oluwatoyin Salau and the shooting of Jacob Blake Floyds murder prompted an international wave of protests and a global dialogue surrounding anti-Blackness and racial injustice in the months following his death. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, by far the largest of its kind, would receive more than $90 million in donations while organizing over 7,750 demonstrations in the US alone between May and August 2020. Online, social media users were quick to take advantage of their digital platforms, informing followers about racial injustice through the sharing of infographics and what artist and educator Mandy Harris Williams aptly titled critical caption essays.

Evidently, the posts were impactful, with 23 percent of adult social media users in the US saying they changed their views about a political or social issue in 2020 due to something they saw on those platforms, up from 15 percent in 2018. Corporate commitment to racial advocacy became a necessity rather than a consideration once social media users began to take aim at specific instances of racism and unfair treatment at many companies. Hundreds of businesses rushed to release pledges committing to upholding racial justice within their organization. But did any of these companies do more than commodify a movement? A year later, have any of these companies transformed themselves for the better?

Beginning on June 2, 2020, Blackout Tuesday would merge these growing trends in online activism and calls for corporate accountability on social media. The online protest involved posting a single image of a black square to Instagram feeds, intended to quite literally black out users feeds and interrupt regular posting as a show of solidarity to Black victims of police violence. By the end of the day, the number of Instagram posts tagged with #BlackoutTuesday was in the tens of millions and more than 950 brands, including ViacomCBS and Apple, had participated in some way. However, the social media protest quickly proved to do more harm than good.

What originally began as a hashtag (#TheShowMustBePaused) created by music executives Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas, to disrupt the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard within the music industry, quickly became appropriated by users, divorced from its original creators and intentions, and made shallow and performative. As #BlackOutTuesday grew in popularity, critiques of the initiative noted how the posting of mostly wordless black squares drowned out Black voices central to movements and obscured valuable information and updates, such as video evidence of police brutality, protest details, and donation links a far cry from the racial uplift the posts set out to achieve. Instead, a majority of Blackout Tuesday posts were effectively one-off statements functioning as a form of virtue signaling, a public expression of an opinion or backing of an idea intended to demonstrate ones moral or political correctness, often without much substantive action.

Before the end of May 2020, racial advocacy and anti-racism were not a priority for socially responsible companies, with consumers struggling to identify businesses seen as good allies to the Black Lives Matter movement. However, as the discussion of racial injustice and discrimination solidified the importance of anti-racism in corporate social responsibility, consumers expect more from where they shop they want donations. In a survey conducted by the public relations firm Edelman in 2020, 60 percent of American respondents said brands needed to use their marketing dollars to advocate for racial equality. The same percentage also said they would buy or boycott a brand based on its response to the ongoing protests. How companies reacted to the BLM movement became a litmus test for how consumers would interact with them in the months to come.

Nike is no stranger to making political statements through its advertising campaigns, especially when it comes to Black Lives Matter. The multinational corporation has a long history of navigating issues pertaining to diversity and inclusion through both its sponsorship of Black athletes and its executive management: In 2018, the Wall Street Journal chronicled Nikes boys-club culture and the executive exits that followed a company-wide probe. Following a 2018 partnership with ousted American football player and activist Colin Kaepernick for the 30th anniversary of its Just Do It ad campaign, Nikes response to the growing unrest was heavily awaited.

On May 29, 2020, prior to Blackout Tuesday, Nike released a video statement on the Black Lives Matter movement in which it called on audiences to pay attention to the unrest unfolding before them. It was met with widespread support and acceptance, with many seeing the statement as a model for corporate social responsibility.

Since then, Nike has continued to restructure its executive leadership team under the stewardship of CEO John Donahoe, promoting Felicia Mayo, a Black woman executive, to the role of diversity chief in July 2020. And as part of the companys internal goals, or Purpose 2025 Targets, Nike, with Converse, Jordan Brand, and Michael Jordan, committed a combined $140 million over 10 years in support of local and national organizations dedicated to addressing racial inequality for Black Americans, an initiative known as the Black Community Commitment. Though not a gold standard, Nikes promise of holistic social responsibility has been matched by few companies.

The millennial-pink beauty brand Glossiers rather diverse word-of-mouth marketing strategy has helped maintain the companys reputation as one of the industrys more inclusive and progressive companies. On May 30, 2020, Glossier similarly posted a statement on Instagram pledging to stand in solidarity with Black communities and the Black Lives Matter movement. It also committed to donating a total of $1 million to Black-owned beauty businesses and organizations addressing racial injustice through an inaugural grant initiative. A year later, Glossier announced it would renew the grant program for 2021 as part of a broader $10 million commitment to bolster equity, inclusion, and representation in the beauty industry over the next five years.

Despite this, Outta the Gloss, a collective of former retail employees of the company, shared on Instagram an open letter to Glossier in August 2020. The letter detailed a sometimes racist and inequitable working environment and included a list of demands, such as standardized anti-racist training for management and the hiring of an on site HR Liaison working solely with retail. Later, the group launched a boycott of Glossier at the urging of its followers. Other than an August blog post from Glossier CEO and founder Emily Weiss, Outta the Gloss maintains that its demands have yet to be meaningfully acknowledged by the company, leaving consumers to question Glossiers commitment to anti-racism within its own workplace.

In contrast, the beauty company Sephora set to make right a history of racist discrimination in its retail stores. On May 30, 2020, Sephora CEO Jean-Andr Rougeot issued a statement committing to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement; a few days later, it published its own #BlackoutTuesday post and closed its retail stores for a two-hour company-wide training on racial bias. The companys US business also became the first major retailer to sign the 15 Percent Pledge, a campaign founded by fashion designer Aurora James asking retailers to dedicate at least 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. (Retailers and brands such as Vogue, Bloomingdales, and Old Navy among others have since signed on, too.)

Sephora has also pledged to do the following in 2021: increase the seven Black-owned brands it carries to 16, focus on supporting BIPOC founders in beauty through its Sephora Accelerate program, and continue providing new training modules for in-store employees while reducing the presence of third-party security officers.

Meanwhile, the department store Nordstrom was quick to involve itself in the Black Lives Matter movement, despite the companys more conservative customer base. It published a #BlackoutTuesday post, and later released a statement committing to increase representation of Black and Latinx populations in management roles and [deliver] $500M in retail sales from brands owned by, operated by, or designed by Black and/or Latinx individuals, both by the end of 2025. It also promised to ensure that its training resources for customer-facing employees include anti-racism and bias content.

Both Sephora and Nordstrom have acknowledged that in their commitment to addressing anti-racism, the work begins internally.

Other retail companies have failed to make any substantial long-term commitments.

The e-commerce retailer Fashion Nova was criticized by users and influencers alike for failing to acknowledge or respond to the Black Lives Matter movement prior to June 1, 2020, despite its large consumer base of Black women. The fast-fashion retailer which has been called out a number of times for stealing designs from small businesses and Black designers and for underpaying garment workers in its Los Angeles factory ultimately posted a black square with no caption on June 2. It issued a statement the following day in which it remarked, Our actions speak louder than our words, and pledged to donate $1 million to various community resources and activism, awareness campaigns, and other initiatives to help in the fight for racial equality and opportunity.

Fashion Nova has not made any other statements pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement since then, though it continues to partner with celebrities such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in its philanthropic initiative, Fashion Nova CARES, which has provided financial support to the Breonna Taylor Foundation and emerging Black designer Tia Adeola, among others. Despite the companys ubiquity in Black communities and its reliance on Black celebrity and culture for relevance, its Instagram page, which functions as its main form of advertising, is devoid of any mentions of anti-Black racism beyond donations, and lacks representation of Black models.

Starbucks, which also has a fraught history navigating race, pledged to stand in solidarity with its Black partners, customers, and communities, and to donate $1 million to organizations promoting racial equity while simultaneously banning employees and baristas from wearing any pro-Black Lives Matter clothing or accessories. Ultimately, the company revised its decision on the dress code, making 250,000 pro-BLM T-shirts for employees in an attempt to show support for the movement, and continue to offer their elective online anti-bias classes.

And in October, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson announced that the company would tie executive pay to the meeting of racial diversity targets set to boost diversity in Starbucks workforce by 2025, the company aims to have people of color represented in at least 30% of roles in corporate operations and 40% of retail and manufacturing roles, though the company declined to share details of how exactly these goals would be tied to executive pay.

Since then, the company has reached a voluntary agreement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in light of 2007 allegations of racial bias in its promotions, and has started a $100 million Community Resilience Fund that will support small business growth and community development projects in BIPOC neighborhoods.

In the music tech industry, companies such as SiriusXM, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music also made respective Blackout Tuesday posts. On June 2, Spotify shared a number of in-app features intended as a show of solidarity with Black creators and users, though artists were quick to criticize the lack of money being donated. This initial offering included a rather out-of-touch 8-minute, 46-second track of silence meant to memorialize the length of time that George Floyd was suffocated by Derek Chauvin, a Black History Is Now hub, and a selection of Black Lives Matter playlists. Later that week, the company committed to contributing up to $10 million in an employee match allocated to organizations addressing anti-racism and racial justice, donating an additional $1 million in advertising inventory to social justice groups (though $345,000 worth of this advertising budget was used to promote the companys own Black History Is Now hub).

Now, the question remains: Have these companies pledges led to any real impact or change in the year since a national racial reckoning? Among the groups that received money from the aforementioned companies including national organizations such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and the Equal Justice Initiative was the NAACPs Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). In a statement, LDF president Sherrilyn Ifill shared that the most valuable gift over the past year has been the increase in pro bono support which enabled them to litigate and advocate with greater intensity, and to increase the pace of our work, increasing the funds capacity to support Black communities.

Still, if anything is to be learned from how these companies have approached corporate accountability, it is that it pays to take a stand, even if performative. As millennial and Gen Z consumers increasingly expect brands to be actively involved in social justice movements, publicly choosing a stance has rewarded companies with consumer loyalty.

Following Nikes BLM statement video, the company moved up 22 places on Social Chain Datas social media leaderboard in May 2020, into the No. 31 spot. The ice cream company Ben & Jerrys saw its social media reach grow by 35 percent on Twitter and 27 percent on Facebook, after declaring, We must dismantle white supremacy last June. However, #HasBenAndJerrysTweetedYet, a hashtag started by Twitter user @telushk, has been gaining traction this month in light of the companys refusal to acknowledge its investments in Israels illegal settlements. If these predominantly white and men-owned companies ultimately reap the benefits of committing to anti-racism and the fight against white supremacy, is this change really a transformation? And is it substantively supporting Black Americans who confront the burden of racism and racial injustice in their everyday lives?

The range of company pledges, commitments, and statements weve seen indicate an ever-present truth: that no matter how impactful or effective corporate activism is, it will also always be inherently performative. Companies cannot be entrusted to be the leaders of the peoples social justice movements.

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Blackout Tuesday 2020: One year later, what have companies done for Black lives? - Vox.com