Fighting White Supremacy: Being informed for local elections

Yes, I am still obsessing over local school board elections, though with good reason. However, Ballots are due Tuesday by 5 PM, and I am hoping to move on soon. Still, I am learning a lot from this process.

One lesson is how easy it is not to know. 

In general, the bad actors are going to be far better organized, and that requires more effort from people of good will.

I remember reading an opinion piece from a woman whose extended family and neighbors would get together before elections to talk about the various measures. Previously everyone had been assigned to research one and explain the ins and outs of it. The purpose was not to convince the other attendees to vote one way or the other, but to reduce the time that each participant had to spend researching. 

It could also have easily helped in building a sense of community.

There is no reason this could not be done with candidates.

Someone could research the incumbent district attorney, and what policies they have been pursuing.

If there is a library candidate who is in favor of moving everything to e-books, someone should notice that.

Researching school board candidates could be a matter of not just seeing what they say, but also how it relates to the actual policies. For example, at least one candidate has been making claims about the Sex Ed material that are demonstrably false, though it does take someone going over the material to know that the claims are false. For someone who has children in school, knowing more about the Sex Ed material is not a bad idea anyway.

That is the thing: there is so much to know about this world -- much of it important -- and so little time to know it.

We can help each other with this.

It does require some care.

It is easy to fall down rabbit holes of disinformation today. Some agreements on what sources of information can be trusted, and how to verify, is in order. 

In addition, while it is certainly possible to have groups where not everyone feels or votes the same way, if there is fundamental disagreement, like that talking about race makes you the real racist, or that letting kids know there is such a thing as sex is dangerous, those are the kind of things that could easily derail attempts at reasonable discussion.

Those are not insurmountable obstacles though; just things to keep in mind.

And as we work together on being more informed and better able to participate in our communities, then surely we are also building better communities.

Fighting White Supremacy: Cleansing the inner vessel

I have been very disheartened in my attempts to reach out to people I know about the racism of certain school board candidates.

I admit there is a certain brilliance in recruiting candidates from churches in general -- especially but not exclusively LDS churches -- because then there are people who will recognize the names and think well of them. Of course I will put your sign in my yard!

But you would hope that if you mention the racism, people would at least listen to that, and be able to get past "But they have always been so nice!" initial response.

That has been disappointing. 

The worst disappointment is that so many members feel like too much gets made of racism anyway. It's not that they completely doubt it's a problem, but surely it can't be as big of a problem as they make it out to be, especially when they know so many devoted and wonderful police officers.

This is when I want to give up on humanity, though I won't.

One reason I can keep going is because of a book club I have been in, reading Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy. The organizer and most of the attendees are LDS.

Initially, I was frustrated with the book. I think I would have appreciated it more back in 2013, before I had read a lot of books and listened to a lot of people. The book was only published in 2020, so that just wasn't an option.

However, listening to the other group members, and some of the things they are facing, and some of the thoughts and attitudes that they admit to having and changing now... this can be a really important book.

I know more people who would benefit from the book than not.

So that might be a good place to start.

Beyond that, I will say one more thing about Critical Race Theory, even though I did an entire post on it Tuesday.

Many people have an idea in mind that racism is a matter of personal virtue, where being racist makes you a mean and bad person, and so if you are a good person you can't possibly be racist.

There are a lot of directions we could go with that. We could talk about the distinctions between "nice" -- often a matter of superficial lack of conflict -- versus kindness and goodness. We could talk about how the idea of being a "good" or "bad" person is an oversimplification, because even people who do a lot of good have their faults, and some people whose lives seem predominantly bad are nonetheless very kind. Trusting too much in your own goodness has definite dangers.

Critical Race Theory is one way of getting past that, examining how racism is built into the structure of of our society. Because of that, we are frequently participating in and benefited by racism without it being an obvious choice, regardless of how good your intentions may be.

Of course, then once you know that, you should be looking at things differently, and trying to change things; that is work. It involves discomfort. Your participation prior to knowing did not make you a bad person, but trying to be a good person will involve acting on that knowledge.

When everything was so comfortable before, some people reject that change. It's easier not to know, and not to have to think about it all the time.

Here's the thing: if you decide to put your comfort over unequal policing, and income inequality, and three times higher maternal mortality, and all of the stress and pain and unrealized potential that happens due to structural racism, then you are definitely not a good person. You are a weak and petty person upholding evil.

You may not be as bad as the people actively campaigning on a platform designed to uphold white supremacy, but you are bad enough.

That is the choice.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2020/08/mormons-and-racism.html

Fighting White Supremacy: Local Elections

As I was writing about fighting white supremacy, and finding ways to do that, it occurred to me that I could go through various aspects of how white supremacy functions and specific actions for each aspect. It was always the plan to get to local elections, because those play a role.

Because of misguided, ignorant, hostile, downright wrong things church members were posting, I diverted into posts about Operation Underground Railroad and Cancel Culture. 

Just as I was finishing up those tangents, church members are being misguided, ignorant, hostile and wrong about school board elections. I mean, it fits back in to where I was going to go, but please, fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, please stop being exhausting.

I am going to be going hard on school board elections on the main blog (sporkful.blogspot.com) for several posts starting tomorrow, so I encourage you to follow along there.

(Sneak preview: the key identifiers of people in the QAnon adjacent campaigns to run our schools is an insistence that schools should be open regardless of virus risk and a hatred for Critical Race Theory -- which they believes gives white kids poor self-esteem. I will get to that.)

However, for this post on the importance of local elections, I will focus on law enforcement.

You may be aware that laws are not equally enforced, and that inequality works as a means of social control. 

Therefore, even though people of color are not more likely to use drugs than white people, they are much more likely to be searched, charged, and imprisoned for drug offenses. Even as many white people are capitalizing on legal marijuana and doing quite well financially by it, many people of color are still in jail on old charges.

But it was illegal then! True. Follow up question: do you think the people with boutique marijuana shops and their clientele only started using when it became legal?

District attorneys decide what crimes to focus on in prosecution, which pleas to accept, and what level of severity to pursue. 

Judges have a say in how that plays out. They can reject some charges or sentences, but what comes before them depends a lot upon the discretion of the DA.

County sheriffs will have some control over how law enforcement occurs. For many of these discussions, city police chiefs come up more often, but that is an appointed position. Mayors and city council members have an impact, but that gets to be more complicated.

Obviously local decisions about schools matter, as do decisions about water and soil and parks and who goes to the state legislature. It may be helpful as elections come around to look at the positions and think about what they do. 

For this post, I want to focus on district attorneys.

I wrote about such an election just three years ago:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/05/political-ads.html

One reason I was very against the incumbent -- who won -- was his tendency to lock up potential witnesses whom he did not trust to appear. This included one suspect's father -- who was not accused of any crime himself -- and a rape victim. 

Those cases were particularly cruel. Someone who abuses power so flagrantly is not someone likely to worry about white supremacy.

Speaking of unequal enforcement of the law, the father was Latino and the rape victim was a woman and a convict. In fact, she had been raped by a prison guard while confined. I suppose that made it easy for Washington County DA Bob Hermann and Circuit Judge Charles Bailey to decide that she couldn't be trusted. She said she would appear, but that wasn't good enough. 

Her accused rapist -- a white man and a corrections officer -- was allowed to remain free. Hermann and Bailey didn't seem to mind that this treatment was cruel, could easily discourage other witnesses from identifying themselves, or how rare it is for a rape case to result in jail time, even with witnesses. 

https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2016/09/accuser_in_prison_sex_case_jai.html

I also recall when Sebastian Junger came to town on tour for his book, A Death in Belmont. His appearance was protested by an Oregon crime victims group, with the support of the Multnomah County DA at the time. Why was he being protested? Because his book was about a wrongful conviction. 

I read the book; their complaints were inaccurate. They didn't care, which is a common issue with victims' rights groups. It's not that advocating for victims is not important, but to get so invested in the criminal justice system that you want innocent people to get convicted and stay convicted is not justice.

I am not saying that their protest was even partially about the exoneration of a Black man. However, the probable murderer was a white man, and there should have been clues and evidence for that. That the law went for the Black man is not a coincidence. That was also the case in the book referenced here:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/07/and-thats-when-i-gave-up-on-death.html

That is white supremacy. You may notice that it isn't great for women, either. 

All of the oppressions end up combining together. Some people oppress when they can, but it is better to fight the oppression. 

One way of doing that is local elections. Our next one is on May 18th, and ballots and voter guides have been sent out.

Cancel Culture Conclusion: Cuties

There are so many examples I could use to show white men claiming they were canceled, and women actually paying the price. 

I could write about Andrew Cuomo swearing not to bow to "cancel culture" as he is investigated for sexual harassment and cover-up (separately), and yet he is still in office, and nothing has changed for him yet. To date he has only faced criticism and questions, and yet, he feels victimized:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/andrew-cuomo-cancel-culture

Whereas Alexi McCammond stepped down from Teen Vogue after some tweets that foolishly threw in race:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56446635 

I could write about Jesse Singal -- "cancel culture" combatant extraordinaire -- hounding Julia Serano off of Twitter while he remains there:

http://www.juliaserano.com/av/JesseSingalStatement.pdf

We could draw lessons from the power imbalance that tends to prevail, whereas white privilege and male privilege -- things that give you a higher position in patriarchy -- tend to be the best protection, and how said privilege also tends to create the thinnest skin, where the complaints about any criticism or questioning will increase.

We might talk about how for a wealthy white man to actually be canceled seems to require at least 50 accusers, but only if at least one is well documented and still within the statute of limitations.

However, I think the most valuable topic will be to briefly focus on the movie Mignonnes, known in English as Cuties.

Maïmouna Doucouré is a screenwriter who came upon an inappropriate talent show one day, with "inappropriate" meaning that young girls were acting too sexy for their age, a common thing to see. Drawing from that and her own experiences she wrote a film about a young Senegalese immigrant to France who desperately wants to fit in with the girls at school, and who is angry at how her father's second marriage is hurting her mother. Amy is given a fair amount of responsibility and a fair amount of unsupervised time, but she does not have anyone trying to understand her or explain things to her.

And she does take part in an inappropriate talent show number, making some pretty bad choices along the way.

It would be very easy to get the telling wrong, where the sexuality of the girls is enjoyable to the audience, but it is really very well done. What the camera shows and does not show leaves you perfectly understanding what the girls are trying to do, but not lingering on it or glorifying it. In addition, you are constantly aware of their immaturity, and their lack of knowledge, and reminded of how hard navigating adolescence is. You can see why Amy finds the dancing liberating, while wishing she would find some other way. 

You also know this path is not going to lead her to happiness, because the film starts with a flash forward of Amy crying at the talent show.

It seems like something that could be a good topic of discussion, especially for parents and teachers of teenagers. It was well-received in France, and won an award at Sundance.

And it got death threats for Doucouré, and petitions to Netflix to pull it, and campaigns for people to cancel Netflix.

That was largely based on a misunderstanding, and Netflix changing the promotional materials in a bad way, but QAnon fanned the flames, and the boycott was popular with church members.

I remember seeing one friend righteously indignant about it. I tried to rein her in, but she was just more determined to cancel Netflix, because how dare they? 

There are ways in which this film made an easy target. It is about how young girls can easily fall prey to sexualization that they don't understand, and how they need better options than a choice between simple obedience to parents and husbands versus objectifying themselves to attract men. There are people who are against that level of conscious choice for women, and especially young women, so yes, the film is the villain, not society, and we can safely excoriate the maker of the film.

It is even more desirable to direct hate against her, because she is a woman, and a child of immigrants, and Black. She is also Muslim, and while we criticize their enforced modesty, we will also shame girls for showing too much leg or shoulder or neck; we win because our young women are allowed to show their hair.

And because this was Doucouré's first film, this can really set back her career, but successful careers are for men, and maybe occasionally white women.

There really was a full-blown attempt to cancel Doucouré, and Mormons helped. No one seems to have thought about mentioning the First Amendment in the same way in which they would for John Schnatter using the N-word.

Getting back to Alexi McCammond, it would be easy to defend and minimize her tweets, compared to other things that have happened. That isn't really right, but when there are credible accusations that Trump raped a 13 year old girl ignored, but the film where girls feel sexy and like it's a good thing while twerking is the real problem... what is the thought process there?

And that is why it was worth spending a few weeks on "cancel culture" if we are going to talk about fighting white supremacy. Repeating the phrase is more likely to be used as a way of not merely deflecting criticism, but also enforcing white supremacy. The damage will be done to others.

We need to understand how that works, and that the current system is rotten at its core.

Cancel Culture, part 3: Is that really canceling?

Let me refer back to Dr. Seuss just briefly, in how so many people have been defending Green Eggs and Ham -- a classic -- when that is not one of the books no longer being published. The things that people say when they are decrying "cancel culture" are frequently less than accurate.

It may not merely be a lack of sincerity. It is possible that people latch on to one detail, and then ignore others.

I will start with an example on the Democrat side, former Senator Al Franken.

There is a contingent that will tell you that because he took some pictures making fun of one sleeping woman on a plane that he was kicked out of congress by Kirsten Gillibrand  -- who might even be more to blame than Leeann Tweeden -- and because we lost such an important Democrat voice we need to learn from that and not bother Andrew Cuomo.

Except, that is not how it happened.

As of 2019, Franken has had 9 separate accusers. He could have appeared before the Senate Ethics Committee, but Senator Chuck Schumer gave him a deadline for resignation versus being censured and losing committee assignments. He chose resignation. 

Franken was replaced by former Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Tina Smith, who is still a Democrat -- one with no harassment allegations -- and who has since won one special and one regular election. 

Should Franken have taken the censure and allowed the investigation to exonerate him? The proliferation of accusers makes exoneration seem less likely. Resignation allows him to maintain a posture of wounded innocence, which would be unlikely to hold up to further scrutiny.

Should Schumer have given Franken more time? Possibly; I don't know what pressures there was on him. Again, exoneration seems unlikely, so not dragging out may have been best for Senate Democrats. I still think the resignation was the least damaging option for Franken.

Is it true that Democrats are the ones most likely to be held to account for abuse? Sadly, that is absolutely true. That isn't a reason for us to stop being better, though; we aren't nearly better enough.

It is also clearly not true that we cannot afford to be better. Franken may have been better known than Smith, but that is for his show business career. Television fame is no guarantee of good governance, which we already knew, but the lessons were painful.

It is interesting -- and to the point -- that Gillibrand has faced more backlash than Schumer for the pressure on Franken.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/26/al-franken-kirsten-gillibrand-2020-1014697

Instead of exploring that now, I am going to mention one other example.

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/amber-heard-was-never-enough-of-a-victim

Notice in the first quoted tweet, the Johnny Depp defender refers to "canceled", like that did happen to Depp.

The article focuses on how the court evidence clearly bears out that the abuse allegations against Depp are true. Amber Heard having also done abusive things does not exonerate him, though that is not the way that fans are interpreting it. There is a lot of food for thought about interpersonal violence there.

However, it also makes the point that even before court evidence about both parties having done abusive things, Depp was not canceled. He still had movie roles. I remember seeing him in a (racist and appropriating) cologne commercial.

He still had people defending him, far more than Heard. Is that because he is more famous, with the longer career?

Or might there be some trend, where who can absorb career damage and who actually does get removed and harmed and "canceled" somehow relates to the already existing patriarchal structure?

Cancel Culture, part 2: Dr. Seuss

While my initial inspiration for writing about cancel culture was the John Schnatter booster going after it, so much has come up since then that there is a veritable wealth of material. 

People are decrying "cancel culture" right and left. 

Phrasing it that way not only hints at the ubiquity but also works as a political metaphor. And one of the complainants is John Schnatter! It's all connected.

Recent specific complaints about cancel culture include Schnatter and Andrew Cuomo (who differ politically, at least a little) for themselves, and others clamoring on behalf of Piers Morgan, Winston Marshall (the banjo player in Mumford & Sons), and Dr. Seuss.

My goal is to look at some of those and try and get beyond the reflexive response. That will cover multiple posts, but we will start with just Dr. Seuss.

In the case of Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to no longer publish six of the books because of offensive stereotypes depicted therein.

One possible hint that conservative backlash is not sincere is that the most common form of protest has been readings of Green Eggs and Ham, which is not one of the books being removed from publication. 

One complaint has been that Dr. Seuss did not have any children, so he is not the one making these decisions. This was also brought up when people thought The Cat in the Hat movie was terrible. (Apparently his widow agreed.)

That can be difficult, and some heirs (who may not be the literal children) may be overly protective, where others may seem overly mercenary. The law covers what is required, but there is a lot of room for variation within that.

In this case, it is the foundation's place to make the decision. It is not government censorship, it doesn't recall already existing editions of those books, and it doesn't do anything to the more than 50 other books he wrote.

There can be two good reasons for the decision. 

One is that children learning to read are also learning about the rest of the world and people. Not indoctrinating them with harmful stereotypes seems like a good idea. 

The books are for children, even if adults often like them or have fond memories of them. 

(This is why the complaints of how you can defend "W.A.P." -- a song that is not aimed at children -- while being against If I Ran the Zoo are specious arguments.)

In addition, you can wonder about Dr. Seuss's intent, and how he would have felt about it. It is true that he produced propaganda during WWII that was anti-Japanese and played into stereotypes, which can be a whole other subject. However, it is also true that the man who wrote The Lorax may have wanted a better world, and could very well have grown along with his books.

Richard Scarry was able to go back during his lifetime and update one of his classic books to make it more inclusive:

https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-classic-richard-scarry-book-to-keep-up-with-the-times-progress

It is not impossible that Dr. Seuss might have done the same. His death may mean that the books cannot be altered with his blessing, but it does not mean that this subset of his books need to be published in perpetuity, freezing those stereotypes in amber.

I like this perspective from his godson:

https://www.danvillesanramon.com/news/2021/03/15/dr-seuss-godson-weighs-in-on-the-culture-wars-uproar-over-decision-to-stop-publishing-several-books

Really, is there any cancellation here? The author is still beloved, with many books that are beloved, but with some that might have done harm in the past now retired from doing harm. That was decided by people who care about his legacy but who do also care about capitalism and profit.

If the objection is going to be to racist stereotypes becoming less common, then say that outright.

Barking up the wrong tree: Cancel Culture!

I wrote about Operation Underground Railroad because I have seen several members focusing their birthday fundraisers on it. The idea for this series, though, started with another person I know.

He is planning on trying to make the world a better place (things have gotten so ugly) by taking on "cancel culture". 

This is the guy who tried to hold an event showing support for John Schnatter after Schnatter was criticized for refusing to give his workers health care. This was seen as more egregious because employee health care would have been very affordable (.02 per pizza, though it was thought it would be .08 when he first refused) and because Schnatter already had a pretty opulent lifestyle. 

What I am saying is that this person I know is on the board -- if not the actual chairman of the board -- of barking up the wrong tree.

I criticized the event for what I thought were obvious reasons and got a lot of abuse from his minions. To be fair, any time he doesn't agree with a given conspiracy theory his minions abuse him too, so perhaps being him is his own punishment. 

I blocked him a while ago, but I still hear about him through mutual acquaintances. His fight against cancel culture is a response to all of the negativity out there post-election, but he is also focusing on how China is more of a danger than Russia.

Now, that is a key conservative talking point. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but it still gets repeated a lot. That indicates to me that a lack of scrutiny is the problem.

The thing is, you can have a pretty good discussion about "cancel culture", and I will try and do that over the next post or two. Before that, I want to talk about it NOT being discussed, like when it just becomes a phrase that gets thrown out there, believed to be unassailable. Since there is no listening by the person who uses the term, they continue to believe they made a valid point.

We see similar issues with "fake news", "snowflakes", and "politically correct", though "cancel culture" is kind of replacing that one.

There was a book I really appreciated: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. It makes short, critical points from the last century and what was seen of fascism and authoritarianism.

Lesson 9 was "Be kind to our language."

Part of that is not simply repeating words without knowing their meaning or if they merit the repetition. 

For example, the phrase "fake news" did not start with the United States and Trump. It was used by Russia in Ukraine. Its purpose was not merely to discount specific stories (that tended to be true) but also to make it so people got cynical and didn't trust anything. Fighting gullibility may be a worthy cause, but spreading general cynicism is not the solution.

Therefore, even if you need to criticize something for being false or fragile or overly delicate, it is best to find your own way of phrasing it. If in the process of thinking about that, you discover that your criticism is unfair, that's a good thing to learn.

My plan is to explore "cancel culture", and show how it does and does not work. We will get into that in subsequent posts.

For this post, I would like to make one more point about conservative talking points.

Currently, Republican politician Matt Gaetz is under scrutiny for various things, including sex trafficking, which conservatives have tried really hard to frame as something Democrats do.

It does look bad for him, especially considering that the investigation started under Bill Barr, who was not know for his diligence in prosecuting Republicans.

However, there was a noticeable uptick in leading conservative figures complaining about Hunter Biden, and how he should be investigated.

This comes after one very convoluted story that was not even close to true, then another story that was at least more probable, but still proven to be untrue upon investigation, though there were phone calls requesting that it be made to look more true, but those phone calls don't incriminate any Bidens.

I know, all of that is convoluted, and it might be unfair for me not to delineate all of that, except the information is out there. Also, if you think that is complicated, wait until you catch up to the Joel Greenberg part of the Gaetz story.

However, this is the point. Once the story about Gaetz broke, conservatives started talking about Hunter Biden right away. It was an immediate attempt at deflection. It is not really possible to tell how well the attempt is coordinated because it gets picked up on so quickly, without questioning.

Of course, anyone who really wants to stop trafficking should be focusing on Gaetz, but the distraction seems to work.

And, it is not completely coordinated. There was also a smaller-scale resurgence of #FireFauci, which seems like an odd way to go now, except it is still a way to deflect. There is less to choose from now. Other choices are mainly focused on Major the dog, and too many people rightly love dogs and have sympathy for older ones.

So because it is visceral and vague and appealing in an alliterative way, you will be hearing "cancel culture" a lot. It will be helpful to recognize why it is being used and notice patterns in when it is being used.

As I first started taking notes, there were a few examples but the list kept growing. 

I can only imagine how many more there will be next week.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/09/economic-corruption.html