Disowning the Lie of Whiteness

September 11, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Hate Crimes, Labor, nonviolence, Police, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, School to Prison Pipeline, segregation, Social Justice, White Allies, White Privilege, Whiteness anti-racism, anti-semitism, Holocaust, jewish, Philosophy, Politics, racism, racist, white ally, white culture, white privilege, white supremacy, Whiteness

The most vivid memory I have of my great-grandfather is the tattoo on his arm.

It wasn’t an anchor or a sweetheart’s name or even the old faithful, “Mom.”

It was just a series of digits scrawled across his withered tan flesh like someone had written a note they didn’t want to forget.

Beneath the copious salt and pepper hairs was a stark number, the darkest stain on his skin.

Gramps is a kindly figure in my mind.

He died before I was even 10-years-old. All I really remember about him are wisps of impressions – his constant smile, a whiff of mothballs, how he always seemed to have butterscotch candies.

And that tattoo.

I think it was my father who told me what it meant.

When he was just a young man, Gramps escaped from Auschwitz. A guard took pity on him and smuggled him out.

His big European family didn’t make it.

My scattered relatives in the United States are all that are left of us.

Those are the only details that have come down to me. And Gramps isn’t here to add anything further.

But his tattoo has never left me.

It’s become a pillar of my subconscious.

The fact that someone could look at my kindly Gramps and still see fit to tattoo a numeric signifier on him as if he were an animal.

A little reminder that he wasn’t human, that he shouldn’t be treated like a person, that he was marked for erasure.

If I look at my own arm, there is no tell-tale integer peeking through the skin. But I am keenly aware of its presence.

I know that it’s there in a very real sense.

It is only the American dream that hides it.

Coming to this country, my family has made a deal, something of a Faustian bargain, but it’s one that most of us have accepted as the price of admission.

It’s called whiteness.

I am white.

Or I get to be white. So long as I suppress any differences to the contrary.

I agree to homogenize myself as much as possible and define myself purely by that signifier.

White. American. No hyphen necessary.

Anything else is secondary. I don’t have to deny it, but I have to keep it hidden until the right context comes to bring it out.

During Octoberfest I have license to be German. When at international village I can root for Poland. And on Saturdays I can wear a Kippah and be Jewish.

But in the normal flow of life, don’t draw attention to my differences. Don’t show everyone the number on my arm.

Because America is a great place, but people here – as in many other places – are drawn to those sorts of symbols and will do what they can to stamp them out.

I learned that in school when I was younger.

There weren’t a lot of Jewish kids where I grew up. I remember lots of cracks about “Jewing” people down, fighting against a common assumption that I would be greedy, etc. I remember one girl I had a crush on actually asked to see my horns.

And of course there were the kids who chased me home from the bus stop. The scratched graffiti on my locker: “Yid.”

The message was clear – “You’re different. We’ll put up with you, but don’t ever forget you are NOT one of us.”

There were a lot more black kids. They didn’t get it any easier but at least they could join together.

It seemed I had one choice – assimilate or face it alone.

So I did. I became white.

I played up my similarities, never talked about my differences except to close friends.

And America worked her magic.

So I’ve always been aware that whiteness is the biggest delusion in the world.

It’s not a result of the color wheel. Look at your skin. You’re not white. You’re peach or pink or salmon or rose or coral or olive or any of a million other shades.

Whiteness has as much to do with color as Red has to do with Communism or Green has to do with environmental protection.

It is the way a lose confederacy of nationalities and ethnicities have banded together to form a fake majority and lord power over all those they’ve excluded.

It’s social protection for wealth – a kind of firewall against the underclass built, manned and protected by those who are also being exploited.

It’s like a circle around the wealthy protecting them from everyone outside its borders. Yet if everyone banded together against the few rich and powerful, we could all have a more equitable share.

But in America, social class has been weaponized and racialized.

You’ll see some media outlets talking about demographics as if white people were in danger of losing their numerical majority in this country in the next few decades. But there’s no way it’s ever going to happen.

Today’s xenophobia is a direct response to this challenge. Some are trying to deport, displace and murder as many black and brown people as possible to preserve the status quo.

But even if that doesn’t work, whiteness will not become a minority. It will do what it has always done – incorporate some of those whom it had previously excluded to keep its position.

Certain groups of Hispanics and Latinos probably will find themselves allowed to identify as white, thereby solidifying the majority.

Because the only thing that matters is that there are some people who are “white” and the rest who are not.

Long ago, my family experienced this.

Before I was born, we got our provisional white card. And if I want, I can use it to hide behind.

I’ve been doing it most of my life.

Every white person does it.

It’s almost impossible not to do it.

How do you deny being white?

At this point, I could throw back my head and shout to the heavens, “I’M NOT WHITE!” and it wouldn’t matter.

Only in a closed environment like a school or a job or in a social media circle can you retain the stigma of appearing pale but still being other.

In everyday life, it doesn’t matter what you say, only how you appear.

I can’t shout my difference all the time. Every moment I’m quiet, I’ll still be seen as white.

It’s not personal. It’s social. It’s not something that happens among individuals. It’s a way of being seen.

The best I can do is try to use my whiteness as a tool. I can speak out against the illusion. I can stand up when people of color are being victimized. I can vote for leaders who will do something to dismantle white supremacy.

Not because I am some kind of savior, but because I know that my own freedom is tied to the freedom of those being oppressed by a system that provides me certain privileges.

But let me be clear: doing so is not the safe way to go.

In defending others you make yourself a target.

I get threats all the time from racists and Nazis of all sorts. They say they can tell just by looking at me that I’m not white at all.

The worst part is I’m not sure what I am anymore.

I don’t go to synagogue. I don’t even believe in God. But I’m Jewish enough to have been rounded up like Gramps was, so I won’t deny that identity. It’s just that I’m more than one thing.

That’s what whiteness tries to reduce you to – one thing.

I don’t want it anymore.

I’m not saying I don’t like the protection, the ability to be anonymous, the easy out.

But it’s not worth it if it has to come with the creation of an other.

I don’t want to live in a world where people of color are considered less than me and mine.

I don’t want to live in a world where they can be treated unfairly, beaten and brutalized so that I can get some special advantage.

I don’t want to live in a world where human beings are tattooed and numbered and sent to their deaths.

Because the Holocaust is not over.

American slavery is not over.

Neither is Jim Crow or lynching or a thousand other marks of hatred and bigotry.

Nazis march unmasked in our streets. Our prisons are the new plantation. And too many of our police use murder and atrocity to ensure the social order.

As long as we allow ourselves to be white, there will be no justice for both ourselves and others.

So consider this my renunciation of whiteness – and I make it here in public.

I know that no matter what I say, I will still be seen as part of the problem. And I will still reap the rewards.

But I will use what power is given me to tear it down.

I’m burning my white card.

I know it’s a symbolic gesture. But I invite my white brothers and sisters to add theirs to the flames.

Let us make a conflagration, a pillar of fire into the sky.

Let whiteness evaporate as the smoke it is.

Let us revel in the natural hues of our faces as we watch it burn.

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Wannabe Terrorist Attempts to Flood Our Schools & Public Spaces With 3D Printed Guns to Make Common Sense Restrictions Moot

August 3, 2018August 3, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Mass Shooting, Media, nonviolence, Obama, Politics, Propaganda, Republican, school violence, Schools, Shooting, White Privilege 3D Printed Firearms, 3D Printers, Cody Wilson, courts, Donald Trump, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, Politics, technology

In the United States, we literally have more guns than people.

Yet we’re trying really hard to make even more available with the touch of a button.

It’s not enough that our right to kill is better protected than our right to live, we need to make it EASIER to commit murder. In the land of the drive-by shooting, slaughter needs to be as convenient as ordering a pizza.

Cody Wilson, a wannabe terrorist who apparently believes John Wayne westerns are documentaries, claims to have invented the first gun that can be made almost completely on a 3D printer. And he wants to post the plans on-line so anyone with access to the device can make one.

He was stopped by a U.S. District judge in Seattle who temporarily banned the plans from publication on the Internet this week following a last-minute lawsuit filed by seven state attorneys general.

They argued that 3D-printed firearms would be invisible to metal detectors and could bypass gun restrictions recently adopted after a string of school shootings in some states.

The issue will go back to court on August 10, when the sides will discuss whether a preliminary injunction is needed.

The whole matter was almost settled in 2013 when the Obama administration originally stopped Wilson from putting his plans online with a lawsuit. After years of back and forth, the federal case against the virtual arms merchant seemed like a slam dunk. Then Donald Trump came into office and not only stopped the suit but paid Wilson $40,000 in damages.

So the question remains – why would any sane human being want to post a do-it-yourself gun kit on the Internet where any criminal, psychotic or violent fanatic could easily access it?

Wilson says he’s not in it for financial gain. He wants to make a political point – to flood the world with so many cheap, untraceable guns that the idea of passing any kind of regulations on them would be impossible.

No, really.

As he told Wired:

“All this Parkland stuff, the students, all these dreams of ‘common sense gun reforms’? No. The Internet will serve guns, the gun is downloadable. No amount of petitions or die-ins or anything else can change that.”

Not only that, but the owner and founder of Defense Distributed, an Austin, Texas, based start up that pretends to be a nonprofit organization, says he is prepared to kill police and federal agents if the courts don’t continue seeing things his way.

In the same Wired interview, he says he wasn’t expecting support from the Trump administration. He expected Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and that she would continue to oppose his 3D printed firearms.

As Wired reported:

“If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his [3D printed gun] repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. “I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style,” Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I’ve ever heard him make. “Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the Internet,” Wilson says.”

So let’s be clear about one thing – the guy pushing for 3D printed firearms is literally a terrorist imitator.

He is an American extremist. He is to us as Osama bin Laden is to mainstream Muslims.

Or at least he wants to be that.

While we’re rounding up brown people and separating them from their children without any workable plan to reunite them on this or that side of the border, we have a US citizen making terroristic threats with the means to carry them out and he’s walking around free.

Oh, but he’s a privileged white dude, so no harm no foul.

If Wilson’s little plastic death dealers do become widely available on-line, they won’t immediately make a huge difference.

It’s hard to make a 3D-printed gun. You need an expensive, top-of-the-line 3D printer and some knowledge of how to work it. And even then the result is a shoddy firearm at best. It may only fire a few bullets before falling apart.

A shooter would have to work extra hard to accomplish his goal with Wilson’s design. It would be much easier to use one of the billions of firearms already available – and much more deadly.

But it wouldn’t take much to make a 3D-printed gun more dangerous.

To comply with federal law, Wilson’s design requires a metal firing pin, which he claims would set off a metal detector. However, it may be relatively easy to bypass that metal part to make his design truly concealable from such devices.

Moreover, technology is always advancing – 3D printers will probably be able to create stronger and more deadly firearms in time. With these sorts of designs readily available, it is easy to imagine a school shooter accessing a device in a tech or computer lab and creating a weapon of mass destruction. He wouldn’t set off any alarms because he wouldn’t have the gun when he entered the building. He’d make it in school.

Some shrug at these dangers saying that they’re inevitable.

Even if we stop Wilson, these sorts of designs will eventually be available in some form on-line. That’s the double-edged sword of mass media – all information is available including easy ways to kill a large number of people.

However, I think this is a cop-out.

For instance, the Internet and computer technology make it fairly easy to mass produce currency as well as firearms. In fact, it’s theoretically much easier.

Yet we don’t see a major influx of counterfeit bills. The reason? Business and industry have collaborated with government to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Programs like Adobe Photoshop include software that restrict the printing of your own money. We could do the same with future 3D printers. We could recall those already in service and retrofit them with such code.

Oh, sure not everyone will comply. There will always be someone who breaks through the safety net. But if all we can do is greatly reduce the spread of 3D-printed firearms, that doesn’t make it futile.

There is a mountain of research proving that the more firearms you have in a country, the greater the number of firearm deaths.

We should be working to restrict guns to responsible people.

But the Wilson’s of the world don’t want to allow us that choice.

They want to force us all to live in a world where guns are even more pernicious than they are today.

Will we let them?

Human beings have such potential, but we seem determined to kill ourselves.

If intelligent aliens came to Earth today and landed in the USA, what would they think of us?

Would they see what we might become or would they only see a pitiful animal struggling to put itself out of its own misery?

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Cyber School Kingpin Gets Slap on Wrist For Embezzling Millions from PA Students

July 25, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Education, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, Teachers, White Privilege Computers, courts, crime, Cyber Charter Schools, education, Elaine Trombetta, judicial system, Neal Prence, Nick Trombetta, PA Cyber, Pennsylvania, Politics, prison, schools, sentencing, technology, virtual charter school

Nick Trombetta stole millions of dollars from Pennsylvania’s children.

And he cheated the federal government out of hundreds of thousands in taxes.

Yet at Tuesday’s sentencing, he got little more than a slap on the wrist – a handful of years in jail and a few fines.

He’ll serve 20 months in prison, be on supervised release for three years, and payback the tax money he concealed.

As CEO and founder of PA Cyber, the biggest virtual charter school network in the state, he funneled $8 million into his own pocket.

Instead of that money going to educate kids, he used it to buy a Florida condominium, sprawling real estate and even a private jet.

He already took home between $127,000 and $141,000 a year in salary.

But it wasn’t enough.

He needed to support his extravagant lifestyle, buy a $933,000 condo in the Sunshine State, score a $300,000 twin jet plane, purchase $180,000 houses for his mother and girlfriend in Ohio, and horde a pile of cash.

What does a man like that deserve for stealing from the most vulnerable among us – kids just asking for an education?

At very least, you’d think the judge would throw the book at him.

But no.

Because he took a plea deal, he got a mere 20 months in federal prison.

That’s less than two years in jail for defrauding tens of thousands of students and multiple districts across the Commonwealth.

In addition, once he serves his time he’ll be on probation for 3 years.

And even though there is no mystery about the amount of money he defrauded from the Internal Revenue Service by shifting his income to the tax returns of others – $437,632, to be exact – the amount he’ll have to pay back in restitution is yet to be determined.

One would think that’s easy math. You stole $437,632, you need to pay back at least that amount – with interest!

And what of the $8 million? Though I can’t find a single explicit reference to what happened to it in the media, it is implied that the money was recovered and returned to Pa Cyber.

Yet there seems to be no discussion of a financial penalty for embezzling all that money. If my checking account dips below a certain balance, I’m penalized. If I don’t pay the minimum on my credit cards, I’m charged an additional fee. Yet this chucklehead pilfers $8 million and won’t be docked a dime!? Just paying it back is good enough!?

But what makes this sentence even more infuriating to me is the paltry jail time Trombetta will serve.

The judge actually gave him 17 months LESS than the minimum federal guidelines for this kind of case! He should at least be serving 37 to 46 months – 3 to 4 years!

Nonviolent drug charges often lead to sentences much longer than that!

For instance, in 2010, Kevin Smith was arrested for drug possession. He was locked up in a New Orleans jail for almost 8 years (2,832 days) without ever going to trial!

But then again, most of these nonviolent drug charges are against people of color. And Trombetta is white.

So is Neal Prence, a former certified accountant who pleaded guilty to helping Trombetta hide his ill-gotten gains.

Prence will serve a year and a day in prison and pay back $50,000 in restitution.

It’s a good thing he didn’t have any drugs on him.

And that he didn’t have a tan.

This is what we talk about when we talk about white privilege.

And speaking of that, compare this crime with the sentences given to the Atlanta teachers who were convicted of cheating on standardized tests a few years back.

These were mostly women and people of color.

Tamara Cotman, Sharon Davis-Williams and Michael Pitts received the harshest sentences.

They each got three years in prison, seven years probation, $10,000 in fines and 2,000 hours of community service.

So in America, cheating on standardized tests gets you a harder sentence than embezzling a fortune from school kids.

I’m not saying what the Atlanta teachers and administrators did was right, but their crime pales in comparison to Trombetta’s.

Think about it.

Atlanta city schools have suffered under decades of financial neglect. The kids – many of whom are students of color – receive fewer resources, have more narrowed curriculum and are forced to live under the yoke of generational poverty.

Yet their teachers were told to increase test scores with little to no help, and if they didn’t, they’d be fired.

I can’t imagine why they tried to cheat a system as fair as that.

It’s like being mugged at gunpoint and then the judge convicts you of giving your robber a wooden nickel.

The worst part of all of this is that we haven’t learned anything from either case.

High stakes standardized testing has become entrenched in our public schools by the newly passed federal law – the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

And though Trombetta resigned from his post as CEO of PA Cyber in September 2013, cyber charters are as popular as ever.

These are publicly funded but privately run schools that provide all or most instruction on-line. Think Trump University for tweens and teenagers.

You can’t turn on the TV without a commercial for a cyber charter school showing up. You can’t drive through a poor neighborhood without a billboard advertising a virtual charter. They even have ads on the buggies at the grocery store!

Yet these schools have a demonstrated track record of failure even when compared to brick-and-mortar charter schools. And when you compare them to traditional public schools, it’s like comparing a piece of chewed up gum on the bottom of your shoe to a prime cut of filet mignon.

A 2016 study found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction than traditional public schools.

Keep in mind there are only 180 days of school in Pennsylvania!

That means cyber charters provide less math instruction than not going to school at all.

When it comes to reading, the same study found cyber charters provide 72 days less instruction than traditional public schools.

That’s like skipping 40% of the school year!

And this isn’t just at one or two cyber charters. Researchers noted that 88 percent of cyber charter schools produce weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

They concluded that these schools have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students.

AND THAT’S ALL LEGAL!

In Pennsylvania, nearly 35,100 of the 1.7 million children attending public schools are enrolled in cyber-charter schools. With more than 11,000 students, PA Cyber is by far the largest of the state’s 16 such schools.

If Trombetta had just stiffed Pennsylvania’s students that much, he wouldn’t have been in any trouble with the law.

However, he got even greedier than that!

He needed more, More, MORE!

Justice – such as it is in this case – was a long time coming.

Trombetta was first indicted back in 2013 – five years ago.

He was facing 11 counts of mail fraud, theft or bribery, conspiracy and tax offenses related to his involvement in entities that did business with Pa. Cyber. He pleaded guilty to tax conspiracy almost two years ago, acknowledging that he siphoned off $8 million from The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School.

He has been free on bond all this time.

His sister, Elaine Trombetta, agreed to cooperate with prosecution, according to federal court filings. She pleaded guilty in October 2013 to filing a false individual income tax return on her brother’s behalf and has yet to be sentenced.

It was only yesterday that her brother – the kingpin of this conspiracy – was ultimately sentenced.

Finally, he’ll have to face up to what he did.

Finally, he’ll have to pay for what he’s done.

Just don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

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Since School Vouchers Don’t Increase Test Scores, Racism is an Acceptable Reason for Privatization, Says Advocate

July 24, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campbell Brown, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Fragility, White Privilege Brown v. Board, Campbell Brown, Cato Institute, Corey DeAngelis, history, prejudice, private schools, Privatize, racism, racist dog whistle, school segregation, school vouchers, standardized testing, The 74

For decades, school voucher advocates claimed that sending poor kids to private schools with public tax dollars was acceptable because doing so would raise students’ test scores.

However, in the few cases where voucher students are even required to take the same standardized tests as public school students, the results have been dismal.

In short, poor kids at private schools don’t get better test scores.

So why are we spending billions of public tax dollars to send kids to privately run schools?

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

These are not the pie in the sky results we were promised when we poured our tax money into private hands.

However, corporate education propaganda site, The 74, published a defense of these results that – frankly – makes some pretty jaw dropping claims.

The article is “More Regulation of D.C. School Vouchers Won’t Help Students. It Will Just Give Families Fewer Choices for Their Kids” by far right Cato Institute think tanker Corey DeAngelis.

In his piece, not only does he call for less accountability for voucher schools, he downplays the importance of standardized test scores.

And he has a point. Test scores aren’t a valid reflection of student learning – but that’s something public school advocates have been saying for decades in response to charter and voucher school cheerleaders like DeAngelis.

Supply side lobbyists have been claiming we need school privatization BECAUSE it will increase test scores. Now that we find this claim is completely bogus, the privatizers are changing their tune.

But that’s not the most shocking irony in DeAngelis article.

Parents don’t really care about the scores, he says. Instead they send their children to voucher schools because… You know what? I’ll let him tell it.

“Families choose schools for their children based on several important factors, including culture, individual attention, and, of course, safety. Research tells us that parents — unsurprisingly — often value these things more than standardized test scores.”

Certainly parents prefer their children have more individual attention. But many private schools have larger class sizes than public schools.

Moreover, reducing class size at all schools would be a more equitable reform than letting some kids enjoy smaller classes if they can just get into the right school.

However, it is his other two claims that sent my racist dog whistle senses tingling.

So parents don’t like the CULTURE of public schools. And they’re afraid public schools aren’t as SAFE.

Hmm. I wonder what culture these parents are objecting to. I wonder why they would think public schools wouldn’t be as safe.

Could it perhaps be fear of black students!?

I don’t want my little Billy to be exposed to all that rap music and kids with sagging pants. I don’t want my little Susie to cower in a class full of thugs and gangstas.

This is racist, stereotypical and just plain wrong about what you’ll actually find in public schools.

But it’s also typical white flight – the impulse behind the charter and voucher school movement in the first place.

Where did the boom for privatized schools come from historically?

It was a reaction to Brown vs. Board. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, many white parents rebelled. They didn’t want their kids to go to school with THOSE kids. Hence, Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge’s aborted plan to close all state schools and issue vouchers to private schools instead.

Hence, the plan that actually did take place in Price Edward County, Virginia, in 1959 where the public schools were closed and all taxpayer money for education was funneled to segregated white academies that would not admit black students. Though the term had yet to be invented, these were proto-“charter schools.” They were publicly funded but privately run. They were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge.

Hence, various segregationist “freedom of choice” plans in several states that allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools. Black students could apply but because of various administrative hurdles were never admitted.

This is the history of so-called school choice. And it is a history that DeAngelis, the 74 and the Cato Institute are willing to bring full circle.

School privatization advocates pretend they’re defending choice, but what choice are they championing?

The choice to segregate?

Pardon me, but I don’t think we should be spending public tax dollars to enable bigots.

If you want to shield your children from the horrors of kids with darker skin, do so on your own dime.

Public money should only be spent on policies that are in the public good – and that’s not segregation. It’s the exact opposite – integration.

Learning how to get along with people who are different than you is an essential skill for good citizens. Understanding that people of different races, ethnicities, religions and cultures are also human is vital if our nation is to survive.

Being exposed to another culture isn’t a bad thing. It’s the definition of the American melting pot.

Our public schools are not perfect. They suffer from targeted disinvestment – especially those situated in urban neighborhoods and those serving larger populations of children of color.

But that is because of the same segregation school privatization lobbyists are empowering. If all students went to the same schools, parents wouldn’t allow this kind of inequity.

In protecting their own kids, parents with power and resources would be protecting all kids.

But this isn’t the goal of privatization promoters. They don’t care about what’s best for children. They’re looking out for what’s best for the businesses running the privatized schools.

So what have we learned?

School vouchers do not increase test scores.

And when that excuse behind the entire school privatization movement is exposed as nonsense, opportunists have no problem using racism and prejudice to defend their industry.

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Antwon Rose’s Life Matters

June 23, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Education, Guns, Police, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, Schools, Shooting, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, White Allies, White Privilege Antwon Rose, Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, East Pittsburgh, Gun Violence, Michael Rosfeld, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, poetry, police, police brutality, police shootings, schools, teachers, violence against children, Woodland Hills

Antwon Rose could have been my student.

I teach 7^th and 8^th grade language arts in a district located minutes away from where the 17-year-old was shot and killed by police.

East Pittsburgh, the neighborhood where his car was stopped and where he ran from officers before being shot three times in the back, is minutes from my house.

He went to Woodland Hills School District, minutes from my house.

Michael Rosfeld, the officer who just started working at East Pittsburgh less than two hours before he shot and killed Antwon, had been fired with cause from his previous job as a security officer at the University of Pittsburgh, where I got both my graduate and undergraduate degrees and where my wife works.

The poem Antwon wrote about not wanting to become another statistic that was read aloud at a protest was the product of an assignment I give my own classes.

So I say again – he could have been my student.

I have had many children like him.

Most of my kids are like him.

Promising, smart, burdened by fears no teenager should have to face.

When I look at the smiling picture of Antwon released to the media, he looks like so many others I have known and loved.

How many kids have passed before me worried that they’ll be the victims of police violence?

How many kids have sat in those seats trying to concentrate on my work while anxious about the reality of the streets they have to walk just to get home?

How many kids have been afraid that if the worst happens, the rest of us will forget their humanity?

I am a white teacher. I don’t know what it’s like to live as a black person in America except by extension of what my kids and others tell me.

When my daughter goes to school or plays in the yard, I don’t have to worry the police will consider her a threat simply because of the amount of melanin in her skin.

But I do see how white people like me blame a 17-year-old kid for his own death.

If he hadn’t been in that car, he’d still be alive. If he hadn’t run from police, they wouldn’t have shot.

Maybe. Maybe not.

But being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn’t bring with it a death sentence. Running away shouldn’t bring with it the finality of the grave.

Yesterday Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death a homicide. That’s a good start.

But plenty of questions remain.

Rosfeld is still on unpaid leave. Why hasn’t he been arrested?

Civil rights writer Shaun King reports that when Rosfeld worked at the University of Pittsburgh, he had a history of harassing black students and was only let go after he harassed one of the chancellor’s own children. If true, was that reported to East Pittsburgh before they hired him?

Why is it police can apprehend white shooters with no violence, but when a suspect is black the rules of engagement start and end with bloodshed?

Protests have rocked this city for two days and will continue today.

And I’m glad.

We need answers to those and more questions. We need justice for Antwon.

But more than anything we need to recognize that he was a human being.

He was a little boy with his whole life ahead of him.

His life matters.

I don’t say “mattered” because even though he’s gone, his life still matters.

We can’t bring him back, but we can honor who he was.

We can recognize his common humanity is the same as anyone else’s.

We can give him and his family justice.

And we must – we MUST – make sure that things like this don’t happen again.

I’ve had far too many students die at the end of a gun.

At absolute minimum, the hand holding it shouldn’t belong to someone tasked with the job to serve and protect.

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African Immigrants Excel Academically. Why Don’t African Americans?

June 6, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, immigration, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege African American, African Students, American Culture, anti-racism, Black Culture, culture, immigration, racial proficiency gap, racism, SAT, standardized testing, white supremacy

The presence of melanin in your skin shouldn’t affect your academics.

But in America, it does.

On average, black students achieve less academically than white students. They have worse grades, lower test scores, meager graduation rates and fewer achieve advanced degrees.

The question is – why?

Why does pigmentation matter so much in this country? What about it brings such negative academic consequences?

This is especially apt since it doesn’t apply to foreign born black students who come here to study or those who recently emigrated here.

In fact, they see just the opposite effect – they earn some of the best grades, have some of the highest test scores, and disproportionately graduate from high school and achieve advanced degrees.

This is something that distinguishes foreign-born Africans – especially those from Sub-Saharan Africa – even from other immigrants. African immigrants sit near the top of the scale of so-called model minorities.

According to a report by Christine Gambino and associates at the Census Bureau, 41% of the African-born immigrant population earned a bachelor degree compared with 28% of the overall foreign-born population in the US.

The four African birth countries with the highest percentages of bachelor and higher degrees among their expat populations in the US are Egypt at 64%, Nigeria at 61%, South Africa at 57% and Kenya at 47%.

So why the difference?

Obviously, it’s not skin color.

Part of it seems to be qualities selected for in the immigration process, itself.

We don’t let just anyone come to the U.S. We have rigorous qualifications and prerequisites that have to be met. For instance, students who want to study here must get high marks on the SAT, Act and/or the TOFFEL – the language proficiency test. To do that, they need the money and resources to study for these exams. They are already some of the best achievers in their native countries.

Moreover, there is a huge cultural difference coming from Africa as opposed to coming from the United States. Native-born Africans have to deal with the effects of post-colonialism. It wasn’t so long ago that European nations conquered and plundered the African continent for gold and resources. That era has mostly ended, but those living there still have to deal with lingering consequences. This has an effect on everything from gender, ethnicity, class, language, family relationships, professions, religions and nation states.

However, native-born Africans do not have to navigate the world of American white supremacy. The affects of being black in this country may be much more harmful than negotiating post-colonialism.

For instance, most mainland Africans enjoy intact cultures. They are not the product of families that were torn apart, religions that were displaced and entire belief systems, world views and genealogies that were stolen.

Nigerian cultures, in particular, highlight the importance of learning.

One typical Nigerian saying goes like this:

“The best inheritance that a parent can give you is not jewelry or cash or material things, it is a good education.”

This is why academics in Nigeria are widely supported, mandatory and free.

Meanwhile, in America native-born black students grow up in a much more stressful and unstable environment. This translates to academic struggles.

For one, they are the victims of educational apartheid. Brown v. Board is more than 60 years old, but American schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class. Black students receive fewer resources than whites and their schools struggle to provide the same quality of education. Moreover, they are the target – either directly or indirectly – of privatization schemes that result in less control over their own schools and the further reduction of resources through charter and voucher schools that can cut services and pocket the savings as profit.

However, the problem is not just systemic. I hate to say it, but sometimes even American teachers put up obstacles to black students success due to (often unconscious) bias.

Most teachers are white. They have certain societally reinforced expectations of black students. When these children struggle, they are more often put into special education and stigmatized for their differences.

It is no doubt that black students are more often disciplined and suspended than white students – numerous studies have shown this.

I think this is due at least partially to white teachers’ expectations. It is tempting to see black student behavior as negative in the default. We too often label them “bad kids” and then try to find evidence to support it instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt or assuming they’re smart and well-behaved until proven otherwise.

African immigrants don’t have to deal with these stigmas to nearly the same degree. They don’t get the same negative label. They have more support from close-knit families. They have more positive role models including more college graduates in the family.

Another obstacle for American born black students is a cultural imputation against academic achievement. Doing well in school can be seen as “acting white.” In order to maintain popularity and prestige, they are steered away from the exact things that immigrant Africans are steered toward.

The poverty of American blacks plays a huge factor, too. Even in moderately successful African American homes, parents or guardians are often working multiple jobs or long hours to make ends meet. This reduces their ability to oversee their children’s homework and monitor academic progress.

It seems then that the so-called proficiency gap between native-born black and white students in this country is due to generational poverty, white racism and coping mechanism in their own culture.

If we want to help American-born black students, we need to realize, first, that this problem is not due to inherent racial deficiencies. It is the product of class warfare and white supremacy.

As such, it can be cured through progressive economic policies and anti-racist efforts.

The strongest argument for reparations comes from a recognition of the lingering effects of our history of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and the prison industrial complex.

These are daunting problems, but they can be solved.

It just takes an honest appraisal of the issues and the social will to make things right.

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Dear Betsy DeVos, I Will NEVER Report My Students to ICE

June 1, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, Education, Hate Crimes, immigration, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Refugees, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, White Privilege Betsy DeVos, bigot, education, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, schools, Students, teachers

Teachers fill a lot of roles in our public schools.

We’re mentors to kids in need.

We’re aides to students struggling with new concepts and skills.

We’re homework-givers, pencil-providers, idea-encouragers, lunch-buyers, scrape-bandagers, hand-holders, hug-givers, good listeners, counselors, caregivers and – yes – sometimes even butt-kickers.

It’s no wonder that we occasionally get mistaken for mothers and fathers.

But one thing we will never be is a snitch.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently intimated that principals and teachers could report their undocumented children to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

She’s not going to say what we should do one way or another. She’s just saying that this is something we COULD do if we wanted.

If that results in those kids and their families being deported, well we are a nation of laws, after all.

It’s a remark that sounds so reasonable to some folks.

Luckily, I speak dog whistle.

So did the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1982 when justices ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on immigration status.

When kids are afraid to learn because they or their parents or extended family may be undocumented, that has a smothering affect on the classroom.

When ICE raids a local business, we see a sudden drop in class attendance.

So if students thought their teachers or principals were scrutinizing them to determine their citizenship status, we’d be discouraging many with brown skin or extra-national credentials from ever coming back.

By suggesting that educators have a choice whether to obey established law or to become self-appointed border patrol officers, DeVos actually is prescribing how we should act.

Well, not this teacher, Betsy.

Not now. Not EVER.

No matter who you are – black, white or brown – a public school is a sanctuary. It is where kids of all different races and creeds come to escape from the ravages of poverty, violence and indifference.

Teachers are not the enforcers of our broken, bent and biased immigration policy. It is not our job to oblige xenophobia and bigotry.

It is our job to teach, to protect and inspire.

Sure, I’ve made my fair share of calls to parents, healthcare professionals and Child Protective Services.

I’ve reported abuse, addiction and mental illness.

But I did that to protect my kids. And I do think of them as my kids.

When these little people come toddling into my class, I take a kind of ownership of them.

For the time they’re here, we’re family. I take interest in their lives and they take interest in mine.

They know all about my wife and daughter, my parents and grandparents. And I know about theirs.

We don’t just learn grammar, reading and writing. We share our lives with each other.

We share a mutual trust and respect.

If I reported even a single student for a suspected immigration violation, I would lose that forever.

It’s sad how much things have changed in a little over year.

Hispanic names have become Anglicized. Angelo has becomes Angel. Julio has become Jules. Jorge is now George.

The dulcet melody of Spanish has been silenced. You’ll only hear it in muffled voices if you wander by a few lockers, but never in class.

My kids aren’t even 13 yet, but many of them have already learned to hide.

Don’t appear different. Don’t let anyone know your roots extend beyond national borders.

Be “normal.” Be homogenized, bland American.

That’s the world we’ve built and it’s the one that DeVos is encouraging with her tin pot nationalism.

Some things don’t change when you cross municipal lines – human decency is one of them.

So I won’t be reporting any of my students to ICE.

I won’t help the Gestapo separate parents and children based on citizenship status.

I won’t help set up ethnic checkpoints where armed guards get to ask “suspicious persons” for their papers.

White supremacy was bad enough before Trump was elected. I won’t help the unfortunately named Department of Homeland Security become the protector of a new white trash Fatherland.

I will defend my students. I will stand up for their safety and their rights.

That’s just what we do in public school. We look after our own.

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In Trump’s America, You No Longer Need to Pretend to be Against School Segregation

April 13, 2018April 13, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Media, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, White Privilege Brown v. Board, education, Judge, Politics, school segregation, Trump, values, Wendy Vitter

School segregation is kind of like war.

When asked point blank, no one wants to admit to liking it.

To paraphrase Motown singer songwriter Edwin Starr:

“Segregation. Huh, Good God.

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.”

However, when it comes to supporting actual integration programs or even just education policies that don’t make segregation worse, no one in politics really gives a crap.

Both Republicans and Democrats are heavily invested in ways to divide up school students along racial and economic lines – whether they be charter and voucher schools or strategic disinvestment in the public schools that serve the poor and minorities and hording resources for wealthy whites.

That’s why it’s somewhat shocking to hear the outrage over Trump judicial nominee Wendy Vitter.

Trump nominated the extremely partisan justice for a federal judgeship in Louisiana. Yet during a Senate hearing Wednesday, Vitter refused to answer a question from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) about whether or not she believed the Supreme Court was right in its landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

The decision overturned the excuse that we could educate white and black people in different facilities so long as they were “separate but equal.” In effect, it said that when we educate the races separately, their schools will never be equal.

And Vitter couldn’t bring herself to affirm this ruling.

“If I start commenting on ‘I agree with this case’ or don’t agree with this case,’ I think we get into a slippery slope,” she said.

“I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with,” Vitter said.

She added that the ruling was “binding” and that she would uphold it if confirmed as a judge.

And there we have it, people.

That’s where the bar is set during the Trump administration.

You no longer need to pretend to be against school segregation.

On the one hand, it’s more honest than most people in the political arena.

On the other, how far have we sunk when you don’t even need to feign decency in order to expect having a chance of Congress confirming you?

Let me be clear. Vitter’s nomination should not be approved.

Congress should draw a line in the sand and say that it cannot accept people who do not share bedrock American values on the bench.

If you aren’t in favor of integration, you have no place making decisions about race, class and education.

And that is the barest minimum.

That is merely decorum.

It’s like having the decency to condemn Nazis – something else Trump can’t bring himself to do.

What actually happens to Vitter will probably be determined by the degree of backlash against her.

As of Thursday afternoon, the video clip of Vitter’s comments about Brown V. Board had more than 1.7 million views, and was retweeted over 13,000 times.

A few months ago, another Trump judicial nominee, Matthew Petersen, withdrew from consideration after a video in which he couldn’t answer basic legal questions went viral.

But even if this reprehensible person who has no right sitting in judgement over anything more taxing than a checkbook gets turned away from the bench, we’ll still be far from where we need to be on school segregation.

Despite Brown vs. Board, many of our schools today are more segregated – not less – than they were in the 1960s.

And instead of putting on our big boy pants and tackling the issue, we’ve gone in the opposite direction.

On both sides of the aisle, lawmakers support charter schools. Republicans and a few Democrats support school vouchers. And just about everyone is fine with the fact that our public schools serve vastly disproportionate racial and economic populations yet rely on local tax revenues for funding and thus are inequitably resourced.

In every case, these policies make segregation worse. Yet hardly anyone in the halls of power or in the media even admits it is happening.

At most, you get a news story every anniversary of Brown v. Board about the increased segregation and a journalistic shrug. Well, we don’t know how to solve that one…

Yes, we do!

We need to integrate – not segregate.

We need to end school privatization.

We need to redraw district boundaries.

We need to audit school policies that keep the races apart within districts by building or by class.

And we need robust, equitable funding that can’t be manipulated to favor wealthy white kids.

That will take a lot more moral courage than partisan outrage against Vitter.

Oh, she deserves outrage, but because of her lack of morality, not her political party.

This can no longer be about if your political football team is in power or not.

It has to be about what’s right and wrong.

Caring about integration should be part of what it means to be an American – like freedom, justice and apple pie.

If it isn’t, we have a lot worse problems than one reprehensible would-be judge.

The Alt Right Has a Friend in Common Core

March 22, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Hate Crimes, Media, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Fragility, White Privilege, Whiteness Alt Right, common core, critical thinking, education, facism, Nazi, neoliberal, plutocracy, prejudice, racism, racist, racist dog whistle, schools, teacher, white identitarian, white supremacist, white supremacy, Whiteness

Let’s say you’re a modern-day hipster Nazi.

You’re bummed out.

No one wants to hang out with you because of your bald head and your red suspenders and your commitment to the ideals of a defeated and disgraced totalitarian regime.

What are you to do?

REBRAND, son!

It’s simple.

No more National Socialist German Workers Party! That sounds too pinko!

Now you’re simply a member of the Alt Right!

It’s not racist! You’re just committed to traditional attitudes and values — if those traditional attitudes and values come from 1945 Berlin!

Heck, you don’t even have to call yourself Alt Right.

You can call yourself a White Identitarian.

You aren’t over-concerned with any one side of the political spectrum or other. You just strongly identify with whiteness — and by extension increasing the political power of white people at the expense of all others.

That’s all.

It should be obvious that this isn’t merely rebranding. It’s propaganda.

In today’s fast paced information age – where every fact is merely a Google away – that can be hard to get away with – UNLESS…

Unless you already have a readymade tool to protect propaganda from the kind of informed critical thought that can pop it like a bubble. Something to insolate the ignorance and keep out the enlightened analysis.

I am, of course, talking about Common Core.

What!?

How does Common Core have anything to do with white nationalism?

Common Core is just a set of academic standards for what should be taught in public schools adopted by 42 of 50 states.

Academic standards aren’t political. Are they?

Actually, they are. Quite political.

Just take a look at how the standards came to be adopted in the first place.

The Obama administration bribed and coerced the states to adopt these standards before many of them were even done being written.

Hold your horses. The Obama administration!? That doesn’t sound exactly like a friend of the Third Reich.

And it wasn’t.

It was a friend to big business.

When first created, these standards weren’t the result of a real educational need, nor were they written by classroom educators and psychologists. They were written by the standardized testing industry as a ploy to get federal, state and local governments to recommit to standardized testing through buying new tests, new text books, new software and new remediation materials.

It was a bipartisan effort supported by the likes of Obama, the Clintons and Bill Gates on the left and Jeb Bush, Betsy DeVos and Bobby Jindal on the right.

After Obama’s success pushing them down our collective throats, many Republicans vocally decried the standards – often while quietly supporting them.

That’s why after all this time very few state legislatures have repealed them despite being controlled predominantly by Republicans.

Okay, so what does this have to do with the Alt Right?

People like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are engaged in redefining the conservative movement. Instead of circulating ideas with a merely racist and classist undertone, they want to make those subtleties more explicit.

Most aren’t about to hop out of the closet and declare themselves open Nazis or members of the Hitler fan club, but they want to make it clear exactly how wunderbar the Fuhrer’s ideals are with a wink and a smirk.

For instance, Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.

When exactly was America great? When white people had unchallenged political and social power and minorities and people of color knew their place. That’s when.

This is obvious to some of us, but we face a real obstacle making it obvious to others.

And that obstacle is Common Core.

A generation of Americans have been brought up with these shoddy academic standards that don’t develop critical thinking but actively suppress it.

For instance, take the absurd ravings of the Core’s chief writer – and current head of the College Board – David Coleman.

Going counter to the thinking of nearly every expert on literacy, he emphasized cold or close reading over reading text in context.

In particular, he said:

“Do you know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today?…It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with these two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or think… It is a rare working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.”

Later, he added:

“The most popular 3rd grade standard in American today…is what is the difference between a fable, a myth, a tale, and a legend? The only problem with that question is that no one knows what the difference is and no one probably cares what the difference is either.”

And finally:

“This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students.”

However, Coleman was dead wrong on all counts.

What you think and feel IS important. The requirements of the corporate world ARE NOT the only reasons to teach something. Being able to distinguish between similar but different concepts IS important. And context is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to understanding!

For instance, today’s spin doctor Nazis soon realized that you can’t go goose stepping down main street blindly espousing how much better it is to be white — better than, say, being black or Jewish.

But you can hang up posters in college campuses that say the same sort of thing in a cutesy, passive aggressive way. For instance: “It’s okay to be white.”

If we look just at the text, as Coleman advises, we see a rather innocuous statement.

There’s nothing racist here. It’s just a simple statement that being white is also acceptable.

However, if we add back the context, we find an indirect racial undertone.

These posters weren’t put up willy nilly. They were hung on college campuses where white nationalists wearing MAGA hats were recruiting. They were pasted over Black Lives Matter posters, accompanying drawings of Donald Trump.

In context, then, this statement doesn’t just mean “It’s okay to be white.” It means “It’s okay to be pro-white supremacist, to be pro-white power.”

And that brings up two other examples.

MAGA – Make America Great Again.

Take it out of context and it’s innocuous. It just means to increase the abstract greatness of the country to what it was at some unspecified time in the past.

However, if we put that statement in the context of the Trump campaign and its xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, etc. — then it’s meaning becomes clear. As noted above, it’s an ode to white power and nostalgia for greater white privilege.

And “Black Lives Matter”? Why do many of these same Identitarians take exception to that slogan and the movement behind it?

The Alt Right says BLM is reverse racist. They claim the name BLM means “ONLY black lives matter.”

Context tells us differently.

The BLM group was formed in response to the indiscriminate murder of people of color and those who committed these crimes not behind held accountable. Officer Darren Wilson not indicted for killing Michael Brown. Officer Daniel Pantaleo not indicted for killing Eric Garner. Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback not indicted for killing Tamir Rice. And on and on.

Yet the Alt Right is allowed to mischaracterize a simple call for peace as if it identified a terrorist organization.

Why? Because context has been banished from the building.

I’m not saying that Common Core has caused these problems, but it has allowed them.

I doubt this is what Coleman, who is Jewish, intended.

But whenever you water down critical thinking – even if it’s for purely practical ends – you end up hurting everyone.

The best societies praise intellect and tolerance.

For all their faults, our founders knew this. That’s why they emphasized the importance of public education.

If we had ensured everyone in the country had access to the best possible education, this modern Nazi subculture wouldn’t be able to make as much headway as it has.

This is yet another way that our obsession with unrestrained capitalism, neoliberalism and plutocracy has put us on a road that may end in fascism.

How to Oppose White Supremacists Without Becoming a Monster, Yourself

March 17, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, Hate Crimes, nonviolence, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, Shooting, Social Justice, White Allies, White Privilege, Whiteness anti-racism, Dr. Martin Luther King, Karl Popper, Mahatma Gandhi, Nazi, nonviolence, peace, prejudice, punch a Nazi, racism, racist, white ally, white culture, white supremacist, white supremacy, Whiteness

There is a danger in opposing white supremacists.

In confronting such an odious set of beliefs, you can justify suspending your own strongest held moral convictions as a necessary end to defeating their prejudices.

It’s easy to see how this might happen.

When hearing an ignorant troll like Richard Spencer arrogantly spouting warmed over Nazi propaganda, it is quite natural to wish to issue a rebuttal in the form of your fist.

You can follow the logic all the way from your heart to your knuckles.

Your thought process might go something like this:

This fool is so enamored with violence, let him suffer the consequences of it.

But that is conceding the point.

That is giving the white supremacist his due. It’s entering his world and playing by his rules.

Oh, I’m sure it’s satisfying, but it’s the wrong way to respond.

However, on the other hand one can’t simply smile and nod during Spencer’s tirade and then expect to reciprocate with an academic treatise.

No cogent, logical, professorial come back is going to counter the purely emotional arguments made by white supremacists.

They are stoking fear and hatred. Logic is useless here.

So what are anti-racist anti-facists like ourselves supposed to do when confronted with people like this?

We have to walk a razor’s edge between two poles.

On the one hand, we can’t tolerate intolerance.

I know that’s paradoxical. But it’s true.

As Vienna-born philosopher Karl Popper put it in The Open Society and Its Enemies, unlimited tolerance leads to the destruction of tolerance.

If we tolerate the intolerant, if we give them equal time to offer their point of view and don’t aggressively counter their views, they will inevitably resort to violence and wipe our side out.

This doesn’t mean immediately punching them in the face or violently attacking them. For Popper, we should let rationality run its course, let them have their say and usually their ideas will be rejected and ignored.

However, if this doesn’t happen and these ideas start to take root as they did in Nazi Germany (or perhaps even today in Trump’s America), then Popper says we must stop them by “fists or pistols.”

In short, Popper writes:

“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

Popper believed in the free expression of ideas, but when one of those ideas leads to violence, it is no longer to be tolerated. Then it is outside the law and must be destroyed.

What then do we do with our commitment to nonviolence?

Do we reluctantly agree to push this constraint to the side if push comes to shove?

No. This is the other pole we must navigate between.

On the second to last day of his life, April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech stating his unequivocal commitment to the principal of nonviolence:

“It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

The next day he was shot to death. These are among the last words he spoke in public.

That King was to be martyred in the cause of justice would not have surprised him.

He had already received several death threats and attempts on his life.

He knew that his continued efforts to fight for human dignity would probably result in the premature ending of his life someday. He knew all that yet he still prescribed nonviolence.

There was simply no other way for him to exist.

Mahatma Gandhi, who influenced Dr. King and our American fight for civil rights with his own nonviolent revolution in India, went even further.

At the start of WWII, he wrote that the British should lay down their arms and let the Nazis invade the United Kingdom without offering any violent resistance. They should even let themselves be slaughtered if it came to it. He made similar remarks to Jews facing the Holocaust.

That’s pretty extreme.

But can you imagine its effect?

No one followed Gandhi’s advice. We fought the Germans in WWII and won. We crushed their pathetic thousand year Reich and threw their prejudiced ideals on the trash heap of history.

And yet here we are today. In Charlottesville. In Portland. In Washington, DC.

The scared and ignorant have rooted through the trash and recycled those same odious ideals.

The war ended, but the battle goes on.

Would that have happened had we met violence with nonviolence?

I don’t know the answer. No one does.

But it respects an important point – we can’t ultimately fight our way to peace. Not without killing everyone else. And then why would the solitary survivor wish to live?

There is an inherent flaw in humanity that continually incites us to kill each other.

We can never have true peace unless we find a way to stamp out that flaw.

Nonviolence is the closest we’ve ever come to finding a solution.

So there you have it, the Scylla and Charybdis of our current dilemma.

We must try to navigate between them.

We must not tolerate the intolerance of the white supremacists. But we must also not allow our opposition of them to change us into that which we hate.

I know it sounds impossible. And I certainly don’t have all the answers about how we do it.

To start with, when white supremacists advocate violence of any kind, we must seek legal action. We must use every tool of the law, the courts, and law enforcement to counter them.

This requires political power. We must organize and keep them politically marginalized and weak.

We must take every opportunity to speak out against white supremacy. We must continue to make their ideal socially and culturally repugnant. At the same time, we must also reach out to them in the spirit of healing and love. We can’t give up on them, because they, too, are our brothers and sisters.

Yet if they resort to violence, we can feel justified in protecting ourselves and those they wish to victimize.

But the keyword here is “protect.”

We should go no further. We should not attack.

I know that is a hard line to walk.

Maybe it’s not even possible. Still, we must try.

It might feel satisfying to punch a Nazi. Heck! I’m sure it would. But we cannot allow ourselves to become like them.

Because the real enemy is not them.

It is their fear and ignorance.

And if we’re honest, we hold the same disease deep inside our own hearts.

We cannot defeat racism and prejudice unless we overcome our own flawed humanity.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

White Privilege

Wannabe Terrorist Attempts to Flood Our Schools & Public Spaces With 3D Printed Guns to Make Common Sense Restrictions Moot