AFTER TRUMP 2016TA by Janice Williamson

Please come:

 

“After Trump,” someone said – it’s not over yet. But my sense of Trump’s campaign and election was more than a simple before and after, past and future tense condition.It is more a matter of epoch: 2016AT. Thinking about Trump’s victory, I talked to some colleagues about organizing a panel or, in the end, a speak out – 15 were enthusiastic. And here a few of my thoughts in preparation –

Canada’s Trump

How does this Trump’s victory resonate in Canada? A recent Ekos poll discovered that “Quebeckers, all progressive voters, women, and, somewhat surprisingly, seniors…are extremely disapproving. Alternatively President Elect Trump is championed “by men, the less well-educated, and residents of Alberta. Albertans’ enthusiasm is thought to connect with Trump’s support of petroleum pipelines – especially the Keystone that was opposed by Obama.

Indigenous Trump: Militarized Police & Oil

These petrostate interests conflict with Indigenous sovereignty and the ongoing resistance at Standing Rock, ND, a social movement that has been marked by brutal attacks and militarized police. What will Trump think of this? His Law & Order politic leads to this Guardian headline in August 2016:

Over the course of his campaign Donald Trump was accused of championing hatred, bigotry and violence.

Resistance to Trump

Upon his election, the American Civil Liberties Union took out a full-page ad in the New York Times appealing directly to President Elect Trump:

“President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression. These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

White Women’s Complicity – privilege over justice

Trump’s own words and women’s  accusations of sexual assault dogged Trump during his campaign. News anchors and home viewers were horrified at the at Trump’s “pussy grab video. But the shock wore off and in the end, 53 percent of American white women voted for him “When asked how they could support Donald Trump after hearing him brag about his ability to sexually assault women at his whim, many white women have responded with some version of, “That’s how men talk,” or, “I don’t like that he said that, but I still think he would be a good president.” – a fact that doesn’t surprise psychologist Dr. Sarah Brazaitis:

For white women to speak out against sexism and misogyny – to deny a vote to Donald Trump – is to break from their alliance with white men, 63 percent of whom voted for the Republican ticket. In particular, white women who speak out against sexism and also acknowledge and eschew their unearned white skin privilege may then force white men to acknowledge theirs. White women who demand an inquiry into white male privilege necessitate an examination of conferred dominance based on gender and skin color, and as such, may no longer be the welcome partners of white men in sharing (however unequally) that dominance. White women, then, risk losing their access to white male privilege if they unmask it. White men, too, then have much to gain by white women’s complicity. If white women challenge white men by speaking out about sexism and racism, white men’s power is at risk of being deconstructed.

Deconstructing white male power entails revealing the myth of meritocracy. Rejecting unearned white privilege means debunking the idea that those who are in power have unequivocally earned their position, rather than that they have benefited from a racist, sexist society and that their conferred dominance is based, in part, on being white and male. The notion of meritocracy benefits white women as whites and as collaborators of white men. Exposing the myth of meritocracy means white women and men must question whether their power and authority have been truly earned.

…Although 53 percent of white women who voted did so for Trump, 94 percent of black women and 68 percent of Latinas chose Hillary Clinton. A majority of our sisters of color voted for a white woman even when we didn’t. White women have often felt hurt and angry when women of color do not identify as feminists or do not rally around our shared cause of sisterhood. But, especially in light of last Tuesday’s result, this view seems hypocritical: We white women want our sisters of color to join us in the feminist fight while we simultaneously fail to acknowledge our white skin privilege. We ignore the reality of the intersectionality of feminism. That is, as white women, we often disregard the fact that all women do not experience oppression equally. Feminism is not a one-size-fits-all for women, but rather is multidimensional and based on the interplay of gender with race, class, sexual orientation and the like. We act as though there is a universal woman and we all come to the anti-sexism barricades on an equal playing field as women. Yet, we white women are not trustworthy comrades.

Post-Fact Fake News Trump

In a “post-fact” era where fake news and propaganda masquerade as truth, Trump’s strategic advisor owns a media business dedicated to appealing to white supremacist (alt-right) interests. His transition leader to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t believe in climate change and ‘denies basic science.” His nominee for Attorney General was once refused confirmation as a judge because he was too racist.

 

Betsy Devos his education secretary appointee endorses a private school voucher program that critics associate with the destruction of public education. Her family billions contributed $200 million to conservative causes over the past four decades. Earlier Devos observed: “I have decided to stop taking offense…at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”

 

What kind of discourses circulate around Trump? For some, post-Trump is the “new normal.” For others it is to be resisted at all costs. Journalist Christiane Amanpour observed in her recent uncompromising speech addressed the Committee to Protect Journalists that Trump made an “end run” around traditional media during the presidential campaign by resorting to social media and other means. This combined with “fake news” contributed to an ill-informed public with disastrous effects and new challenges:

 

“We cannot continue the old paradigm – let’s say like over global warming, where 99.9% of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.
I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.
I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.”

As the World Turns: Stephen Lewis on Change

Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, the distinguished honorary degree recipient was Stephen Lewis, former Canadian political leader, former UN ambassador and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS. He spoke at a November 16 University of Alberta convocation ceremony. In the speech he advised listeners that ordinarily he would advise students to change the world. But this time his verb is different:

“I beg you to understand that the world has turned. It hasn’t just changed; it’s turned. And your collective response—moral, principled, determined, tenacious, indefatigable—it can save this world.” 

In his introduction to Stephen Lewis’s convocation address, UofA President David Turpin quoted an African proverb: “True teaching is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the awakening of consciousness.”

And consciousness is changed by facts and arguments and the affective power of stories well told.

With thanks to the sponsors (more to come):   Campus St Jean, English & Film Studies, Faculty of Native Studies,  Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies.

 

furry kitties and plump puppies, uncensored

Sometimes “troubling texts in unsettling times” are about voicelessness, more often about ears that refuse to listen.  Today’s lesson about the circulation of knowledge unveils a surveillance culture of censorship and silencing.  For facebook censored essays about critical thinking in America and Indigenous education in Canada.

In this blog post, let’s pretend that the furry kitty is Netanyahu’s campaign against BDS and the cute puppy is a pipeline approved by Justin Trudeau.

Perhaps the cutie pie title of this blog post will confuse the digital censors at facebook so I can share an essay with you that was blocked earlier. A facebook security message popped up when I tried several times to share an article about Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance written by the distinguished public intellectual  Henri Giroux. The article was shared with ease by others, but blocked on my facebook page.

It appears that new surveillance filters are in place on facebook to censor our conversations? Or to target particular people having particular conversations?

Today several colleagues who work in Indigenous and Critical Race studies got the same censoring security message when they tried to share political scientist Adam Guadry‘s article that outlines the necessity and challenges in expanding Indigenous curriculum: “Paved with Good Intentions: Simply Requiring Indigenous Content is Not Enough.”

What kind of deals is facebook making with agencies that spy on people? We know about one of them because facebook publicized five few days ago their new controversial social media arrangement with Israel that you can read about here and here.

The irony in blocking this particular Giroux article was the title itself that advocates “dangerous thinking” – a fundamental critical practice. Was this a blip? In a digital culture of surveillance and censorship throws its net far and wide to include “dangerous thinking,” we are all at risk. Here is Giroux on the value of thinking critically:

Americans occupy a historical moment in which it is crucial to think dangerously, particularly since such thinking has the power to shift the questions, provide the tools for offering historical and relational contexts, and “push at the frontiers…of the human imagination.”[8] Stuart Hall is right in insisting that thinking dangerously is crucial “to change the scale of magnification. … to break into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently presents, and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations.”[9] In this instance, the critical capacity for thinking becomes dangerous when it can intervene in the “continuity of commonsense, unsettle strategies of domination,” and work to promote strategies of transformation.[10]

…Salmon Rushdie is right in viewing thinking dangerously as a type of political necessity whose purpose is to “push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world.”[14] As Hannah Arendt noted, thoughtfulness, the ability to think reflectively and critically is fundamental to radical change and a necessity in a functioning democracy. Put differently, formative cultures that make such thinking possible along with the spaces in which dialogue, debate, and dissent can flourish are essential to producing critically literate and actively engaged citizens.

on facebook censorship

 

How does facebook surveil  intellectuals doing their work in a new regime that makes deals with spies? What kind of new surveillance has been put in place?

One of the areas that has had increasing attention includes supporters of BDS  documented in this article.

It that describes how they are “the ramping up their campaign to suppress BDS activism globally, having failed to prevent this non-violent civil society movement from disseminating information about Israel’s discriminatory regime, continuing acts of dispossession, and unrelenting violations of human rights and international law.”

How closely connected is the censorship of my post to this? I support BDS with posts and commentaries and events.

Maybe it is just a coincidence but not long ago when I friended someone with connections to Israel, my entire facebook page was shut down. I was unable to access it for some days until I finally got technical help.

I Spy a Spy:
Canadian surveillance of Indigenous activism

When professors on facebook try to share “Paved with Good Intentions: Simply Requiring Indigenous Content is Not Enough” and find themselves blocked, who do we imagine is now included in the oversight of facebook’s digital censors.

When I  think about Indigenous issues and surveillance, I think about resistance movements on the land, civil disobedience in Canada and in the recent US Dakota resistance.

We know that our former Prime Minister Harper set in place special Canadian security centres to monitor Indigenous and environmental activism that was considered “dangerous.”

Over the past few days, some of us participated in a University of Alberta Indigenous Reconciliation symposium that drew speakers and listeners from across campus, Canada and the US. I wonder if CSIS was there? Good to know that the CSIS Prairie Regional Office is just down the road in Edmonton. (Weren’t these regional security offices established by former PM Harper when the pipeline controversy in the Tar Sands heated up.)

 And after Snowden’s revelations, other spy scandals emerged that revealed the fierce oversight and breadth of Canada’s surveillance. With Bill C-51 still unchallenged and the Liberals merrily approving pipelines, how much of this surveillance and security apparatus is still in place under our cute puppy PM Justin Trudeau?

Here is Giroux again on the risks of thinking “undangerously” – in a time when white supremacy is on the rise.

Thinking undangerously is the first step in the triumph of formalism over substance, theater over politics, and the transformation of politics into a form of celebrity culture. The refusal to think works in the service of a form of voicelessness, which is another marker of what it means to be powerless. Within this moral and political vacuum, the codes, rhetoric, and language of white supremacy is on the rise wrapped in the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, emotion become more important than reason, ideas lose their grip on reality, and fashion becomes a rationale for discarding historical memory, informed arguments, and critical thought. Reflection no longer challenges the demands of commonsense. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.”[7]Within such an environment, the truth of an event is not open to public discussion or informed judgment at least in the official media apparatuses producing, distributing and circulating ideas that parade as commonsense. As a result, all that remains is the fog of ignorance and the haze of political and moral indifference.

 

Note re: Henry Giroux, Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance – the arguments  are drawn from his 2015 Routledge book Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism.

 

---

---

---

 This past week, another of my blogs gathered 64,000 viewers from 163 countries. Look here and SIGN the Council of Canadian petition. 

When Black Lives (don’t) Matter, others are vulnerable too

Racism blinds people, impairs their judgment, shrinks their cognitive abilities, and diminishes moral values. Racism stinks and stings.

(Abdullah Almalki, 2011, Parliament Hill, Ottawa)

And racism kills.

When you first see the video of the man in a white shirt walking to the police car his hands in the air, you can anticipate the gun shots that follow with fatal consequences. And the meaning of the social movement Black Lives Matter becomes more urgent than ever.

Terence Crutcher, unarmed, on his way home from an evening course to his four children and wife dies but not before someone in the police helicopter circling above says,”That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something.”

Two women appear in the news shortly after.

For the first time in one of these high-profile police shootings, a woman pulled the trigger: Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby has been identified.

The victim’s twin sister Dr. Tiffany Crutcher drove home her grief and loss with this sad irony:

“The whole family is devastated. …That big bad dude was my twin brother. That big bad dude was a father. That big bad dude was a son. That big bad dude was enrolled at Tulsa Community College just wanting to make us proud. That big dad dude loved God. That big bad dude was at church singing with all of his flaws every week. That big bad dude – that’s who he was…. We are demanding today immediately that charges be laid against this officer…and that justice is served. …That big bad dude – his life mattered. “

Tiffany Crutcher calls out to all of us to make this tragedy count:

We are demanding today immediately that charges be pressed against this officer. …We just want justice. …His life matters and the chain breaks here. We’re going to stop it right here.”

Will this be a tipping point, commanding words that generate a profound shift? Or is this another murderous tragedy recorded and played out again and again that hovers in the foreground of the news as part of an echo chamber of death and injustice.

Meanwhile, the largest American police union announce their support of Donald Trump and hunker down with his followers that include racists and white supremacists and others indifferent to the politics that make the act of being African American a deadly crime.

In Canada, we know anti-Black racism and especially in my neck of the woods, the dangers of being Indigenous

CP / Coulton Boushie undated photo

We can track anti-Black racism in Canada across the country and the surge of Black Lives Matter activism recently points to this ongoing injustice. Anti-Black racism has a long history in Canada, and one that is outlined by many excellent accounts including this opinion piece by Anthony Morgan that describes it as “suffocating.” Recently in my city, a young African Canadian man sparked an anti-racist campaign when he stood up to racist epithets on the street.

But one element in the Terence Clutcher murder brings this story closer to home just across the wide prairie: the misfortune of a car breakdown or a flat tire can get you killed if you happen to be a young native man driving into a farmyard for assistance near Biggar, Saskatchewan, on a day not long ago.

Red Pheasant Cree Nation member Colton Boushie, 22, and friends were returning from swimming at a nearby river when they had a flat tire. The farmer Gerald Stanley greeted the stranger’s car with a shot gun in hand and didn’t hesitate to shoot.

When the police issued a press release, it was denounced as “prejudicial” and “biased.” Eleanore Sunchild in nearby North Battleford underscrored the anti-Indigenous bigotry of settle colonialism:

“I’m sorry to say it’s getting worse. There’s been more than 100 years of stereotypes and racism building…. Our peoples are not equal. They have never been equal.”

If the other young people in Boushie’s car had not run away, would they too have been shot. The racist elected councillor for the municipality of Browning, not far from Forget, Saskatchewan, lost no time in regretting those who survived the ordeal when he posted on a now-closed Saskatchewan farmer’s group facebook page:

“His only mistake was leaving three witnesses.”

The Defence Relies on Racism

Terence Crutchly and Colton Boushie: two men with car trouble, dead. But the case of  the Colton Boushie reminds me of another shooting – the infamous murder of Trayvon Martin, “an unarmed 17-year-old African-American who was shot and killed in 2012 by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, who was acting as a self-appointed watchman in a gated community in Florida where Martin was living.”

The controversy that emerged afterwards about the Florida murder included a Republic Senate ad campaign that attributed the murder to “Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law — which permits a person to “meet force with force, including deadly force” if he or she has reason to feel threatened in the confrontation.”

Here in Canada, law & order on the Saskatchewan farm involves different circumstances but racism grounds the argument and defends the shooter.

At least that’s how I see it.

And we are reminded of the dangers of being a Canadian Muslim in the Era of Extreme Islamophobia

Yesterday, the Director of Amnesty Canada Alex Neve wrote in The Ottawa Citizen:

On Oct. 21, 2008, when I sat with Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin after the release of the report from the inquiry into their cases that had been conducted for two years by former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci, I was sure that they would soon see justice for what they had been through.

But the staggering and disgraceful truth is that nearly eight years later, these three men – all survivors of torture that Canadian officials made possible – seem further away from justice than ever. They have, in fact, perversely only been put through deepening injustice, this time through obstructive Canadian government tactics in our own legal system.

The basis of all this according to what the RCMP reports was police racism.

Listen to Abdullah Almalki during a press conference on Parliament Hill on October 25, 2011. “Shocking RCMP documents obtained under access to information request that prove that the RCMP’s allegations against him were baseless and racist. It demonstrate how the accusations against him were fabricated.”

Such a poignant articulation of his case & Canadian complicity in his torture. Almalki provides the epigraph to this blog post in his statement at the 3:20 mark:

“… It is not only heartbreaking or extremely disappointing to see that the biggest police force in Canada is racist. It is rather disgusting and outrageous that this would lead to making up and fabricating accusations about a person that resulted in torture and illegal detention.

Racism blinds people, impairs their judgment, shrinks their cognitive abilities, and diminishes moral values. Racism stinks and stings.”

 

 

 

 

[Feature photo credit at top: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263721/black-lives-matter-demands-air-tax-slavery-daniel-greenfield ]