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      Ken Burns’ Misunderstanding of Pronouns

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      Last week, David Marchese interviewed filmmaker Ken Burns for The New York Times. It came on the occasion of yet another in the growing series of Burns documentaries about the iconic people, objects and trends that most Americans recognize as the pillars of their culture. They include baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, the Civil War, the Brooklyn Bridge and the war in Vietnam, among many others. The latest, which will premiere next month, is on Ernest Hemingway.

      Marchese detects an underlying motive in Burns’ work: the wish to affirm and highlight the importance of certain historical artifacts, if only to remind sometimes forgetful Americans that they possess a common culture. Burns is engaged in a valiant effort to convince Americans that they must recognize a powerful cultural identity capable of uniting them. Burns wants his fellow citizens to believe that military might and monetary clout are not the only forces that define American exceptionalism. He believes that the soft power conveyed by remembering the cultural icons and important moments of the past may endow the nation with a new source of vigor.

      As Marchese notes, Burns wishes to correct the impression that the nation is condemned to flounder in an increasingly complex set of culture wars that, to all appearances, have undermined the once vibrant national spirit. Burns, a 67-year-old baby boomer, admits his attachment to the feelings of pride he experienced in his youth when, despite the obvious contradictions that emerged with the Vietnam War and a “turned on” counterculture, there was a sense among white, middle-class Americans — regardless of their political preferences — that the nation was engaged in the noble mission of fulfilling the project its founders had imagined nearly two centuries earlier. 

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      Burns was 7 years old when John F. Kennedy stirringly called people to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” — and the entire nation seemed to agree that that was a good idea. Sixty years later, the slogan in most people’s minds has become: Grab whatever you can for yourself because no one out there is going to help you.

      Marchese asks Burns whether his optimistic project isn’t “quixotic.” Burns replies enigmatically that he has “made films about ‘us.’ All of the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all the majesty and contradiction of the U.S. But the thing that I’ve learned is that there’s no ‘them.’ This is what everybody does: make a distinction about ‘them.’ It’s just us.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Them:

      The most impersonal of the personal pronouns in the English language, particularly prized by people with a paranoid cast of mind. In US culture, the pair “they/them” has come to mean those who are not like us and who should therefore be thought of as a threat.

      Contextual Note

      Burns stresses the fact that the two letters, “U” and “S” spell not just the name of the nation but the people who compose it in their collective identity: “us.” He appeals to the idea of solidarity in the midst of diversity, in conformity with the Latin motto that appears on the nation’s Great Seal: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. The one, according to Burns, is “us.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      When Marchese suspects the denial of the existence of “them” may sound naive in a clearly fragmented nation, Burns defines his position as a categorical moral imperative that all Americans should embrace. He calls it “a nonreactive state, which is the state of observation.” In his role as a cultural journalist, he even appears to believe that it’s “part of a journalistic discipline.” It means struggling with oneself to avoid categorizing other people as “them.” At one point, he evokes John Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” which he interprets as meaning listening to all sides. Keats might have found Burns’ interpretation somewhat superficial. In any case, American culture has always preferred positive force to negative capability.

      Burns attempted to put negative capability into practice in his series of films on the war in Vietnam. Though the media critics acclaimed the film for its inclusive breadth, the historian Andrew Gawthorpe, writing for the Journal of Strategic Studies, judged that “Burns and Novick’s superficial telling of the history of the war fails to get to grips with the deeper ideas and structures of belief that led the USA into the Vietnam debacle in the first place – and which, if not tackled, threaten to lead it down similarly unwise paths in the future.”

      In the conclusion of his article, Gawthorpe describes the nature of that delusion that consists of believing in the capacity of a documentary filmmaker to transform the perception of “them” into “us.” “The ‘national healing’ Burns wished for implies not a useful confrontation and interrogation of these controversies and errors, but rather a soothing return to the status quo,” he writes. Throughout his work, Burns generously hopes that the divisions created by past and present traumas may be healed. But at a moment in history when belief in the nation’s institutions is crumbling, redefining the warring groups as a potentially unified “us” resembles a form of voluntary blindness.

      Historical Note

      Andrew Gawthorpe notes that Ken Burns’ hankering for a return to a comfortable status quo evident in his Vietnam War documentary reflects the mentality that “has led the USA to recently repeat in Iraq and Afghanistan many of the same mistakes made in Vietnam and gives us no reason to suspect it will not do so again in the future.” As a final thought, he adds: “[A] superficial rendition of [history] presents us with the risk that we will treat only the symptoms of what ails us and not the deeper malady.” The “us” Gawthorpe refers to is suffering from a “deeper malady.” For a nation that has never managed to create a functional health care system, this becomes particularly worrying.

      Ironically, former President George W. Bush proved to have a more secure sense of history and a better understanding of the concept of “them” than Burns. During his first presidential campaign in 2000, Bush offered this thought, framed in his inimitable style: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

      Bush understood that since the Second World War, the US economy and political system depends on its fear of a threat from some group that can be labeled “them.” The glorious expansion of the economy during the Cold War existed thanks to the stability of Americans’ perception of the Soviets as the indispensable “them.” The permanence of the Soviet threat (real or imaginary) justified a series of aggressive actions across the globe as well as the imposition of standards and cultural memes — American soft power — that no one dared argue with.

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      Today, the vast majority of Americans, encouraged by the media, have been taught to believe that the Taliban, the Iranians, the Venezuelan “socialists” and the Chinese are not people and nations, but simply “them.” They are perceived not just as others to whom we can be indifferent, but as a threat to America’s being and its values. Thanks to the confusion of the 2016 US presidential election, the Democrats and their media have elected the Russians as the dominant them.

      The difference between the media-induced perception of foreign policy during the Cold War and today is that we now have multiple “thems.” That is the ultimate effect of the consumer society that celebrates choice and encourages the affirmation of personal identity not only through the brands each consumer adopts, but through the choice of an enemy each citizen or group of citizens is free to make.

      Focusing on the nation itself, Burns hopes that Americans will not treat one another as belonging to a group of threatening “thems.” He believes that if Americans at least occasionally listen to Louis Armstrong and read Ernest Hemingway while attempting to admit only to forget their foreign policy blunders of the past (such as the Vietnam War), all will be well again in the consumer empire.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Chaos Under Heaven: Trump as raging bull in a China policy shop

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      Covid-19 has left more than 530,000 Americans dead and China’s standing with the US at a historic low. Only Iran and North Korea fare worse. US opinion is no outlier. China’s reputation has taken a beating in Australia, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. Images of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square in summer 1989 have been supplanted by Beijing stonewalling on the origins of the plague.In Chaos Under Heaven, the Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin reminds us that under Xi Jinping, China halted the export of personal protective equipment made by US companies, sent defective PPE to the Netherlands and barred Australian beef exports after Canberra called for an inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. In Rogin’s telling, China’s “mask diplomacy” was a blunt instrument, designed to still criticism abroad and sow fear at home.Rogin delivers a needed modicum of clarity. Under the subtitle Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, he lays out what the US and its allies got wrong about China over decades, strife within the Trump administration and personal financial conflicts that affected US policy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump feature heavily. But Hunter and James Biden bear watching too.McConnell’s wealth is tethered to his wife’s family interest in Chinese shipping. Angela Chao, his sister-in-law, is chief executive of the business and sits on the board of the Bank of China. Most recently, the US transportation department inspector general reported that Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and Trump’s transportation secretary, escaped criminal investigation after the justice department weighed in.If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, Trump said, ‘there isn’t a fucking thing we can do’. So much for US policyIn fall 2019, McConnell and Trump thwarted progress on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy bill, which had cleared the Senate foreign relations committee, then controlled by Republicans. Back in 1992, McConnell backed legislation enacted in connection with the autonomy of Hong Kong. As late as summer 2019, he wrote an op-ed in support. Time – and perhaps marriage – can change perspective.Rogin has longtime interests in human rights and the far east. He spent the early days of his career at the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, and more recently rubbed shoulders with an informal group of opponents to the Chinese regime, which he calls the “Bingo Club”. One member was Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst and nephew of James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary. During the 2016 Republican convention, Rogin broke the story of the Trump campaign “gutting” the GOP’s anti-Russia platform on Ukraine.Chaos Under Heaven moves quickly, is well-written and draws the reader in. Rogin makes clear that tension between Beijing and Washington will probably remain for the foreseeable future. China’s economy and military continue to grow, America’s social chasms remain on display. Under Xi, don’t expect the Middle Kingdom to back down.One of Rogin’s central points is that Trump correctly identified the threat and challenge posed by China yet proved incapable of formulating a coherent strategy and sticking with it. Much of the time, he conflated personal relationships with the national interest. As his approach to North Korea showed, not everyone was buying what he was selling. His effort to draw China into that quagmire was a bust. The art of the deal is way harder than Trump trumpeted.On the ground, the food fights of 2016 carried over to the White House. The West Wing was riven with factions. Wall Street transplants, military veterans and diehard Maga-ites exchanged verbal blows. The former reality show host zigged and zagged, blowing hot and cold as TV and his moods took him.During the 2016 transition, Trump accepted a congratulatory phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan. Not surprisingly, China was angered – it regards the island as its own. Ambiguity toward Taiwan was central to US rapprochement with China in the 1970s. Trump walked his words back, invited Xi to Mar-a-Lago and treated him to the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”.As for Trump’s take on Taiwan, he told a senator it was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”. Trump chillingly added that if the Chinese were to invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”. So much for US policy.Trump’s inability to forge working alliances hampered US responses. Confronting China required playing well with others. Trump proved unable to set aside personal pique and drive a consensus forward. At times he caved on the technological threat China posed, for the sake of scoring an elusive trade deal.On the plus side of the ledger, the conduct of Beijing during the pandemic made governments realize “their dependence on China was a political vulnerability”. The UK reversed course and banned Huawei, the Chinese communications Goliath, from its networks.No book about Trump is complete without at least one salacious morsel. Chaos Under Heaven conveys that Trump came to believe an unfounded rumor that Gen HR McMaster, his second national security adviser, was conducting an extramarital affair. As expected, Trump could not keep the news to himself.At a crowded Oval Office staff meeting, the former president queried: “Have you heard who McMaster is fucking?” Ever the puritan, Trump warned: “He’s gonna get us all in trouble if he can’t keep his dick in his pants.” The Manhattan district attorney is still investigating all things Trump, including payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.Rogin observes that Trump was “great at flipping over the chess board but he couldn’t set the board back up again”. That said, he had “shifted the conversation about China in a way that cannot be undone”. More

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      Violence Against Women in Mexico Rises

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      Home is not a safe space for many women around the world and coronavirus-era quarantines and lockdowns have increased the risk of gender-based violence. In Mexico, statistics reflect this reality and women additionally face the rising risk of becoming targets amid violent drug crime and the militarization of the state security forces.

      According to the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSPC) last year, 3,752 women were violently killed. Of these were 969 classified as femicides — defined as the violent death of a woman because of her gender — a slight increase on the previous year’s figure. According to data compiled by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico has the second-highest total number of femicides in the region — after Brazil — whilst nearby El Salvador and Honduras have the highest rates per capita. The prevalence of violent crime, a culture of machismo and weak implementation of measures designed to protect women mean Latin America is home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world.

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      The first months of the coronavirus pandemic were particularly dangerous for Mexican women, according to Maissa Hubert, the executive sub-director of Equis Justicia Para Las Mujeres, a Mexico City-based NGO. “During the first months of the pandemic, we saw a rise in various forms of gender-based violence,” she says. “In total, 11 women killed each day, compared to 10 per day at the start of 2020.”

      In March 2020, the emergency call centers received 26,000 reports of violence against women, the highest ever in Mexico. The number of women leaving their homes to take shelter in the National Refuge Network quadrupled.

      Outside the home, however, the continued growth of Mexico’s transnational criminal organizations and the militarized response of state security forces have further increased risks to women. While crime dropped in the first months of the pandemic, the security vacuum has increased clashes between 198 active armed groups in the country’s “hyper-fragmented criminal landscape,” according to International Crisis Group.

      Gangs and Militarized State Security

      “Organized crime has aggravated the situation with regards to the murder of women,” says Maria Salguero, a researcher who created the National Femicide Map. “The crime gangs use the dead bodies of women to send messages to their rivals. In states where there is a lot of organized crime, such as Juarez, Chihuahua, Guerrero and Naucalpan, we see high incidences of femicide, disappearances and rape.”

      The situation is exacerbated by the further militarization of state security. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index’s (BTI) country report on Mexico notes that “the army has been called upon to perform internal security tasks and is receiving large amounts of resources in the context of the war against drug trafficking.” It adds that the widening of the military’s mandate to include civilian tasks could have worrisome implications for consensus building in the country. As noted in the BTI report, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador‘s government risks losing public support if it cannot solve the challenges of corruption and violence in the country. It points out that “the fact that the army, which has so far not signified a threat to democracy, is required to undertake ever more tasks may be a threat in the future.” Such a breakdown in trust for institutions and the security forces could have knock-on effects for all violent crime.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On May 11, 2020, the Mexican armed forces and National Guard were given new authority to play a far greater role in policing violent crime in the country — giving them free rein to assume many of the police force’s duties — without any effective audit mechanism.

      The effect of this process on gender-based violence is only now coming to be understood. “The attitude of this government and its predecessors has been that a military response to the security situation will protect all of us and women in particular,” says Hubert. “But the reality is that the increased circulation of firearms has had a tremendous impact on women.”  

      Firearms were the weapon used in 60% of the total 1,844 murders committed against women in 2020. From 1998 to 2019, the number of women killed by firearms in Mexico rose by 375%. Over 2.5 million firearms have entered Mexico from the US over the last decade, and firearms accounted for the overwhelming majority of the total of 34,515 murders registered in Mexico in 2020, the highest number since 2015.

      An Overlooked Issue

      The continued emphasis on militarized security is sapping state funds at a time when resources for programs addressing violence against women in Mexico are being cut. In recent years, Mexican public policy has had a mixed record with respect to gender-based violence. It took until December last year for President Lopez Obrador to talk about gender-based violence, having previously avoided using the word femicide or acknowledge that women faced specific security concerns. In May 2020, he said that 90% of domestic violence-related 911 calls were false. His team failed to provide evidence to support this claim when requested to by NGOs.

      Despite this intransigence at the executive level, in recent years, there has been greater recognition of the problem at the federal and ministerial level, according to Hubert, with many long-lasting public policies proposed by the National Institute of Women, founded in 2001. However, many of the preventative and reactive policies introduced to tackle gender-based violence have been subject to cuts in government spending as a result of the pandemic.

      “We analyzed the activity of the courts at the start of the pandemic, and we found gender-based violence was not being prioritized,” says Hubert. “Issues such as divorce and alimony are crucial for a woman looking to free herself from a violent situation, but they weren’t being attended to by the courts.” 

      For Saguero, the priority is to keep recording the names and identities of the victims of Mexico’s “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence. “Only by making the victims visible can we really make the scale of the problem visible,” she says, “but we have a lot of work to do because the numbers remain high.”

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      'A breath of fresh air': readers on women who changed the world in 2020

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      Amanda Gorman‘She was a breath of fresh air on inauguration day’She is a young, intelligent and brilliant woman who will accomplish great things for good causes such as feminism, [and fighting] marginalisation, oppression, racism, etc. Our world today needs women and men of this calibre in order to live better together. In this difficult period, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it was so wonderful to get a breath of fresh air on Joe Biden’s inauguration day, and the accompanying enthusiasm to maintain good mental and physical health. Young people, especially, need hope for a future that looks so bleak. Nicole Dorion Poussart, retired historian, Quebec City, CanadaGreta Thunberg‘She dedicated her childhood to defend this planet’She dedicated her childhood to defend this planet. She is still very young but knows how to address the public and express her ideas and ideals. I don’t know how she came to be so dedicated – it’s outstanding! We need people who can persuade politicians to do something and cut emissions, save our flora and fauna and the land.Australia could become a desert if we don’t do something about water and stop the multinational companies from making millions from destroying this environment. We have a beautiful country and lots of people I know want to keep it beautiful, but it is difficult. We need people like Greta – I hope she lives for ever! Nathalie Shepherd, 79, originally from Holland but living in Adelaide, AustraliaAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘She is a political powerhouse’AOC is a Democratic representative from New York’s 14th congressional district. She is a political newcomer and a rising star because of her popular democratic-socialist policies and ideas. It’s ideas like the “green new deal”, tuition-free public college, affordable housing and many more that have gained traction among the working class and future generations.Love her or hate her, you’ve got to admit AOC is a political powerhouse. She works tirelessly to amplify progressive voices that have been neglected by our government for decades. It feels really good having a member of the government actually care about the people rather than the handouts they receive from oil companies and evil corporations. Never has a member of Congress been so transparent and supportive of effective political reform. Abdullah Chaudhry, 19, student, Texas, USZelda Perkins‘She’s been really brave in speaking out against Harvey Weinstein’She has been really brave in speaking out about her regret around the NDA she signed [in 1998] after allegations against Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted of rape and sexual assault in 2020 and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Breaking the NDA, and the debate this sparked about how pernicious they are in enabling abusive behaviour to go unchecked, makes her a really important figure and unsung hero in the post-#MeToo landscape.She’s really committed and brave, and clearly not in it for the fame. She has articulated really well the hold that men like Weinstein have on the women who have come into contact with them, and why this is not just about Weinstein, but addressing a toxic power imbalance. Ruth, 45, LondonStacey Abrams‘She’s been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for her work in the 2020 US election’She is a US democratic politician, lawyer, author and voting-rights activist who played a significant role in getting the state of Georgia to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 US presidential election. She was also largely instrumental in ensuring that the new Democrat government had a working majority in the Senate by getting Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff elected in the runoff election that took place in January 2021. She has recently been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for her work in the 2020 election.In this time of political turmoil, I am inspired by Abrams because she has shown what is lacking in so many of our politicians in the UK and US – intelligence, honesty, bravery, transparency, decency, pragmatism, hard work and a wonderful sense of humour. She has shown that an individual can make a difference, and without cynicism. We should thank her, for we owe her a lot. John Glasser, 74, retired computer consultant, Tring, HertfordshireHannah Gadsby‘She touches on topics such as abuse and autism and puts them in easy words’She’s an Australian standup who has done two Netflix comedy specials. Her second one, which was released in May last year, was on her autism. It’s super-funny, but at the same time touches on so many important topics and subjects that are usually quite hard to explain. I’ve watched both her shows at least 10 times so far and I will probably watch them again at some point, because they don’t get boring.She inspires me by putting subjects such as abuse and autism in easy words and explaining feminist concepts so well. It’s highly educating and encourages me to fight my own feminist battles, to put my own struggles in words and explain them to others. I’m still much less agreeable than she is when I’m talking about feminism, so I hope I will be able to put things into words as lightly and at the same time convincingly as she does. Anna, Berlin, Germany More

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      'It's a moral decision': Dr Seuss books are being 'recalled' not cancelled, expert says

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      A leading expert on racism in children’s literature has said the decision by the Dr Seuss Foundation to withdraw six books should be viewed as a “product recall” and not, as many claim, an example of cancel culture. Philip Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University, is the author of Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. He told the Guardian the six titles by Theodor Geisel published between 1937 and 1976 that Dr Seuss Enterprises said it would cease printing contained stereotypes of a clearly racist nature.“Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricature in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world and I would support that,” Nel said.The titles in question are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer. Dr Seuss books have sold some 700m copies globally.They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell themAfter this week’s announcement, amid uproar eagerly stoked by conservatives in the media and Congress, Dr Seuss books swiftly dominated sales charts. On Friday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, went so far as to share a video of himself reading from Green Eggs and Ham, a perennial strong seller.“I still like Dr Seuss, so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham,” McCarthy said, inviting viewers to respond “if you still like him too!”Geisel’s stepdaughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post there “wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body”, but also said suspending publication of the six titles was “a wise decision”. But the controversy left many perplexed, since the decision was made by Dr Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.Nel said the decision to no longer publish titles including caricatures of people of African, Asian and Arab descent showed just one way to address problematic material.“[The books are] not going to disappear,” he said. “They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell them.”Geisel died in 1991. Later in life, he made efforts to tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books. Such revisions “were imperfect but will-intentioned efforts that softened but did not erase the stereotyping”, Nel said, noting that Geisel also made a joke of the changes, “which served only to trivialise the importance of the alterations”.Moves to correct dated or offensive cultural material take different forms. Turner Classic Movies, for example, has introduced Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror, a series devoted to “problematic” films. TCM identified 17 films that five hosts will discuss, among them Gone With the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tarzan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Searchers and Psycho.“We are hearing more and more from audiences about moments they are really puzzling over, if not downright offended by, in light of all of the broader cultural and political conversations we are having,” the University of Chicago cinema studies professor Jacqueline Stewart, a Reframed host, told Variety.TCM’s decision to seek to contextualise the films but not alter or drop them may reflect the importance of the works and a more mature target audience. Nel said placing contentious work in a larger context and inviting discussion can be risky when the work is directed at a younger consumers.“Children understand more than they can articulate,” he said. “If you inflict racist images on them before they can express what they’re articulating they may endure a harm they cannot process.”In the case of Dr Seuss, Nel said, that “is itself a reason to withdraw the books or to bring in books or art that counter stereotypes with truth.”He pointed to statistics that show the publishing industry still has a way to go. According to a recent Diversity in Children’s Books study, only 22% of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters.Nel pointed to The Indian in the Cupboard series by Lynne Reid Banks, Penguin Random House titles about a toy figure of a Native American that comes alive, first published in 1980, as an example of a book that remains in print without comment or apology.“There’s a lot of examples of contemporary as well as older work that the publishing industry should address,” he said, “and there are different ways to do that. There’s a debate on what the response should be but there should be a response.”Merely putting the question of what a child can or cannot see to parents would not be an adequate solution, Nel said.“Parents may not have training in anti-racist education,” he said, “or may not know how to have these conversations. So in the case of Dr Seuss it’s a way of addressing the gap in what one might hope a responsible adult would know and what we can expect a responsible adult to know.“Either way, children’s book publishing is facing a reckoning, as indeed it has been for some time. This decision, and all the attention it has received, I hope will create a broader reckoning in the publishing industry – the need for more diverse books and to address the problems in current books being published.” More

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      Lucky review: how Biden beat Trump – and doubters like Obama and Hillary

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      Seven million votes more was almost not enough. Had 45,000 gone the other way in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would still be president. Calls to defund the police nearly cost Joe Biden victory and led to a more than a dozen-seat loss for House Democrats.
      Biden had “separated himself from the orthodoxies of his party’s base” but “had no coattails” to spare, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write. As always, culture counts – even amid a pandemic.
      But “Unwoke Joe”, as the authors call him, was the one Democrat whose empathy and instincts matched the demands of the times. Lucky is an apt title for Allen and Parnes’s third book.
      “In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win,” they write. “This time, Biden caught every imaginable break.”
      Their joint take on Biden is a prism and scorecard that gives added understanding to the seemingly never-ending war of 2020. Allen is a veteran political writer at NBC News digital, Parnes reports for the Hill. They deliver.
      Subtitled How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, Lucky is the first full-length campaign postmortem. It makes the silent parts of the conversation audible and reminds the reader the past is always with us.
      The authors convey the cultural dimensions of Biden’s win. He was an old-time north-eastern pol who repeatedly bore witness to personal tragedy. So long in the Senate, he prided himself on his capacity to compromise and reach across the aisle, a trait that Allen and Parnes report elicited scorn from Elizabeth Warren.
      Biden also sought to maintain a “close relationship with the police and the civil rights community”, in his own words. It was no accident South Carolina emerged as Biden’s firewall in the primary, or that James Clyburn, a 15-term congressman and the most senior Black member of the House, was pivotal in digging Biden out of a deep hole.
      In the election’s aftermath, Clyburn attributed Democratic underperformance to the move to defund the police and the mantras of the left.
      “I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort,” he told NBC. For good measure, Clyburn added: “Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means.”
      On the other hand, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come across as out of sync. We are told that Clinton, the “vampire in the bullpen”, harbored thoughts of another run – until late 2019.
      Embed
      The fact Clinton lost in 2008 and 2016 had not totally dulled her capacity to believe she could unify party and country. Lucky captures Biden in 2016, calling the former secretary of state a “horrible candidate” who failed to communicate what she actually stood for.
      Unlike Clinton, Biden understood that simply drawing a contrast with Trump would not be sufficient. Yet Clinton did see that the 2020 Democratic nominee, whoever it was, would be in a fight for “the very soul of the nation”. Charlottesville provided that epiphany to Biden.
      Obama too does not fare too well, a fair-weather friend to his vice-president on several occasions, overly concerned with protecting his own legacy. He got some very important stuff wrong. Biden was more attractive and viable than the 44th president and his coterie thought.
      In the authors’ telling, Obama was temporarily enamored with Beto O’Rourke. Like Kamala Harris, the former Texas congressman’s candidacy was over before the first primary. For both, stardom did not translate into staying power.
      Then, at an event with Black corporate leaders in the fall of 2019, Obama amplified Warren’s chances and trash-talked Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Obama reportedly said: “He’s the mayor of a small town. He’s gay, and he’s short.” Unlike Buttigieg, Warren never won a primary. She also finished third in Massachusetts – her own state.
      As for Biden, one source describes Obama’s support as “tepid at best”. Obama tacitly backed Biden just days before Super Tuesday in March. Months later, he took his time congratulating Biden on his election win.
      Biden’s so-called “brother” failed to call him “on election day, or the next day, or the next, or the next”, according to Allen and Parnes. Obama waited until Saturday 7 November, “the day the networks had finally called the election”. The audacity of caution. More

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      in US Politics

      'Lynching was treated as a celebratory event': Adrian Younge on the history of US racism

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      “I’m sacrificing myself to deliver a message,” says the composer, multi-instrumentalist and now podcast-maker Adrian Younge. “We aren’t aware enough of black history, nor of the integral role black people have played in building America. There is an educational sterilisation going on and it’s my duty to make people understand that history of racism – something America has pioneered.”With more than 400 years to cover since US slavery began, Younge’s project to educate the public is a vast and complex one. Yet, speaking on a video call surrounded by analogue recording equipment in his LA studio, it is a story Younge believes he has spent his life and career building up to. “This is my What’s Going On project, my record talking about why we are in the place that we are in,” he says. “It’s as if James Baldwin hooked up with Marvin Gaye to make a record produced by David Axelrod. It’s psychedelic soul but it is very professorial at the same time. There’s so many layers to it.”Indeed, there are. The resulting project comprises a 26-track album, written, played and recorded entirely by Younge, entitled The American Negro, a four-part podcast – Invisible Blackness – hosted by Younge – and a short film, again written and directed by Younge himself.Racism is a learned behaviour, one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labourSuch auteurship could seem somewhat egotistical but Younge – a 42-year-old musician who has made his name in collaboration with the likes of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Kendrick Lamar – sees it as necessary. “Pre-Covid, I was travelling the world performing and I was shocked at how little people understood about racism and its history,” he says. “Racism is a learned behaviour and one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labour and those economic gains. America is a slavocracy: it is a nation founded on bigotry, and those principles continue today. People might think racism no longer exists because there is no longer a slave system, but they don’t realise the laws that enabled the slave system still put us in a position where we have to jump over insurmountable handicaps to just become equal.”It is an incendiary argument and one that has found an increasing foothold in historical scholarship. The writer Edward E Baptist recently argued that the expansion of slavery during the first decades of American independence was foundational in enabling the country’s modernisation, while film-makers such as Ava DuVernay have convincingly plotted the continual subjugation of African Americans through the legal and penal system.While Younge’s album puts luscious orchestral arrangements and spoken-word interludes to use in creatively unfurling the development of structural racism in the US, it is through the podcast Invisible Blackness that he most comprehensively lays out his thesis. With guests including Public Enemy’s Chuck D, the trumpeter Keyon Harrold – whose son was recently in the headlines after being falsely accused of stealing an iPhone – and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca, Younge explores how his guests’ creation of socially conscious hip-hop influenced his own understanding of inequality. He also uses his previous career as a professor of law to authoritatively detail the origins of this American “slavocracy”.“I use the phrase of the show’s title to illustrate that we all have invisible blackness, this sense of ‘otherness’ inside us, because we are all descended from the first human being in Africa,” Younge says. “It all means that we are radically equal. And I have black radicals on the podcast, like Chuck D, to find out what he had to go through to educate others about this. We’re all looking at the past to understand what’s happening now, to inform people so they can ultimately make their own opinions with all the knowledge at their disposal.”Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thoughtIt is a measured approach, yet not one without moments of visceral, emotional charge. Most strikingly, the cover art for The American Negro album is a black-and-white image of Younge being lynched, in the fashion of a “lynching postcard”. “Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thought, as it’s easier to act without thinking,” he says. “Lynching was a celebratory event, one where people would pay to take ‘souvenirs’ like a thumb or an eyeball and they would then send each other postcards to say: ‘I was here’. So when you look at the album cover, which represents one of these postcards, I want to highlight how we were seen as the symbols of evil in America. And viewing the image now, we symbolise the American problem of racism. I want people to have a personal experience when they see it; I want them to see me as any other person of colour that can be killed with no judicial reprisal. I want people to see that I am real and I want them to see themselves in me.”It is a powerful image, one that calls up the horrors of history while referencing its grim modern iteration: filmed police brutality against people of colour. In fact, the May 2020 police killing of Minnesotan George Floyd occurred while Younge was at the beginning of recording his album. “George Floyd’s death didn’t affect the progression of the record at all and that’s what’s sad, right?” Younge says. “It’s the same thing; before that you had Eric Garner and before that, you had so many black people dying without judicial reprisal. That is what makes the world complacent towards the treatment of black people, because it’s so commonplace.”However, the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by Floyd’s death did augur something different. “Part of me is happy that Trump was president because, while he has inspired more bigots, his lack of reaction to these police killings and white supremacy has also launched the greatest global protest that we’ve seen regarding race. He’s removed complacency,” says Younge. “I have two daughters and I see how young people are so much more woke than they were before now. There’s 12-year-olds on TikTok explaining racism because of him.”Despite the centuries of ingrained inequality laid out in Younge’s project, is it still possible to hope for a future change? “We’re in a better place now than we have been for decades,” he says. “America has been forced to acknowledge there is a problem but there is a deferred commitment to solving it. Our governments have the power to make those changes and so they need to make it happen – and soon.”Until then, Younge is keeping occupied. “Right now, I am the busiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he says, “but I’m doing something good and so it feels good. I’m giving so much of myself because this is an ongoing fight. This project is something that people could look back on 50 years from now and still have more to say.”The podcast Invisible Blackness is available now on Amazon Music. The American Negro by Adrian Younge is out on 26 February. More

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      in US Politics

      'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries

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      Chances are it is the most influential amendment to the US constitution that you aren’t familiar with. Given its impact, it is astonishing how little the 14th amendment is discussed in public life. Americans can’t rattle it off like the first and second amendments – but its words have fundamentally shaped the modern definition of US citizenship and the principles of equality and freedom entitled to those within the country’s borders.Sitting at the crux of these key ideals, the 14th amendment is cited in more litigation than any other, including some of the US supreme court’s most well-known cases: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Loving v Virginia, Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore, Obergefell v Hodges. And because these noble notions are embedded in the 14th, it has the remarkable ability to generate both boundless hope (for the promises of that more perfect union aspired to in the constitution’s preamble) and crushing misery (for the failures to achieve such promises).The new six-part Netflix docuseries Amend: The Fight for America is a deep dive into the 14th amendment. Ratified in 1868, it gave citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the country and promised due process and equal protection for all people. Amend threads the amendment through the fabric of American history, from its origins before the American civil war to the bigoted violence of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, through the tumultuous years of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, right until today’s feverish debates over same-sex marriage and immigration. The show is a journey into America’s fraught relationship with its marginalized peoples, who have fought to fully be a part of the country.It’s heady stuff for sure, but portrayed with an eye toward educating and entertaining, employing a blend of performance, music and animation, in addition to the requisite experts and archival images. Acclaimed actors breathe life into speeches and writings of key historical figures: Mahershala Ali as Frederick Douglass, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Andrew Johnson, Diane Lane as Earl Warren, Samira Wiley as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Laverne Cox as James Baldwin, Pedro Pascal as Abraham Lincoln, and Randall Park as Robert F Kennedy, among many others.Amend is infotainment expertly done, with the host Will Smith’s affable yet engaged approach gently guiding viewers through moments joyful and difficult. Smith executive-produced the series with the Emmy-winning writer Larry Wilmore, who exhibited his skill at finding humor in dark moments as the “senior black correspondent” on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “People just don’t know what the 14th amendment is,” Wilmore said to the Guardian. “The first, second and fifth are hogging up most of the oxygen. And yet the 14th has been the most resilient and durable. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but a lot of light has not been shown on it.”Amend helps viewers appreciate the 14th amendment’s unwavering relevance by delving first into its origins. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some 4 million enslaved people were free – but they weren’t citizens, even after fighting to preserve the union during the civil war. The 14th amendment changed that, circumscribing citizenship and providing a roadmap for formerly enslaved people to fully actualize their economic, political and familial lives. It is the first appearance of the word equal in the constitution. “In a lot of ways, our country wasn’t founded in 1776,” said K Sabeel Rahman, a Brooklyn Law School professor. “It was founded by [Ohio representative] John Bingham and Congress passing the 14th amendment because that’s the modern constitution.”The system of labor, wealth and politics by which white southerners had defined themselves was crumbling – but they wouldn’t let it go easily. While citizens and terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan waged violence on black Americans, a popular, persuasive new medium helped propagate the mythologies of the lost cause – and it is partly why many aren’t familiar with the 14th amendment: “The former Confederacy got the final cut on the movie of civil war,” as Smith puts it, with films like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation shaping the dominant historical narrative.The gauzy fantasy of the noble civil war, coupled with supreme court–sanctioned segregation, ensured the scourge of open racism endured for another century after the 14th amendment’s passage. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision ruled that “separate but equal” violated the 14th’s equal-protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banished Jim Crow segregation. But the calls to enforce the 14th can be heard just as loudly today as in the 60s and 70s: Amend’s third episode draws a tight parallel between the non-violent activism of the civil rights movement and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, both eschewing moderate calls for patience in favor of Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now”.“We have a set of ideals in this country, and we continue to fail to live up to them,” the activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham said to the Guardian. “Every single time the police shoot another unarmed black or brown or indigenous person, every single time an LGBTQ+ person is fired from their job or left houseless, every time immigrants are stripped of the rights that should belong to them, we are experiencing the gap between what is written and what is true. And the more we grapple with these challenging conversations, the more real we can get not just about the scale of the problem we have to fix but how exactly we can go about handling it.”The amendment is a lodestar for all claiming the constitutional right to be treated fairly. Women, with the help of then attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, convinced the court in the 1970s that the 14th’s equal protection clause should apply to gender in the same way it is applied to race, both being immutable characteristics that don’t affect one’s ability.But women’s equality depends on control over their own bodies and the choice of when and whether to have children. In 1965, the right to privacy was established, founded on the 14th amendment’s due process clause, and this new concept was applied to Roe v Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion by determining that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman, not the state. “It’s an unfolding process,” said Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, of the 14th amendment extending to the right to abortion. “It may not seem obvious as a path, but that is the process of constitutional law.”Indeed, the 14th touches Americans’ most intimate moments. Its passage finally allowed formerly enslaved people to legally marry, and later it was applied to protect the right of interracial couples to marry in 1967 and the right of consenting adults to engage in intimate sexual conduct in 2003. Amend devotes one powerful episode to the story of Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and proved that marriage equality too was at the heart of the 14th. (Obergefell admits he had no idea what the 14th amendment was before his case.)More than 150 years after the passage of the 14th, many groups are still actively struggling to realize its promises. Immigrants have long devoted backbreaking labor to this country, only to see intolerant policies, racism and violence trample their dreams. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only major federal legislation to explicitly stop immigration for a specific nationality, was the result of the supreme court putting fear and misguided claims of national security above the constitution’s expressly provided protections. Dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrant groups to deny their 14th amendment rights has been part of America’s playbook ever since. “We’ve just survived four years of a president who’s been openly racist and has targeted particular immigrant communities based on their race,” said Alina Das, the co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU’s law school. “Equality under the law is something that the immigrant-rights community is still striving for in many ways.”After all, says Cunningham, “the biggest misconception [about the 14th] is that once it’s written on paper, the work is done. The truth, of course, is very different, and I think that Amend really pushes people to see past the veneer of American exceptionalism.” The show sadly but clearly illustrates how ignorance and hate have long fomented misunderstanding, anger, violence and inequality in America and how potently fear and intolerance have prevailed.But it is also just as clear who has the power to make the 14th amendment’s promise of an equal society a reality: not the courts, but we the people, ordinary folks taking to the streets, sacrificing our time, privacy, and sometimes safety, and doing the courageous, often unglamorous hard work of making sure its words have meaning for all of us. “We’re all part of the story of the 14th amendment, and it’s a continuing story,” Das notes. “And the documentary does a wonderful job of inviting people to be part of the living history of the amendment.” As Smith says at the conclusion of the series: “We have to choose to bring 14 to life.”“We’re giving an uplifting message here, not a dour or bleak one, said Wilmore. “There’s a lot of tough material here, but at the end of the day, we’re saying that this is what allowed the promise to happen – this document is the pathway for the promise.” More