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      America’s War on Abortion

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      Despite the World Health Organization (WHO) releasing a statement earlier this year articulating that, “services related to reproductive health are considered to be part of essential services during the COVID-19 outbreak,” legislators in some US states have been making relentless efforts to declare abortion services as non-essential during the pandemic. Lawmakers in Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Iowa are having to contest extensive lawsuits in connection with the issue.

      On March 23, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked all licensed health care professionals and facilities, including abortion providers, to comply with the executive order issued by Governor Greg Abbott that stated that all surgeries and procedures that are not medically necessary to correct a serious condition or preserve life will be postponed. Thus, all procedural abortions in the state of Texas were banned amid the COVID-19 outbreak to conserve medical resources. After a union of abortion-rights groups, including Planned Parenthood, sued the state of Texas over this temporary yet extremely restrictive measure, the bans were partially lifted, with abortions resuming again at the end of April.

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      According to Marie Stopes International, the suspension of services could lead to anywhere between 1.2 million and 2.7 million unsafe abortions during the pandemic across the 37 countries where the charity operates. A large part of these will occur in the United States, owing to a lack of safe abortion facilities. Thus, the uproar caused by the US restrictions has breathed new life into the standoff between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, an argument the relevance of which has not diminished with time.

      May 15, 2019,was a decisive and divisive date for women in the United States, particularly in the state of Alabama, which saw the passing of the Alabama Human Life Protection Act. Under this law, women who undergo an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy can be held criminally culpable or civilly liable for homicide. The act bears only two exceptions: if the fetus has a lethal anomaly or if the pregnancy poses a threat to the mother’s life. Since the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973, this is the first time abortion is being criminalized in the US. The passing of the act has triggered a domino effect, opening the availability of abortion up for debate in several states. In Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana and Missouri, blanket bans on abortion have been passed.

      Of the 27 Republicans in the Alabama Senate, 25 of those who voted the act through were white men. As Nahanni Fontaine, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Canada, tweeted, “These 25 men, who will never be pregnant, just legislated more rights to rapists than to women, girls & victims of rape/incest.”

      Hundreds of pro-choice demonstrators marched to the Alabama Capitol to protest the bill, with slogans like “My Body, My Choice!” and “Vote Them Out!” Then-Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg vocalized their opposition to the passage of the act. Celebrities like Jameela Jamil, Ashley Judd, Amber Tamblyn and Busy Philipps talked about their own abortion stories as an act of protest. Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, Sophie Turner and Emma Watson have also spoken out against the bans. Even Tomi Lahren, a conservative commentator, has voiced her opinion against the ban, calling it “too restrictive.” The postulate that “Men shouldn’t be making laws about women’s bodies” flooded the internet.

      Pro-Life?

      On the other side of the argument, pro-life supporters think that the 6-week-old embryo is a living being and that aborting it is murder — even in the cases of incest and rape. Often, religion is used to justify such ideology. The main argument that pro-lifers bring to the table is that because at six weeks of gestation the fetus inside its mother’s womb has a heartbeat, it must be recognized as a human being.

      In 2015, 89% of all abortions in the United States happened during the first trimester, prior to week 13 of gestation. During this period of time, the fertilized zygote is generally attached to the wall of the mother’s uterus through the placenta. At this stage, the embryo is incapable of surviving independently from its mother. Hence, the embryo — which becomes a fetus at seven weeks gestation — cannot be considered an entity in itself.

      Pro-life advocates go on to say that adoption is an alternative to abortion and also highlight the fact that abortions may result in medical complications later in life. However, more than 60% of children in foster care spend two to five years, and 20% spend five or more years, in the system before being adopted. Some never do. This can lead to issues like a greater vulnerability to depression, obesity and anxiety. Furthermore, new research shows that only about 6% of children passing out of foster care have actually finished college and less than half are employed at the age of 23.

      When it comes to the safety of abortions, a study by the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health shows that major complications in abortion procedures are rare, occurring in less than a quarter of 1% of procedures, which is safer than having a wisdom tooth removed. Abortions performed in a clinical environment are safe. However, that is precisely what these acts are denying women.

      In the case of incest or rape, pro-life advocates are vocal about punishing the perpetrator. However, Republican Congressman Steve King has defended the blanket bans by saying, “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest?” He went on to ask: “Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can’t say that I was not a part of a product of that.” The fact that the birth of a child is a physical burden carried out by women, not men, is glaringly absent from this line of thought.

      Embed from Getty Images

      What legislators seem to be impervious to is that rapists continue to walk free while women are made to carry their children. Nearly 3 million, or 2.4% of American women, experience rape-related pregnancy in their lifetime. However, for every 1,000 sexual assaults that take place in America, 995 perpetrators walk free. According to a CNN investigation, 25 law enforcement agencies in 14 states were found to be destroying rape kits in cases that could still go to trial.

      The American justice system is currently incapable of delivering justice to women. No minor — like the 11-year-old rape victim from Ohio — must be forced to carry her rapist’s child to term. Moreover, in cases of incest-related rape, the child born out of the union can suffer various mental and physical deficiencies. Children born to close relatives often suffer from being more prone to recessive genetic diseases, reduced fertility, heart defects, cleft palates, fluctuating asymmetry and loss of immune system function.

      Conservatives insist that women must be responsible enough to use contraception and not use abortion as an alternative. A Gallup poll shows that at least 78% of all American adults who are opposed to abortion are also pro-birth control. However, between 2011 and 2013, 43% of adolescent females and 57% of adolescent males in the US did not receive information about birth control before they had sex for the first time.

      There is a lack of sex education at the primary and high school levels, and women are expected to be aware of contraceptives in a system that doesn’t teach preventive measures in the first place. Moreover, in 2014, 51% of abortion patients were using a contraceptive method in the month they became pregnant, and this goes to prove that contraception does not always stop conception, especially in cases where people are ill-informed about its use.

      A Nightmare for Women

      The deeper one looks into the issue, the clearer it becomes that pro-life advocates are not really saving lives. They are more simply anti-women. The Alabama Human Life Protection Act states that if a woman does undergo an abortion, the doctor carrying out the procedure could go to jail for up to 99 years — a class-A felony charge.

      The ban will disproportionately affect racial minorities. For example, some 36% of abortions are performed on African American women, who make up just 13% of the population. In Georgia, while African Americans constitute 32.2% of the population, they account for 62.4% of all abortions. Policymakers are conscious of this.

      The bill also fails to address the crucial question of who will provide the basic necessities that a child needs to survive. In the US, the average cost of raising a child up to the age of 18, excluding college education, is $233,610. However, 49% of all abortion patients in the United States of America live below the poverty line, with an annual income of less than $11,770. Childbirth costs for many uninsured Americans can easily extend to over $30,000.

      Furthermore, in 2017, a total of 194,377 children were born to women aged between 15 and 19 — a rate of 18.8 per 1,000 women in this age group, a record low. The states of Mississippi and Louisiana, where attempts have been made to criminalize abortion, rank among the first six states with the highest teenage pregnancy rates. The expenses of having an unplanned child become insurmountable for many of these women.

      But making abortions illegal will not stop them from taking place. In 2017, over 6,000 abortions were provided in Alabama. This is despite the fact that the number of abortion clinics had been reduced to just five and that some people had to drive hundreds of miles to get to one. In the state of Georgia, 27,453 abortions were carried out in  2017, 8,706 in Louisiana, 20,893 in Ohio, 3,903 in Missouri and 2,594 in Mississippi. It is unrealistic to suggest that all these women will decide to keep the baby just because of the change in the law.

      Baby Lives Matter

      The only change Alabama’s new law will bring about is in the methods women will use to secure an abortion. In countries where abortion is already criminalized, non-clinical and illegal abortions still cause about 8 to 11% of all maternal deaths. America may soon be no different. Women may be forced to seek help online, where they receive suggestions such as injecting themselves with unknown drugs, falling down the stairs and other horrific solutions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As the Alabama abortion laws remain blocked by a federal judge, Americans are shadowed by uncertainty with respect to their right to abortion. With the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg earlier this week, the right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade comes under threat of a possible conservative majority on the court.

      Following  President Donald Trump’s termination of America’s relationship with the WHO, the US is under no obligation to adhere to the prospects of abortion being an essential service. Despite retaliation from several reproductive rights groups and national medical associations including the American Medical Association, the Trump campaign is selling baby onesies with the slogan “Baby Lives Matter.”

      These bans, though legally restricted to the US, affect women all over the world as they affect any progress toward gender equality and create general disagreement on the issue. According to Marie Stopes International, unless efforts are made to acknowledge the essential nature of reproductive health, 9.5 million women across the world could lose access to contraception, causing up to 3 million unwanted pregnancies and, in turn, between 1.2 million and 2.7 million unsafe abortions and 11,000 pregnancy-related deaths. Considering the current state of affairs around abortion in the US, it is safe to say that a large portion of these figures will be attributed to America.

      Amid deepening economic, social and health care crises spurred on by the global pandemic, the debate over reproductive rights will affect women the world over. When it comes to abortion, laws around it must be written by women, for women. America must listen to its women, who must retain their right to choose, especially during these trying times.

      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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      Will Chile Listen to Its People?

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      The country with the highest per capita infection rate of COVID-19 is in South America — but it isn’t Brazil. Chile, despite its high incomes and access to resources, has struggled to keep the pandemic under control and suffers from infection rates higher than the United States, which currently leads with the highest number of total coronavirus cases in the world. What the pandemic has done is highlight one of Chile’s biggest problems — income inequality.      

      Mortality rates in Santiago’s public hospitals are twice that of the nation’s private hospitals. However, those with fewer resources in Chile have been marginalized from the elites in the nation’s capital long before the virus. A highly privatized economy has allowed many to fall through the cracks, bringing millions of Chileans to the streets in protest in 2019. To close this gap, economic, social and educational reforms are required.

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      The Chilean government is aware of the discontent among its citizens. In 2006, 800,000 students took to the streets, with subsequent protests in 2008 and 2011 in response to the rising costs of higher education. Then, in October last year, a 4% subway fare increase sparked nationwide protests that brought over a million Chileans to the streets of Santiago, the largest protest in the country’s history. The 2019 protests have resulted in at least 30 deaths and 11,000 injured. Human rights organizations have reported incidents of torture, sexual abuse and assault by Chilean security forces.

      Most Unequal

      The government of President Sebastian Pinera has responded with various reforms, such as a middle-class stimulus package, early access to pensions as well as a promise of a vote on a new constitution. Chile’s current constitution was written in 1980, during the 17-year military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, furthering the need for a new democratic framework. The Chilean government must make good on its promises if it is to shake its place as the most unequal among the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

      The virus has disproportionately affected Chile’s poorest citizens, who often live in densely populated areas and do not have the luxury of working from home. Speaking to The Guardian, a university professor commented, “What are people in poor rural communities supposed to do with online yoga and cooking classes?” Chile must reach into its savings and provide immediate relief for those who are struggling. A stimulus package that benefits low-income populations should be implemented immediately.

      In the long term, Chile must reverse its stance on fiscal prudence. Savings can help mitigate recession, but Chile’s conservative fiscal management is its Achilles’ heel. Chile offers very few social services, ranking second only to Mexico in social spending among OECD countries. Even water is a private commodity. However, Chile has taken actions that indicate less austere policies may be coming. The lower house of parliament voted to allow Chileans to dip into their private pensions to provide immediate COVID-19 relief. President Pinera announced a 1$.5-billion middle-class stimulus as well. This is a positive step, but more funds must be directed to the country’s poorest citizens.

      “One Bread per Person”

      Looking to the long term, educational reform must be prioritized. Public schools in Chile are underfunded, while private education is often unaffordable. Average annual college tuition in Chile is $7,600 — approximately half of the median income and among the highest in the world; only American private universities and British universities have higher tuition rates adjusted for income.

      There have been efforts to reduce public university costs, such as when the gratuidad system was introduced in 2016. While the program mitigated university costs for low-income students, it has reduced funding for public universities. For public universities to be competitive with their private counterparts, funding is critical. Not only is an improved education system perhaps the most important factor in reducing inequality, but it is something that Chileans have been asking of their government for over 15 years.

      Feeling pressure from its citizens, Chile has pushed forward an agreement to vote on a new constitution in October. Polling showed last year that three-quarters of Chileans supported the protesters, with 87% backing the demand for constitutional reform. Camila Meza, a 28-year-old publicist living in Santiago, agrees with the need for a new constitution: “The need for a new constitution is paramount. One that allows for a more efficient response to issues of citizen interest, such as education and guaranteed health care.”

      A government directly addressing public needs amidst protest is not a given. But there should be optimism for a better, more stable Chile. It is important for the country to push forward with the drafting of a new constitution. Otherwise, the capacity for further violence and unrest will remain. The late Chilean poet Nicanor Parra said it best: “There are two pieces of bread. You eat two. I eat none. Average consumption: one bread per person.” 

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

      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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      The 2020 US Census Could Threaten Human Rights

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      On July 21, President Donald Trump signed an unprecedented memo directing the commerce secretary to collect data on undocumented immigrants and remove them from the final population totals. The memo follows up on a July 2019 executive order that assigned the Census Bureau to determine how many residents are US citizens.

      It remains unclear how this plan — seemingly a workaround the Supreme Court decision that blocked the administration from including a question about citizenship on the census — would be enforced or survive a legal challenge. However, removing undocumented immigrants from the population totals would have the effect of distorting the count, thus diminishing political representation and federal funding for states with larger undocumented populations.

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      The decennial census, enshrined in the US Constitution, was conceived to count all residents of the country — regardless of citizenship or eligibility to vote — as a basis for taxation and the regular reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives among the various states. In March 2018, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that for the first time in 70 years, the 2020 census would include a question about citizenship status for all households. After months of court battles, the Supreme Court issued a complicated ruling that kept the question off the census, noting that the administration’s rationale for adding the item was contrived.

      Nonetheless, recent surveys by civil society groups indicate that Latino communities remain fearful of participating in the census: as a result of the controversy, many mistakenly believe that a question about citizenship status will still appear and fear that census data could be shared with law enforcement or other government agencies. Now, the Trump administration seems determined to work around the Supreme Court ruling, noting that it is the “policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

      The ramifications of removing undocumented immigrants from the count loom large as census information is used not just for congressional apportionment, but also for the allocation of an estimated $900 billion in federal funding for programs on issues such as nutrition, public health, housing, transportation, education, law enforcement and environmental protection. International human rights law — including the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) — recognizes the rights to education, health and an adequate standard of living.

      Distorted census results would damage the protection of these fundamental human rights by putting communities with large immigrant populations at risk of limited access to essential services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems particularly punishing. Further, an undercount would place certain states at a political disadvantage in terms of proportional representation in Washington, undermining the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives. Removing undocumented immigrants from the census count would ensure that everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, ultimately suffer.

      The Trump administration has come to be associated with a xenophobic, exclusionary and race-based conception of American identity. Indeed, President Donald Trump has stood apart from all of his recent predecessors in displaying open hostility toward immigrants, asylum seekers and other vulnerable and minority groups. The president has proposed dramatic new restrictions on legal immigration and pledged to abrogate birthright citizenship — the constitutional guarantee that those born in the United States, whether or not their parents are citizens, have a right to citizenship. As a result, this proposal, beyond its harmful practical impact, has been criticized as an effort to enforce that identity.

      The proposal can also be seen as part of a larger pattern in which politicians seek to define American political membership, determine voters’ political identity according to demography and then maximize their chances at the polls through the manipulation of district boundaries or the rules of voting eligibility. In effect, a census that undercounts immigrant populations and distorts reapportionment could amount to an enormous partisan gerrymandering exercise. Like all such efforts, this would undermine the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives rather than representatives choosing their voters, further eroding the idea that elected officials should serve and appeal to all segments of society. Everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, would ultimately suffer from such an outcome.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

      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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      Slaves Picked Cotton, Senator Cotton Picks a Fight with History

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      History has always been one of the biggest sources of embarrassment for the United States. The liberated colonists left European history behind when they declared independence. Americans ever since have demonstrated an obsessive focus on the present and the future, believing the past is irrelevant. American culture treats history as a largely forgettable litany of loosely related events, the best of which serve to prove that the entire “course of human events” (Thomas Jefferson) has served a divinely ordained purpose: to elevate to dominance “the greatest country in the history of the world” (Senator Rick Scott), consolidating its power and affirming its global leadership.

      In the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln resorted to some rhetorical trickery to get his audience in Gettysburg to think about the history of the nation’s founding. He caught the public’s attention by proposing an exercise in mental calculation, testing their skills at math while invoking historical facts. Challenged to make sense of the circumlocution “four score and seven years ago,” his listeners had to multiply 20 (one score) by four and add seven to arrive at the sum of 87, and then count backward to arrive at 1776, the year of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

      The success of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address now stands as just one more isolated fact in the timeline of history. It should be remembered not only as a moment of inspired political thought and patriotic expression, but also for its clever rhetorical ploy to focus the audience’s attention on history. 

      Today’s creative teachers might do well to follow Lincoln’s example. With the right rhetoric they could encourage their students to think things out instead of simply subjecting them to boring lectures that present history as a sequence of anecdotes largely devoid of context and meaning. Of course, today’s teachers are no longer in a position to teach due to the coronavirus. And even if they could, they would be expected to focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) instead of history.

      The Transatlantic Slave Trade Led to the Birth of Racism

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      This year’s lockdown caused by COVID-19 has given Americans more time to think. The ongoing protests against police brutality and racial inequality have forced a renewed discussion about the nation’s founding and its historical logic. In 2019, The New York Times promoted a project aimed at understanding the crucial role slavery played in building the colonial economy and structuring the nation that emerged from it in the late 18th century. Called The 1619 Project, it focused on the annoying fact that the first permanent settlements in Virginia, a year before the arrival of the Pilgrims in New England, inaugurated the practice of importing African slaves.

      Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was sufficiently annoyed to propose a law that would ban the results of the project from being taught in schools. He explained: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the founding fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Necessary:

      1. Required by the logic of events to attain a certain goal.

      2. When applied to the history of the United States, ordained by Providence in its plan to elevate American capitalism to the status of paragon of both political and economic organization.

      Contextual Note

      Realizing that the idea of a “necessary evil” sounded like an excuse for racism, Cotton “claimed he was citing the views of America’s founding fathers, rather than his own.” Some might interpret that as aggravating the offense, since it calls into question the judgment of the founders, generally considered by Republicans to be secular saints called upon by the divinity to establish the most perfect nation on earth. If the founders thought slavery was both evil and necessary, this either brands them as hypocrites or flawed political thinkers.

      The historians who have commented on Cotton’s assertion that slavery was a necessary evil have pointed out that there is no instance of any of the founders taking and defending this position. Pressed to reveal his own views, Cotton distanced himself from the cynical founders: “Of course slavery is an evil institution in all its forms, at all times in America’s past, or around the world today.”

      When pressed further by Brian Kilmeade on Fox News, Cotton offered this explanation: “What I said is that many founders believed that only with the Union and the Constitution could we put slavery on the path to its ultimate extinction. That’s exactly what Lincoln said.” There is of course no evidence that “many founders” believed that the mission embodied in the Constitution was to phase out slavery. Furthermore, Lincoln never said “exactly” any such thing.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Cotton believes history should not be thought of in terms of acts and deeds or the nature of institutions and their workings, but simply remembered for its stated ideals. Here is how he frames it: “But the fundamental moral principle of America is right there in the Declaration [of Independence.] ‘All men are created equal.’ And the history of America is the long and sometimes difficult struggle to live up to that principle. That’s a history we ought to be proud of.”

      Does he really think that learning about the reality of slavery and its role in building the nation’s economy will prevent students from being proud of their country? Cotton seems to believe that studying the documented facts about the nation’s past rather than simply admiring the edifying text of a slaveholder who claimed to believe in equality is a form of perverse revisionism. 

      The question being asked today by vast swaths of the US population — and not only those protesting in the streets — concerns precisely the point Cotton mentions: the “difficult struggle to live up to that principle.” He seems to believe that the struggle ended long ago and merits no further consideration. Mission accomplished. But if he were sincere, he would highlight the fact that if we want to live up to the principle, we should examine the facts rather than simply parrot the principle.

      Historical Note

      Cotton was specific in his complaint about The 1619 Project. He called it “a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.” Though it would be difficult to find any logical structure to this assertion, Cotton implies that denying “the noble principles of freedom and equality” is what makes the project “racially divisive.” 

      Acknowledging the fact that the principles of freedom and equality he vaunts cannot apply to slavery does not amount to denying the principles. On the contrary, it asserts their importance by signaling the historical contradictions that not only should have been taken into account in 1789 (when the Constitution was ratified), but also in 1865 (at the end of the Civil War), as well as in 1964 (when the Civil Rights Act was passed) and in 2020, when the whole question has emerged again after the brutal death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

      The real problem lies in the idea of a “necessary evil.” How does Cotton justify the concept? One might argue that Officer Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd was the evil that was necessary to provoke today’s protests. And the protests may have the effect of changing things to make the nation less racist than it was before. But an evil act by an individual cannot be compared with an institution, an economy and a way of life, which is what slavery was.

      To call something necessary means it is required for some purpose. What is that purpose? Senator Cotton seems to suggest it was the abolition of slavery. And in purely logical terms, he’s right. Slavery couldn’t be abolished if it didn’t exist. Long live the great institutions of the past, especially the ones that foresaw their own abolition.

      *[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. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.]

      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 Master Class in Linguistic Suppression

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      Boston’s local National Public Radio news station, WBUR, recently interviewed Rutgers University linguist Kristen Syrett, an advocate for pushing the sacred cause of political correctness beyond its currently accepted boundaries. Presumably in the name of racial justice, Syrett wants to root out every conscious or unconscious reference in the English language to the institution of slavery.

      Because plantation slave owners were referred to by slaves as “master,” or “massa” in the black vernacular pronunciation, Syrett believes the expression “master bedroom” should be expunged from the language of real estate. In the program, she and the interviewer, Robin Young, approve of the initiative to change the name of the Augusta Masters golf tournament, doubly culpable because in the past its caddies “had to be black.” It may seem odd that she has nothing to say about chess masters and grandmasters. This oversight seems even odder because chess is a game that pits a black army against a white one, which always has the first move.

      Syrett explains why the master bedroom must disappear: “There are people who are part of our population who do associate that practice and that history with that word.” And therein lies the problem because “there are times when language can express implicit bias.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Implicit bias:

      1. In contrast with explicit bias, the attribution to another person, by people with a superior moral standing, of an unjustifiable idea, belief or value that merits being condemned even if the accused person does not entertain that idea or belief.

      2. A supposed reprehensible mental habit of ordinary people that is discernible only to a class of people skilled at reading meaning that is not there into everyday language.

      Contextual Note

      What Syrett may not realize in her puritanical Bostonian zeal is that the enemy she’s tilting against isn’t racism — it’s the English language. She is calling into question the legitimacy of metaphor. Impoverishing the language does nothing to combat racism and may even have the effect of sheltering it from criticism. Racism is a worldview, not a vocabulary list.

      Syrett and Young appear intent on identifying, listing and banishing from polite discourse any words that might be associated with the slave economy. As she works in the field of children’s language acquisition, she appears to propose establishing a list of words teachers will be instructed never to use in classrooms to protect students’ ears from their vile influence.

      Some may suspect that these language detectives are primarily motivated by the personal pleasure gleaned from occupying the high moral ground that empowers them to designate unconscious racists for public opprobrium. Isn’t that part of the great Puritan tradition of New England to find ways of feeling more virtuous than the unwashed masses?

      For all her apparent schooling in the fashion of “critical theory,” Syrett’s critical thinking often relies on specious reasoning. Here is how she justifies the need to ban words: “To the extent that language can be a way of expressing who we are and what our values are and to the extent to which that language can either be a way to exclude people from a discourse or include them as key participants, then this is a great opportunity for us to revisit.”

      On several occasions in the interview, Syrett builds her reasoning around the phrase “to the extent that,” an expression that introduces a speculative and indeterminate idea. By concatenating two unrelated speculations, she creates the rhetorical illusion of equivalence or even of cause and effect. In this case it allows her to reveal an “opportunity.” But she hasn’t justified either proposition and even less the relationship (non-existent) between them. The opportunity this chopped logic permits is simply the censure she seeks to impose on the language ordinary people use.

      At another point, she says: “I think in a lot of cases, people aren’t really thinking that the expression conveys that kind of racism or misogyny.” Her point is clear: She thinks, whereas other “people” don’t think. With a more scientific approach, she might seek to explore why people don’t think what she thinks rather than supposing that they aren’t thinking. She may be right about their ignorance, but it may also emerge that she has misconstrued their and the language’s reality.

      Undoubtedly, Syrett starts with a noble intention. She wants to protect the victims of a truly oppressive system, even when the victims may not realize they are being oppressed. She believes language can be more secure by hiding reality. It must rid itself of anything that might, in her words, “marginalize and hurt other people.” The best way to do that is to scold those who fail to conform to the findings of her science.

      Historical Note

      Syrett’s approach is a perfect example of the decades-long trend in academe of the phenomenon known as critical theory. The first half of the 20th century produced a vibrant intellectual current called structuralism. It originated in the field of linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) and anthropology (Claude Lévy-Strauss) and offered insight into how societies and the cultures they produced were structured as complex interdependent systems. 

      In the mid-20th century, a disparate group of French linguists, philosophers, psychoanalysts and literary critics influenced by structuralism set about “deconstructing” the relationships between ideas, practices, language and modes of thought, from penal systems and sexuality (Michel Foucault) to popular entertainment and advertising (Roland Barthes). The chief deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, denied the fundamental stability of meaning itself, which could only be a function of context. The ongoing dialogue of these thinkers, all of whom wrote in French, contains subtle and complex reflection on how human knowledge is created, managed and transmitted. 

      Alas, when this body of discourse crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the 1960s and 1970s, it lost something in translation. A strange mutation took place as academics labelled it “critical theory.” It appealed to humanities departments in the US who felt the need to show their concern with social issues. Because thinkers such as Michel Foucault offered insight into how cultural artifacts could reflect and support dominant worldviews and ideologies, American academics neglected its focus on the structural complexity of cultural and political ecosystems and instead seized on it as of method of assigning criminal intent to those who exercised power and oppressed minorities. 

      From the French post-structuralist perspective, this hijacking of the intellectual toolbox contributed little to our understanding of the societies past and present but served to reveal systemic features of US society and culture. If the French took delight in detecting the complex play of influences within a cultural system, American academics turned the method into a polarizing game of blame and victimization. Where the French thinkers saw intricate resonances that supported morally ambiguous social and political hierarchies, American academics saw arbitrary acts of personal abuse.

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      A French structuralist or post-structuralist observing this historical trend among intellectuals today might remark on the continuity in American society between the early Puritans’ insistence on dividing the world into the just and the unjust — those predestined by God to be among the virtuous and those condemned to sin. This cultural trend underlies the current obsession with separating society into two groups: innocent victims (any specific minority group) and evil oppressors. An aggressive system of identity politics has become the dominant ideology of the mainstream Democratic Party. It opposes the equally aggressive Republican insistence on defending “the shining city on the hill,” essentially a metaphor for white privilege.

      The rise of puritanical linguistic despotism can be traced back to World War I when sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage” to protect American ears from German words. The tradition was perpetuated and even aggravated after George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq when the White House punished Jacques Chirac’s disloyal France by renaming French fries “freedom fries.” 

      If liberty cabbage had some legitimacy because it was meant to spare people using a word from the enemy’s language, Bush’s initiative went further. France, after all, was not the enemy, except in the sense implied by Bush when he asserted in September 2001 that “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” When France refused to line up behind his government in what President Chirac correctly deemed a deceitful and murderous enterprise, Bush undoubtedly saw France as an ally of the terrorists.

      That helps to situate the common thread between Syrett’s assault on “master bedrooms” and US foreign policy. It’s all about identifying, shaming and, when possible, banishing the culprit.

      *[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. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.]

      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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      The Travails of America’s Higher Education

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      American universities are among the best in the world. Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale, to name but a few, attract the best and the brightest of their generation, year after year. The competition is brutal. Most applicants are rejected. American universities, however, are not only among the best in the world — they are also among the most expensive. A non-resident student at one of the top public universities, such as UCLA, Berkeley or the University of Virginia, pays more than $ 150,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. A professional master’s degree, such as business or law, costs you well over $100,000 a year. No wonder that higher education has become a multibillion-dollar quasi-corporation, with university presidents behaving — and being remunerated — like CEOs.

      Until COVID-19, business was booming. The pandemic, however, has thrown a monkey wrench into the works, and university administrators are at a loss of how to respond to the crisis. The problem is that as higher education in the United States morphed into big business, it increasingly reached out beyond America’s borders, actively seeking to recruit international students. Last year, for instance, there were some 90,000 German students enrolled in American universities. Their numbers pale, however, in comparison to Chinese students, who in recent years amounted to over 350,000. Universities love foreign and non-resident students if only because more often than not they pay full tuition.

      Up in the Air

      The combination of COVID-19 and Trumpian nativism poses a serious threat to this arrangement. As the pandemic spread across the nation, universities were forced to close their doors and go online. And with the pandemic threatening to engulf the whole nation, largely thanks to the administration’s incompetence and utter lack of preparedness and empathy, the immediate future of higher education is completely up in the air. Foreign students are in the United States on a visa that requires them to pursue their degree at a (physical) university. As universities become virtual, switching to online teaching, this no longer applies, or so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced in early July.

      This meant international would be required to leave the country or face deportation. Immigration suggested that international students whose university moved online consider transferring to another university that still offered in-person instruction – under the circumstances a rather ridiculous proposition. In any case, ICE announced that the Department of State would no longer “issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester” nor would immigration authorities “permit these students to enter the United States.”

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      In response, a number of major private and public universities filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the measure. In the days that followed the administration reversed course, admitting the “proposal” had been “poorly conceived and executed.” This, however, failed to smooth the waves of academic indignation. On July 14, the president of MIT, Dr. L. Rafael Reif, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he claimed that America needed foreign students. Foreign students, he charged, were essential for American competitiveness and innovation. “As a nation,” he maintained, “when we turn our backs on talented foreign students, we not only lose all that they bring to our classrooms and laboratories, we also give up a strategic asset.”

      To illustrate the point he chose as an example Chinese PhD students — not particularly felicitous given the current anti-Chinese sentiments prevalent in America today. Most recent data showed, he wrote, “that 83 percent of Ph.D. students from China, the kind of highly trained scientists and engineers who drive American innovation, were still in the United States five years after completing their degrees.”

      The Resentment of the Privileged

      The New York Times allows its readers to comment on op-ed pieces. It is difficult to know if Reif was prepared for some of the responses he got from his readers. Quite a number of commentators questioned the MIT president’s motives behind his defense of foreign students, and particularly Chinese students. Others insisted that American students should get preference. Others charged that foreign students were “squeezing out” qualified American applicants for the simple reason that American top universities put them in a position to do so. Undoubtedly, resentment transcends class boundaries.

      There are, however, good grounds for this resentment. One of the most burning socioeconomic issues today is inequality. COVID-19 has once again drastically shown that inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon, related to a range of markers — gender, race, class and particularly education. Take, for instance, “assortative mating,” which refers to the tendency of people to choose a partner with a similar background, such as education level. Studies show not only that assortative mating has steadily increased over the past decades, but also that it has a non-negligible impact on socioeconomic inequality.

      It has also been shown that parents’ education level has a significant impact on their child’s educational attainment. Children from families where the parents are highly-educated are more likely to succeed in high school, more likely to attend and graduate from university and more likely to get a well-paying job. In this way, inequality is passed on to the next generation.

      A second reason for the resentment expressed by some of the comments in The New York Times is probably more mundane, more “human, all too human.” Top American universities are the incubator of America’s elite, similar to Oxbridge in the UK and the grandes écoles in France. With top universities seeking to attract foreign students, there are fewer spaces from the “native-born.” Given the profile of the average reader of The New York Times, the resulting resentment is quite understandable. Nativism is usually associated with “ordinary people” having to compete with migrants for scarce resources such as social welfare.

      This does not mean, however, that the privileged are immune to nativism. And the resentment of the privileged is bound to increase in the years to come. Until now, highly educated professionals in the West were largely protected against international competition. Studies suggest that COVID-19 is going to boost trade in services. The acceleration of trade in services, in turn, is likely to affect a range of professional services — finance, consulting, accounting, legal services, even medicine — hitherto shielded from international competition. Under the circumstances, the resentment of the highly educated is perfectly understandable. Foreign students from China and India at Harvard and MIT are the likely competitors of their offspring a few years ahead. And they are likely to win the race.

      Luxury Good

      It appears American higher education is in a pickle, some of its own making, some not. The reality is that higher education has become a luxury good in the US. For most Americans today, college education represents the second-largest expense after buying a home. Over the past three decades or so, tuition costs have more than doubled, in some cases significantly more. One of the reasons has been deep cuts by states for higher education, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession: Since 2008, tuition and fees in four-year public schools increased on average by more than 30%.

      At the same time, however, universities are also to blame. One of the main reasons for the spiraling costs of higher education is the dramatic expansion of university bureaucracy. In the years following the Great Depression, and state funding cuts notwithstanding, administration costs skyrocketed. According to Forbes, between 1980-81 and 2014-15 school years, administrative costs at private and public schools increased from $13 billion to $122.3 billion. During the same period, instruction costs increased from $20.7 billion to $148 billion. In the process, the number of administrators has steadily risen largely outpacing the hiring of full-time faculty. In fact, in today’s universities, a significant part of the teaching is done by part-time faculty more often than not paid a pittance — around $3,000 per three-credit course.

      As has been the case in so many other areas, COVID-19 has brutally exposed the complete lack of awareness of what is happening in the “real” world and of preparedness for contingencies on the part of those supposed to be in charge in higher education, namely its highly remunerated administrators. In a recent scathing critique in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Johns Hopkins University professor has released all the pent-up anger that has accumulated over the years: “Even as they continue enriching themselves,” he charges, “university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk. In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency. Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.”

      The professor’s ire is understandable, given the heavy losses Johns Hopkins has projected it will incur as a result of the pandemic and its impact on its faculty. The university expects losses for the next fiscal year to amount to more than $350 million, partially to be met by cutbacks. In addition to restrictions on new hiring, the possibility of furloughs and even layoffs, the president of the university announced that JHU would suspend the university’s contributions to individual retirement accounts — for all practical purposes amounting to a pay cut.

      COVID-19 marks a rude awakening for America’s premier universities, laying bare all the problems associated with the “corporatization” of the institution of the university and “the monetization of just about everything within the institution” that are at the root of their current predicament. Under the circumstances, the MIT president’s op-ed piece is understandable. It certainly won’t fix the system of higher education.

      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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      If a Statue Offends My Sister, It Also Offends Me

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      Since the toppling of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol last month, a stream of articles, many by white writers, have called for such monuments to be placed in museums. These writers argue that, with sensitive curation, such statues can act to educate a public ignorant of the suffering inflicted by abusive systems […] More

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      Black Lives Matter Shines the Spotlight on the Shadow of Slavery

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      The Black Lives Matter movement has been sweeping advanced liberal democracies, from the United States to Western Europe, impacting even those countries, such as Switzerland, comparatively marginally involved in the slave trade. Black Lives Matter confronts all of these societies with their historical role in the trafficking and exploitation of human beings, whose only “defect” […] More