Got Woke?

I am a great proponent of teaching about the history of race and the dynamics of how that contributed towards our current culture and the role it plays in income inequality, from redlining that prohibited Black families to buy homes and build equity which is a major role in family wealth; public versus private education and the role of funding K-12 to Colleges that led to discriminatory practices in how well a school could educate their students; Affirmative action, voting rights, equal rights for women and of course LGBQT history of their rights as well. The debate on Immigration and of course Slavery and how even today we continue to have a form of indentured servitude with undocumented workers. All of these things are actually ongoing so it is living history and the past acts of laws and misdeeds by many politicians including interning Japanese during WWII, the Chinese Exclusionary Acts, the role of American Natives and how we have done damage to their culture and identity are all part of what is under the umbrella of Critical Race Theory. Sadly it is not, it is defined by two colors, black and white, and with that we have a major problem right there. Our history is not defined solely by those two races and should not be defined to only those and with that even within that there are perspectives that run contrary to the collective belief.

I deeply respect John McWhorter and his views regarding Anti Racism theory has been well documented and has often been quite the lightening rod for many who are seeking to make this curriculum a requirement in all schools, both K-12 to College. This has also escalated to smack down on his blog and of course the personal often colors the professional when criticizing any theory which is what Anti-Racism is. It is not a science, a defined mental health issue nor anything more than one persons perspective on race, much like DiAngelo’s thoughts on race that claim white fragility is why racism persists. There are theories on the issue of Caste and its role in why Black economics are affected by persisting racism and that theory too can be extended across the board when it comes to economic inequality that meritocracy works, that yes one can rise above ones class or race. Allowing, no really it is permitting, some to elevate in society easier than others. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to me clearly demonstrate that and the bookend is Barack and Michelle Obama. So yes folks the mythical Unicorn of Meritocracy can exist, just not that often, where it is less about entertainment or sports as the avenue in which to advance.

So when I read the article below about the well off and historically white institutions of education in New York and their attempt to teach wokeness I did laugh. As I have said there is little room in liberal bastions for dissent despite their otherwise saying to the contrary. Drink the kool-aid, shut your mouth and say, thanks I love overly sweet drinks. I have learned that the most political profession is not actually politics but education. Despite the fact that public education is transparent with regards to salary, educational requirements, professional expectations and of course professional growth it is is also the most behind closed doors one that I have ever experienced. The endless revolving doors of Superintendents, Administrators, School Boards along with the political climate in the mainstream, and of course the endless onslaught of theories and concepts created in the halls of ivory (STEM, Restorative Justice). Follow the money backing said theories become the latest and greatest idea since sliced bread. Common Core anyone? And how these affect the classroom and only been measured less in tests but in exhaustion. Covid has opened that Pandora’s Box and has now enabled many to see, if not experience, first hand the challenges of what it takes to manage a classroom of diverse and not so diverse bodies.

But the rich are different and while they espouse egalitarianism they are the most dogmatic when it comes to protecting their own and their way of life. Nurture versus nature matters most and in turn they profess to care but they really on care about their own. Public face versus private face and that anyone who thinks faces of color are experts at code switching, need to spend more time with wealthy as they are experts at it. They invented it, they patented it and they get it. How do you think the rest of us learned it? We had to to survive.

So below is the story of the rich, the elite and their schools in teaching Critical Race Theory. The stories of the rednecks and others protesting this only demonstrates the method in which they do so, the rich are different. They will do it, they will take no one else’s opinions or regard any criticism as this is the way it is to be done. They actually don’t care but on surface it appears they do. And the article mentions the issues over class but not just those ones exhibited by the privileged Whites, but Black families as well. But when you hear only one voice you hear nothing and learn even less. And again, swallow the tea, drink the kool aid as it is like a cult just with better style.

New York’s Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.

In this world — where tuition runs as high as $58,000 — the topic has become flammable. Parents, faculty, students and alumni have all entered the fray.

By Michael Powell The New York Times August 27 2021

Several years back Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan, embraced an antiracist mission and sought to have students and teachers wrestle with whiteness, racial privilege and bias.

Teachers and students were periodically separated into groups by race, gender and ethnicity. In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher, and what the school called his “white-identifying” group, met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included individualism, worship of the written word and objectivity.

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. “Objectivity?” he told the consultant, according to a transcript. “Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.”

As you look at this list, the consultant asked, are you having “white feelings”?

“What,” Mr. Rossi asked, “makes a feeling ‘white’?”

Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. “I’m so exhausted with being reduced to my race,” a girl said. “The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.” Another girl added: “Fighting indoctrination with indoctrination can be dangerous.”

This modest revolt proved fateful. A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of “creating a neurological imbalance” in students, according to a recording of the conversation. A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes.

“When someone breaches our professional norms,” the statement read in part, “the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.”

This is another dispatch from America’s cultural conflicts over schools, this time from a rarefied bubble. Elite private schools from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., from Boston to Columbus, Ohio, have embraced a mission to end racism by challenging white privilege. A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far — and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students.

This is nowhere more true than in New York City’s tony forest of private schools.

Stirred by the surge of activism around racism, Black alumni have shared tales of isolation, insensitivity and racism during school days.

And many private school administrators have tried to reimagine their schools as antiracist institutions, which means, loosely, a school that is actively opposed to any manifestation of racism.

This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York’s private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million.

At a time when some public schools are battling over whether to even teach aspects of American history, private school administrators portray uprooting racial bias as morally urgent and demanding of reiteration. Some steps are practical: They have added Black, Latino and Asian authors, and expanded course offerings to better encompass America and the world in its complications.

Other steps are much more personal. The interim head of the Dalton School, Ellen Stein, who is white, spoke five years ago of writing a racial biography of herself to better understand biases and to communicate with “other races.” The Brearley School declared itself an antiracist school with mandatory antiracism training for parents, faculty and trustees and affirmed the importance of meeting regularly in groups that bring together people who share a common race or gender.

Kindergarten students at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx are taught to identify their skin color by mixing paint colors. The lower school chief in an email last year instructed parents to avoid talk of colorblindness and “acknowledge racial differences.”Sign Up for The Great Read  Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go. Get it sent to your inbox.

Private school leaders, along with diversity consultants, say these approaches reflect current research about confronting racism and stamping out privilege.

“There’s always the same resistance — ‘Oh my God, you’re going too far,’” said Martha Haakmat, a Black diversity consultant who serves on the board of Brearley. “We just want to teach kids about the systems that create inequity in society and empower them rather than reinforcing systems of oppression.”

Studies show that very young children, she said, are aware of skin color. Better to address it — “Yes, that woman has Black skin. What do you think of that?” — than to let children view white skin as the baseline.

More broadly, Ms. Haakmat said, private schools need to sidestep white old boy networks in hiring and integrate antiracism into the curriculum: If you teach statistics, why not touch on economic and racial inequality? Or use biology classes to teach of eugenics and how race has framed the way we think of humans? That, she said, “is thoughtful antiracism.”

Critics, a mixed lot of parents and teachers, argue that aspects of the new curriculums edge toward recreating the racially segregated spaces of an earlier age. They say the insistent emphasis on skin color and race is reductive and some teenagers learn to adopt the language of antiracism and wield it against peers.

The nerves of some parents were not soothed when more than 100 teachers and staff members applauded Dalton’s antiracism curriculum and proposed two dozen steps to extend it, including calling on the school to abolish any advanced course in which Black students performed worse than students who are not Black.

A group of Dalton parents wrote their own letter to the school this year: “We have spoken with dozens of families of all colors and backgrounds who are in shock and looking for an alternative school.”

This upswell of parental anger, fed also by discontent with Dalton’s decision to teach only online last fall, led the head of school, Jim Best, who is white, to leave on July 1. Dalton’s diversity chief resigned under fire in February.

Bion Bartning, who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. “The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,” he said.

No head of school agreed to an interview. Those at Dalton, Riverdale and Grace Church answered some questions by email. Several dozen faculty members declined interviews; in the end six spoke only on the condition of anonymity, for fear of upsetting employers. A dozen parents at five schools agreed to interviews, only one on the record.

For parents to speak out, said a white mother of private school children, was laden with risk. “People and companies are petrified of being labeled racists,” she said. “If you work at an elite Wall Street firm and speak out, a top partner will tell you to shut up.”

Another parent framed the primal class stakes: Wealthy parents plot and compete to get a child into a private school secure in the knowledge that education married to social connections will ease the way into an elite college and a gilded career. A letter or call from the counselor at a top private school can work wonders with college admissions offices.

Why risk all that?

Responding to Painful Stories

The stories make for disturbing reading. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Black private school alumni formed Instagram accounts: @blackattrinity, @blackatdalton, @blackatbrearley, @blackatandover and @blackatsidwellfriends.

The posts are anonymous and difficult to fact-check. But the ache and hurt are inescapable. A Black student recalled a white peer who told him Dalton “wasn’t made for people like you anyway.” A Black graduate of Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School recalled wealthy white classmates who complained Black students only got into certain colleges because of their race. A Black Brearley graduate wrote of being conditioned to believe “white skin, straight hair, a skinny body and money was the only way I could be right in this world.”

Stories come laden with complication. Students wrote of favorite teachers and treasured experiences. And there were traces of class anger. A Black working-class parent at Trinity School wrote that wealthy Black families dominated the Black affinity group and excluded her child.

These kinds of stories, taken together with shifts in the culture around racism, persuaded private school leaders to double down on antiracist education. Such efforts extend back more than four decades.

“As schools got used to diversity they realized it enriched education for all students,” said Ms. Haakmat, the consultant. “But these schools were still way white.”

New York’s private schools declined to provide the demographic breakdowns that are required of public schools. Riverdale and Trinity officials say about 40 percent of students identify as of color, a quite broad definition; Grace officials say 33 percent of students hail from “diverse backgrounds”; Dalton said only that it had a “strong commitment to being intentionally diverse.” Riverdale’s head of school, Dominic Randolph, said a precise count was complicated by the number of families identifying as multiracial.

Numbers compiled by the Guild of Independent Schools of New York City showed that the percentage of students in elite private schools who identified as Black or Latino remained static since 2013, hovering at a combined 12 percent; Black and Latino residents constitute more than 50 percent of the city’s population.

Lisa Johnson is a graduate of a private school in Atlanta and heads Private School Village, a Los Angeles-based organization for Black families. “They love to pitch you on diversity,” she said. “Then your child is one of two Blacks in a class and you think, ‘Huh, how do they define diversity without crystal-clear data?’”

Chloé Valdary, a Black diversity consultant who diverges from her peers and is critical of aspects of antiracist education, noted that heated rhetoric rarely challenged the status quo. “Antiracism sidesteps income inequality and doesn’t actually threaten the elite at all,” she said.

Several teachers spoke of a performance-like quality to heated rhetoric on antiracism and pointed by way of example to Dalton, which throws an annual diversity conference that attracts trustees, parents and donors from 30 private schools. The conference this May carried intrigue, with Dalton’s head of school, Mr. Best, speaking of his confusion at being pushed out, saying, “No one here, including me, has the full story.”

Mr. Best introduced the keynote speaker, Rodney Glasgow, a Black diversity consultant who leads a private Quaker school in Maryland. Mr. Glasgow, a popular speaker on the private school circuit, promptly laid waste to that world, describing it as laden with “insidious” whiteness and “built to replicate the plantation mentality.”

Mr. Glasgow ended with a flourish, comparing those Dalton parents who pushed out Mr. Best to what he described as the white supremacists who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Dalton featured his speech prominently on its website until questions arose. It has since been removed.

The Grace School Mission

Paul Rossi and Grace Church School’s journey into antiracist education offers a window into its complexities. Mr. Rossi, 52, changed careers in his early 40s, and found at Grace — an Episcopal school with liberal values — a place he adored. He taught math and classes on existentialism and Stoic philosophy. Records show he received strong annual evaluations and was described as a natural teacher.

Slowly change came. The head of school, George P. Davison, who is white and has steered Grace for many years, pinpointed the moment his school embraced an antiracist mission.

“Grace began using the language of antiracism in 2015 as part of our efforts to foster a sense of belonging,” he wrote in response to The New York Times. “It means believing that racism is real, that opposing it requires active engagement and that our community and curriculum are enriched when we aren’t blind to race’s influence.”

Grace, he wrote, incorporated the language of critical race theory but did not rest upon that foundation. He emphasized that the school avoided using shame around race.

Mr. Rossi, along with two teachers who described themselves as progressives and asked for anonymity, was skeptical. The teachers acknowledged that quite a few colleagues appeared to support the new curriculum and they spoke of sustained pressure to demonstrate acceptance of the language of antiracism.

Last year, the @blackatgrace Instagram account anonymously accused a female administrator of once placing derogatory information in a Black student’s file. A teacher circulated a petition demanding her firing.

Another teacher grew worried; he had not known of the petition and feared the absence of his signature would be taken as a sign of his insensitivity. “I thought to myself: We’ve entered a culture of denunciation,” Mr. Rossi said. “We don’t just denounce but if we don’t do it fast enough, we could be denounced.”

Pressure to join affinity groups went “beyond ‘highly encouraged,’” teachers said. A Latino couple asked a teacher to stop pressuring their daughter, who did not want to join the Latino one.

Grace administrators agreed to demands to seek more diverse faculty; it is largely white.

With the election of Donald J. Trump, teachers said, permissible disagreement narrowed markedly. Mr. Rossi recalled some students in his “The Art of Persuasion” class hankered for contrarian readings outside what he called the “Grace political bubble.” So last autumn he proposed a work by Glenn Loury, a well-known economist at Brown University and a Black man with conservative leanings.

An administrator, Hugo Mahabir, whose family has roots in Trinidad, blocked that. He wrote in an email to Mr. Rossi that Mr. Loury’s argument — delivered to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics faculty — “rings hollow,” and that to give students a Black conservative view on race might “confuse and/or enflame students.” Mr. Mahabir did not respond to requests for comment.

The transcript of the February session with Mr. Rossi’s white affinity group revealed a tense, probing discussion, with teachers and students found on either side of various questions. Toward the end, the dean of student life, Ilana Laurence, offered thanks: “As uncomfortable as Mr. Rossi may have made many people here, I firmly believe that our conversation would not ever have been nearly as rich and thought-provoking.”

This drew support from the consultant, Emily Schorr Lesnick, who ran the affinity session. At a faculty meeting a few days later, she noted that Mr. Rossi and fellow teachers modeled an intelligent discussion.

“I have been in lots of spaces with adults, with students around antiracist work,” she said, where white people are “kind of just saying things and going through the motions and this was not that space, and I am so so grateful.” Ms. Schorr Lesnick, who is white, did not respond to a request for an interview.

That air of congratulation dissipated. Soon Mr. Rossi talked with Mr. Davison, the school head, about the dim shape of his future. He secretly recorded that conversation.

It offered a surprise. “The fact is that I’m agreeing with you that there has been a demonization,” Mr. Davison told the teacher. “I also have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of antiracist.”

Mr. Davison said he was worried students were made to feel shame because of race. “We’re demonizing white people for being born,” he said, adding later, “We’re using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible.”

Mr. Rossi wrote of his case on the Substack site of the writer Bari Weiss, a former Times Opinion editor. In an email to Mr. Rossi, Mr. Davison claimed he was misquoted. The teacher later released recorded excerpts from that conversation, after which Grace claimed that the quotes lacked context.

Mr. Rossi was denounced at Grace and in private school circles. He rejoined that he was trapped, accused of racial insensitivity and in danger of losing his job.

This drama occurred against a backdrop of tension at the school. Months earlier, nine Black students demanded that classes be called off in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death. They said peers were “voicing their white opinions about how Black and brown people should protest.”

The Grace Gazette, the school newspaper, surveyed 111 students and staff this spring of all backgrounds about free speech.

By a margin of about 48 percent to 43 percent, respondents said they were uncomfortable expressing dissenting opinions. And 35 percent said they had practiced “wokeness” to protect their reputations. “There is no viewpoint diversity on race,” a student wrote, “because everyone is expected to view things the same way.”

An Uncertain Future

The pushback against antiracism education has taken on aspects of an ideological uprising. In Boston, a new group, Parents United, has entered the fight with New England’s private schools. Mr. Bartning, the former Riverdale parent, established the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, with a large board that includes the academic and writer Steven Pinker; the human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the former Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly; and Mr. Loury, the economist at Brown. Mr. Rossi works with this foundation.

Grace Church School appointed a task force to re-examine its antiracist teachings.

But the schools seem unlikely to change their approach to educating students on race. And opponents face daunting challenges. Powerful trustees say they support the schools, and administrators sound steeled for the argument. Tom Taylor, the head of Riverdale’s Upper School, who is white, recently published an academic article on race and private schools. He, too, is a product of such schools.

Private schools perpetuate whiteness, he wrote, and must pursue an “antiracist, decolonizing and culturally affirming” agenda, with no obligation to educate those who resist. “Private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward a culturally responsible school are free to draw a line,” he wrote.

Mr. Rossi, the Grace schoolteacher, will watch from the outside. Grace Church School offered him a contract if he participated in “restorative practices” for the supposed harm done to students of color. Grace officials did not explain what that would entail.

Soon after, Mr. Rossi and the school parted ways. “It’s no longer the school I loved,” he said.

White Lady Power

To women the resolution is to have more women in power, as it is believed that for many women have. been marginalized and demonized too long, just ask Hilary Clinton about that one. And to some extent that is true but to think that women are superior to men and can find better ways to resolve a problem, handle a crisis and to be more egalitarian clearly haven’t hung out with a lot of women. Most of my professional life has been one surrounded by women in the education field and of course retail. Store Managers, Administrators and often other Executives in both the private and public sector have been men, largely white but in education that is a field that has been largely one of color and usually singularly Black. Government positions, be that municipal or federal have a better grasp on what Affirmative Action means and in turn follow that guidance to employ and promote. I won’t say it is perfect but it has enabled many faces of color to be employed in secure jobs with a career track (sort of) and secure pay and benefits that enable a middle class lifestyle. That has eroded and the Supreme Court has like Voting Rights slowly whittled that away and again all we really need to look at is the pay equity with regards to women and those of color to see how the gaps remain.

As I have said repeatedly when it comes to poverty, the rung on the mythical unicorn ladder of meritocracy is a low one to get when it is at the bottom but each successive rung is one hard climbed and regardless of who is below you will claw, kick and do whatever it takes to keep hold, regardless of color, gender or any other factor, be in extrinsic (as in enabled by laws and policies) or intrinsic (that up by your boot strap nonsense) that has led people to believe they earned it and are worth it. Sometimes you are pushed or pulled up and that seems to be forgotten once landed.

I have also said that as a woman I have been scolded, reprimanded, disciplined and cautioned that what I said, didn’t say, should of said, what I looked like, how I acted, did not act, failed to do or did wrong which I all took as a failure of personal character, until I didn’t. I am not sure when but I think it was during Teaching, being married and having fuck you money or just getting older which enabled me to stop beating up myself. Then I sat down and realized that no one is perfect, the perfect person is dead, as my Mother used to say, and that to some I am great to others not and how I handled the latter mattered more. So I started to abandon ship. I quit jobs, I moved, I dumped and ran like the runaway Bride anytime conflict entered the picture. I finally had to stop running thanks to a pandemic and in reality I already knew it was time, I am sick of fucking running. So when I read this article in the Guardian today about a Pakistani woman who has found White Feminism repressing and oppressing in the same, but different, ways Muslim life was, I was RELIEVED; What I had been saying as a white woman for years about the way women, largely white treat each other, excusing women of color as well they were deeply also in debt psychologically to the power of the purse, I found myself having a good laugh. This is why we don’t get along, we don’t know each other at all. I call it Cultural Dysmorphia, like Body Dysmorphia: A mental health disorder in which you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance — a flaw that appears minor or can’t be seen by others. But you may feel so embarrassed, ashamed and anxious that you may avoid many social situations

So now take that and apply that to someone else, a person of color, a person of another gender, culture, religion, sexuality or even class and see what happens. I remember when Ethan the religious Zealot said, “I have never met anyone from the North before.” Dear God you would have thought I just arrived from Croatia with that comment. Really, no one? He said the same about Gay folks so there you go, he just needed to look in the mirror on that one. But that is the point, that you treat someone as an oddity, as a thing that needs to be fixed, placated, handled. it is both patronizing and utterly insane. And with this one I mean really even the bullshit assorted with White Privilege and that idea that we have to confess our micro/macro agressions to a room of people, many strangers but also colleagues, and find those folks of color and go out of our way to apologize and ensure that we will never do it again, is both patronizing and childish. The old adage about teaching a man to fish fits, learning about another culture/race/faith opens the mind and hopefully the heart a workshop filled with sad worried white liberals is the last place to do it. I would truly hate to be the outlier there and be a face of color, the sad grimace faces would be enough to have me go off the rails. I went to one and turned my micro aggression into a vulgar stereotype and admitted to having the dick pics to prove it, and no one took me up on and immediately moved away from me. I then went to the bathroom never to return, grateful that I had not been asked to show said non-existent pics as that would have been well, to say “interesting.” But one woman did show her pics, of her family, a nice interracial one and that too led to very pregnant pauses.

Again I want to remind many that to have a Teaching degree you need at least five years of college and most Teachers have Masters and Doctorates and yet we are subject to endless seminars and workshops in which we must take in order to retain our licenses. I doubt Accountants, Architects, Attorneys and others with similar licensing requirements need to subject themselves to this bulllshit to prove worth but then this is largely a pink collar profession so that makes sense.

Dr. Zakaria which like Jill Biden is the appropriate title, has entered a largely privileged class or workplaces, higher Ed and to say assholes would be well a sweeping generalization but then again I remember the crazy woman Professor a few years ago and her “safe space” agenda. We have the crazy Tiger Mother at Yale and her husband the serial harasser so no, higher ed is hardly the respite one thinks when it comes to intellectual parity so her issues she faces there are not shocking in the least. But then again she has never been a bus driver or a fast food worker so she too has an elitist touch when it comes to her perspective here with regards to her experiences. What I do agree with is that almost all women’s success is dependent upon male mentors and patriarchs. The reality is that almost all women have some comma, hyphen or tangential relationship to a powerful white male. The example of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Google has clear links to the blowhard, Lawrence Summers of Havard, etc, who was a strong factor in her hiring in said gigs, so no those bootstraps were tied to Manolo’s when she leaned in. And currently her relationship to Zuckerberg is to say the least, tense, given the current climate post election and their role in the debacle that is all things Trump.

I rarely hear women mention other women as their mentors and that is not surprising as few know how and they fear and worry that the same woman they are supporting is the same women who will walk over her back on the same Manolo’s that Andrew Cuomo seemed to prefer on his staff, who seemed to have no problem enabling his toxic work culture.

Again much like any maligned class or group few have the training, the talent and the skills needed to navigate what is a largely a man’s world. And we as Liberals take offense as a highly skilled defense when someone does not agree with the concepts and decisions made that are talked about over and over again and then decided upon after reaching a consensus of all. And with that anyone who does not agree is immediately ostracized and alienated, marked and labeled as an outlier/outsider not to be trusted. Sheep mentality is not exclusive to the right or left but it is both expected and tolerated. Be different just like everyone else, my Mother said and on that too she was right. I choose be different just like myself and I have paid a heavy price for it. So choose wisely.

Rafia Zakaria: ‘A lot of white female professors told me to quit’

Nesrine Malik The Guardian

The activist and author discusses why there is no one-size-fits-all feminism and her aim to create work that comforts women of colour who have been ‘gaslit’Sat 28 Aug 2021 06.00 EDT

Rafia Zakaria’s new book Against White Feminism starts with a sort of Sex and the City scene entitled “At a wine bar, a group of feminists …” In it, some well-heeled white women are gathered for a drink in New York. The only brown woman in attendance, Zakaria winces and wilts under the glare of their innocent questions, as she tries to avoid the responses she tends to receive when she tells her true story – ones of pity, discomfort and avoidance.

Zakaria was born in Pakistan and at the age of 17 agreed to an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man living in the US. “I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. The marriage was unhappy, and she left her abusive husband at the age of 25, seeking refuge in a shelter with her toddler. What followed were years of precarity in the US.

She tells me, from her home in Indiana, that she wrote the book because “I am a Muslim brown person from Pakistan, and the assumption when I meet people in the west is that all the oppression I’ve ever faced, all the hardship that I’ve ever faced, were back in Pakistan, and were the consequence of cultural mores and beliefs.” With Against White Feminism, she wanted to challenge that “liberation trajectory” of the Muslim woman’s story, so that women who live in the west stop thinking “Oh it’s so bad over there – ” it must be “so great here”.

Graduate school, with its subsidised childcare, was a refuge, a place where she could be ‘poor and smart’

By writing the book, Zakaria hopes to decentre white feminism or, at least, call attention to the fact that it is a template that does not work for everyone because it is limited in its utility by white supremacy. “A white feminist,” Zakaria writes, “is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played in universalising white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and of all of feminists.”Advertisement

In the book, Zakaria outlines how a one-size-fits-all white feminism has been complicit in interventionist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in destroying native aid and empowerment structures in low income countries, and in denying the cultural backwardness of western societies vis-a-vis women’s rights.

Her “trauma” is central to her motivations for writing the book. In 2002, when she ran away from her husband with “a baby on her hip”, she had no money, bank account or credit card. She managed to leave sheltered accommodation only when a black woman “took her on” and offered her an apartment. It was the first time she could “exhale”, she says. “I had been running for so long.” After a few difficult years, she managed to finish law school and complete a postgraduate degree in political philosophy. At one point, a stranger paid for her groceries at the supermarket when her daughter brought an unbudgeted bag of popsicles to the till. “That moment of not having enough money to pay for your food is really seared into my memory. I felt so much shame, so much absolute disappointment in myself because I had to take charity to feed myself and my kid.” Graduate school, with its subsidised childcare and flexible hours, was a refuge, a place where Zakaria could be “poor and smart”.

The white women she met on the way, all of ostensibly impeccable liberal and feminist credentials, did little tohelp her. In law school “a lot of white female professors told me to quit”. When she felt she had finally found her place in the NGO world, white women “obstructed” and sabotaged her “in every possible way” from doing her job. “Every time I would write a report there would be 10 people who would shred it, telling me how I was wrong and I was failing and I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that. I would put forward a resolution or an idea and there would be discussion and none of the white woman would support me. Basically it was a trap, I was set up to fail. So then you can tell the story that we gave so and so the job and we’re so inclusive, but she decided she didn’t want to do it.” Zakaria is softly spoken and quasi-academic in her speech, but her tone sharpens when she lists these slights and humiliations, as it does when she recounts other incidents that made her feel like a sort of shop window display of a brown woman for the benefit of a white audience.“I was either never allowed to speak or entrapped.”

One of the problems with white feminism according to Zakaria is that it is still connected to the patriarchy through the power pool of white men. “That shared culture can be drawn on and augmented by ideas such as ‘lean in’ [Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestselling book advocated a can-do brand of feminist self-empowerment] that undergird the white feminists you might encounter at Google.” This model of feminism has “gotten far and shattered ceilings, I won’t lie”, she says. But once white feminists succeed, they hoard the spoils. “If white men have welcomed you to the executive suite, the way you protect your position there is you continue to please white men.”

What about the women of colour who get to the top, remain silent and so are also complicit? “There are a lot of benefits in being the token woman of colour. There are doors that open for you, things available to you that are not available to a trouble-making brown feminist like me, because I am going to ask questions and I’m not going to take it.” But she sees these women as co-opted by necessity, rather than by conscious agreement and shared interest. “I have sympathy for them; for literally hundreds of years that has been the only way to get anywhere close to power.”

The sharpest of Zakaria’s criticism of white feminism is reserved for white female journalists. “There’s a certain arc that the editors want,” she says, that these journalists deliver. “In the case of Afghanistan, there was very much an idea that this was America taking feminism to Afghan women,” and “liberating them from the Taliban. There are colonial precedents to sending female reporters out there. These white women are sent in as emblems – our women are brave and they are out taking pictures and writing stories and getting your story out to the world. But the assumption is that there isn’t anyone in Afghanistan who can write in English and tell the stories of Afghanistan to the world.”

When it comes to her native Pakistan, a country from which white feminists believe she was saved, Zakaria has little time for their concerns. When Imran Khan, the prime minister, was challenged by Judy Woodruff of PBS earlier this year about comments he made that appeared to blame women for incidents of rape in Pakistan, Zakaria saw the episode as a manifestation of “a legacy of cultural ranking that no one has really bothered to take apart. That cultural ranking says that cultural crimes occur in these places and those sorts of cultural crimes don’t exist in other places in the west. There isn’t some particular British form of violence against women, it’s just violence against women.”

With her book, Zakaria hopes to console the scolded and scold the consolers. “I don’t think white women are truly aware of how uncomfortable other women feel, how much they have to edit themselves, how fed up they are.” While she harbours some hope that white feminists will listen to her advice on how to cede space and examine their prejudices, she says the real goal of her work is to comfort women of colour who have been “gaslit”.

“I struggled very much. I had come from trauma, I went into trauma. I feel a very strong sense of responsibility towards other women like me, who’ve been through traumatic marriages, migration, being a single mother. Women like me never really make it. The odds are so stacked against someone with my experience, my racial background, my economic background, to be in the conversation at all. And so since I’ve somehow slipped into the conversation I feel a responsibility towards other women who are just as smart as me, just as articulate. Now I’m here, I’m going to say all those things. I believe that you can tear things down when they’re not working, and build them up again. That is one of my core beliefs, because I’ve done it.”

Take a Breath

I have said repeatedly you don’t know me until you know me and then let me know what you think, be honest, be frank and be kind.  Any criticism should come from love and from that comes growth but not in America we just shame, blame, scold and walk away. Working out great.

As I wrote about the recent comments from two women about what it is like to be a face of color be in business or education there is a long road ahead for equity and parity both in gender and race.  But again there is a massive rainbow here and we have not done well finding the pot of gold for any of those who travel along it.  Dorothy may have clicked her heels three times to find her home over the rainbow but for the woman who played her she never made it home in one piece, we do that, kill or be killed; Survival of the fittest, only the strongest survive.  We get it, we really do.

When I gave a friend, who is black, Radley Balko’s articles and books on Warrior Cops and the racism endemic in the criminal justice system he was amazed.  He had no idea that over 1,000 people a year die at the hands of police, George Floyd only one of them.  His Mother is a 911 Operator and she has never discussed her job or her role in how these calls literally are the life and death of many who are the first responders on the other end. But you are right, I am White and should not teach anyone of any color other than my own about my own experience in said system, nor hear of others and in turn share that in any way that is to inform, educate and bring change.  Thank you.  And guess what? I won’t.  I have finally realized sitting in house arrest about how I mocked Nashville and its racism and poverty and values that seemed resistant to growth, to change, to be less religious and more open and then I sat down and realized how Seattle, the good white liberal town was not much different, white privilege is well for the privileged. And by that we mean never had a bad thing ever happen to them ever.  Not all white people are so fortunate but our color at times makes us invisible to those in power until they choose to see it.   And we can choose at any time to see color and just add that to the list of things we note and then we can choose to know them. Fuck that its hard I just want to be with the people who get me and my people. Thanks I am stupid and privileged. Oh how fragile I am!!

In public education, most of the schools are run by faces of color, many Teachers are faces of color, much of the staff are also very much a reflection of the school’s population.  And this varies by district and in each district each neighborhood they too add  color or lack thereof but that is about segregation in another way, economic and the taxes and costs of home that legally separate the have’s from the have nots.  To overcome that since Seattle had ended Affirmative Action which required quotas and numbers, we created a false culture of education. There were/are or have been schools that existed to reach any face and all types of learners, schools that were African American Academy’s, Interagency’ Academy’s and their focus on the kids who needed alternative support, the American Indian Academy, the Seahawks Academy, the Center School, the varying high schools with Academic Achievement, International Baccalaureate Programs, the World School of multicultural languages, and on and on with all kinds of methods and concepts to show how progressive, liberal and good they were.  They have the same in Nashville and they are all dumpsters, and the kids garbage bags. Some are better quality and are compostable and recyclable and are largely white with high achieving faces of color to round out the program. The focus on Sports and the never ending bullshit that makes it the leveler of equality by enabling boys to believe that sports will open the door to a better life.  Yes, been to an NFL Draft?  It is a slave auction just without whips.  There are no professions apparently open to faces of color other than entertainment and athletics, good to know says, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

We have good Teachers, we have bad. We have good Administrators, we have bad, but we have one thing in common, nothing is good about public education as it stands today. Sorry but they are all just shitty as hell, from the politics to the course work they are horrific.   I have had conversations with a young black girl who works in my coffee shop, she is lovely. She never heard of the 4 Girls in the Church of Alabama or of Emmett Till. So much for Jersey City schools being quality that answered all I need to know before I ever set foot in one.

  The endless amount of faces of color who have seemingly never heard of many things until pop culture embraces it never ceases to amaze me. And much of that goes for other faces less of color. We live a me me world.    It is as if intellectual curiousity is for freaks of nature who don’t deserve respect or attention and that is when I realized why people hate me.  In the last 10 years in schools I have been accused of slapping a kid because he was black, he later retracted it but after putting me through hell and massive legal bills and I am not alone.  I have been called racist more times than I can count, had money stolen, been verbally abused and had shit thrown out me while kids laughed.  And like a true Masochist I went back for no reason other than I could and thought it will be different next time.  I recall when a Principal came in and said I was reading racist material to a class, it was an editorial by Bob Herbert in the New York Times and the importance of children of color getting into higher education; he has written a book on the subject, and that when I showed him both the article and the photo of Mr. Herbert it was snatched from my hand and never heard about it again. This a class that the former Teacher had quit, the long term sub also quit as the children were having sex in the classroom. Yes, in the classroom; It was a portable and there was a room divider and they would go behind that and have sex.  They were 7th graders.  And there were more stories like this in Seattle, the circle jerk film that circulated in another middle school leading the Police to come and the boys returning to class.  The boys in a high school raping a special needs girl in a toilet, the boy in a high achieving high school raping a student on a field trip and having done it another middle school the year before.  Do I need to add that all of these are children of color and yet you keep hoping and trying that maybe one voice will reach them.  Apparently it was because none did? No face of color seemingly did either and they were there, so explain that to me,  I can wait.

Now I have many horror stories about other kids not black but largely they share one thing in common, they are poor, they are angry and they are in public schools.

The ending of public schools began when the President Voodoo Reagan began to cut funding in his smaller Government concept that has dominated the GOP playbook for decades, it masks classism, racism, arrogance, ignorance and general disregard for the concept of Democracy.  It is not just fueled in racism but it is the biggest burner in the stove.  So when I read books calling all white people fragile and therefore racist I want to say, “You don’t know me and you generalize, you know like if I said all Black kids are crazy.”  Given my experience I could say it’s valid,  but you see I actually vest and talk and try to connect and try to learn and teach simultaneously.  So when you hear the phrase, “I can’t breathe.” Know that many before and after have said the same, at the hands of law enforcement. This white teacher reads and actually wants this to stop and has for years.  I have seen the affects of the broken families, the crime, the pain on the faces of children and I want that to stop too.  But instead I will stop teaching, I will do something white, whatever the fuck that is.

Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’
The deaths of Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minnesota created national outrage over the use of deadly police restraints. There were many others you didn’t hear about.

By Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez and Michael LaForgia
The New York Times
June 29, 2020

As the sun began to rise on a sweltering summer morning in Las Vegas last year, a police officer spotted Byron Williams bicycling along a road west of downtown.

The bike did not have a light on it, so officers flipped on their siren and shouted for him to stop. Mr. Williams fled through a vacant lot and over a wall before complying with orders to drop face down in the dirt, where officers used their hands and knees to pin him down. “I can’t breathe,” he gasped. He repeated it 17 times before he later lapsed into unconsciousness and died.

Eric Garner, another black man, had said the same three anguished words in 2014 after a police officer who had stopped him for selling untaxed cigarettes held him in a chokehold on a New York sidewalk. “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd pleaded in May, appealing to the Minneapolis police officer who responded to reports of a phony $20 bill and planted a knee in the back of his neck until his life had slipped away.

Mr. Floyd’s dying words have prompted a national outcry over law enforcement’s deadly toll on African-American people, and they have united much of the country in a sense of outrage that a police officer would not heed a man’s appeal for something as basic as air.

But while the cases of Mr. Garner and Mr. Floyd shocked the nation, dozens of other incidents with a remarkable common denominator have gone widely unacknowledged. Over the past decade, The New York Times found, at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words — “I can’t breathe.” The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65. The majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were black.

Dozens of videos, court documents, autopsies and police reports reviewed in these cases — involving a range of people who died in confrontations with officers on the street, in local jails or in their homes — show a pattern of aggressive tactics that ignored prevailing safety precautions while embracing dubious science that suggested that people pleading for air do not need urgent intervention.

In some of the “I can’t breathe” cases, officers restrained detainees by the neck, hogtied them, Tased them multiple times or covered their heads with mesh hoods designed to prevent spitting or biting. Most frequently, officers pushed them face down on the ground and held them prone with their body weight.

Not all of the cases involved police restraints. Some were deaths that occurred after detainees’ protests that they could not breathe — perhaps because of a medical problem or drug intoxication — were discounted or ignored. Some people pleaded for hours for help before they died.

Among those who died after declaring “I can’t breathe” were a chemical engineer in Mississippi, a former real estate agent in California, a meat salesman in Florida and a drummer at a church in Washington State. One was an active-duty soldier who had survived two tours in Iraq. One was a registered nurse. One was a doctor.

In nearly half of the cases The Times reviewed, the people who died after being restrained, including Mr. Williams, were already at risk as a result of drug intoxication. Others were having a mental health episode or medical issues such as pneumonia or heart failure. Some of them presented a significant challenge to officers, fleeing or fighting.

Departments across the United States have banned some of the most dangerous restraint techniques, such as hogtying, and restricted the use of others, including chokeholds, to only the most extreme circumstances — those moments when officers are in fear for their lives. They have for years warned officers about the risks of moves such as facedown compression holds. But the restraints continue to be used as a result of poor training, gaps in policies or the reality that officers sometimes struggle with people who fight hard and threaten to overpower them.

Many of the cases suggest a widespread belief that persists in departments across the country that a person being detained who says “I can’t breathe” is lying or exaggerating, even if multiple officers are using pressure to restrain the person. Police officers, who for generations have been taught that a person who can talk can also breathe, regularly cited that bit of conventional wisdom to dismiss complaints of arrestees who were dying in front of them, records and interviews show.

That dubious claim was photocopied and posted on a bulletin board at the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, in 2018. “If you can talk then you obviously can [expletive] breathe,” the sign said.

Federal officials have long warned about factors that can cause suffocations in custody, and for the past five years, a federal law has required local police agencies to report all in-custody deaths to the Justice Department or face the loss of federal law enforcement funding.

But the Justice Department, under both President Barack Obama and President Trump, has been slow to enforce the law, the agency’s inspector general found in a 2018 report. Though there has been only scattershot reporting by departments, not a single dollar has been withheld.

Autopsies have repeatedly identified links between the actions of officers and the deaths of detainees who struggled for air, even when other medical issues such as heart disease and drug use were contributing or primary factors. But government investigations often found that the detainees were acting erratically or aggressively and that the officers were therefore justified in their actions.

Only a small fraction of officers have faced criminal charges, and almost none have been convicted.

In the case of Mr. Williams in Las Vegas last year, Police Department investigators determined that the officers did not violate the law. But the death triggered immediate changes, said Lt. Erik Lloyd of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s force investigations team.

Officers are not medical doctors and may believe that someone who says “I can’t breathe” may be trying to escape, he said.

To alleviate potential dangers, officers are told now to promptly get detainees off their stomachs and onto their sides — or up to a sitting or standing position. They are also told to call for medical help if someone has distressed breathing.

“Since the death of Mr. Williams, our department has been extremely aware of someone saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Lieutenant Lloyd said. “We have changed the attitude of patrol officers.”

For the relatives of many of the men and women who died under similar circumstances in police custody, watching the video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis has felt painfully familiar. Silvia Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, died in 2018 in Sacramento County, Calif., after being pinned down by sheriff’s deputies at a jail. She said she had been feeling both heartbroken and comforted amid the national outrage.

“I don’t feel alone anymore,” Ms. Soto said.
‘You want to kill me?’

While there have been dozens of “I can’t breathe” deaths over the past decade, the emergence of body cameras and surveillance footage has eliminated the invisibility that once shrouded many of these deaths.

Videos from Mr. Garner’s death galvanized changes in neck restraint policies around the country, but problematic techniques for restraining people did not go away. In the six years since then, more than 40 people have died after warning, “I can’t breathe.”

Less than three months after Mr. Garner died, police officers went out to a tidy stucco home near Glendale, Ariz., to investigate a report of a couple arguing.

The officers found Balantine Mbegbu seated in a leather chair with his dinner. Both Mr. Mbegbu and his wife assured them that no argument had taken place. According to police reports, Mr. Mbegbu became indignant when they refused to leave.

“Why are you guys here?” he said, his voice rising. “You want to kill me?”

When he tried to stand, the officers slammed him to the floor, punched him in the head and shot him with a Taser. With Mr. Mbegbu on his stomach, officers put knees on his back and neck.

As his wife, Ngozi Mbegbu, watched them pile on top of her husband, she heard him say, “I can’t breathe. I’m dying,” according to a sworn statement she made. Records show he vomited, began foaming at the mouth, stopped breathing and was pronounced dead.

The county prosecutor’s office determined that “the officers did not commit any act that warrants criminal prosecution.”

Cases in which detainees protested that they could not breathe, before dying, continued to occur. Their words could be heard on audio or video recordings, or were otherwise documented in official witness statements or reports.

In 2015, Calvon Reid died in Coconut Creek, Fla., after officers fired 10 shots at him with a Taser.

In 2016, Fermin Vincent Valenzuela was asphyxiated after police officers in Anaheim, Calif., put him in a neck hold while trying to arrest him. His family won a $13 million jury verdict.

In 2017, Hector Arreola died in Columbus, Ga., after officers forced him to the ground, cuffed his hands behind him and leaned on his back, with one officer brushing off his complaints: “He’s fine,” he said.

In 2018, Cristobal Solano was arrested in Tustin, Calif., and then died after at least seven deputies worked together to subdue him on the floor of a holding cell, some with their knees on his back.

In 2019, Vicente Villela died in an Albuquerque jail after telling guards who were holding him down with their knees that he could not breathe. “Right, because they’re having to hold you down,” one of the guards said.

Then last week, the Police Department in Tucson, Ariz., released video of an encounter on April 21 with Carlos Ingram Lopez, who was naked and behaving erratically when officers forced him to lie face down on the floor of a garage with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Part of the time, Mr. Lopez’s head was covered with a blanket and a hood. He was held down for 12 minutes, crying for air, for water and for his grandmother. Then he, too, died.
‘If you can talk you can breathe’

One of the reasons such cases keep occurring may be the persistent belief on the part of police officers that a detainee who is complaining that he cannot breathe is breathing enough to talk.

Edward Flynn, the former police chief in Milwaukee, said in a deposition in 2014 that this idea was once part of training for officers there and persisted as a “common understanding” even if it was wrong. Other departments have told their officers the same thing, records show, and the notion shows up often in interactions with detainees.

“If you’re talking, you’re breathing — I don’t want to hear it,” a sheriff’s deputy told Willie Ray Banks, who was struggling for air after officers in Granite Shoals, Texas, restrained and Tased him in 2011.

But the medical facts are more complicated. While it may technically be true that someone speaking is passing air through the windpipe, Dr. Carl Wigren, an independent pathologist, said that even someone able to mutter a phrase such as “I can’t breathe” may not be able to take the full breaths needed to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain life.

The “if you can talk” notion has persisted even in places like the jail in Montgomery County, Ohio, which had to pay a $3.5 million settlement last year in connection with the 2012 death of an inmate named Robert Richardson, who had been jailed for failing to show up for a child support hearing.

A fellow inmate called for help after Mr. Richardson, 28, had what was described as a possible seizure. Sheriff’s deputies cuffed his hands behind his back and restrained him face down on the floor, pushing on his back and shoulders, and eventually on his head and neck, according to court documents.

Witnesses said Mr. Richardson repeatedly told deputies he could not breathe, until, after 22 minutes, he stopped moving. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

It was that jail facility where, six years later, the photocopied sign about being able to breathe if you could talk was posted on the bulletin board.
‘We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die’

Police officers often failed to seek prompt medical attention when a detainee expressed problems breathing, and that has proved to be a factor in several deaths. In some of these cases, the person in custody had recently been Tased or restrained, but other times they were suffering from acute disorders, such as lung infections, and languished for hours. Often, this appeared to be because officers did not take the detainees’ claims seriously.

When 40-year-old Rodney Brown told police officers in Cleveland he could not breathe after being Tased multiple times during a struggle in 2010, one of them responded: “So? Who gives a [expletive]?”

One of the police officers radioed for paramedics but later said he did so only because it was a required procedure when someone had been Tased; he did not convey that Mr. Brown had claimed he could not breathe.

A lawyer for the city in that case told a panel of judges that the officers did not have the medical expertise to know when someone was in a medical crisis or simply exhausted from a vigorous fight, according to an audio recording.

Another troubling case occurred in March 2019 when the police in Montebello, Calif., were called to the home of David Minassian, 39, a former vice president at a property management firm who had suffered a heroin overdose.

His older sister, Maro Minassian, a certified emergency medical technician, had given her brother a dose of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opiate overdoses. He jolted awake but still appeared to have fluid in his lungs, and she dialed 911, anxious to get him to a hospital.

But it was the police, not paramedics, who arrived next. Ms. Minassian said three Montebello officers entered her family’s home as her brother was flailing on the floor.

At least two of the officers slammed him to the ground and put their knees into his back as they tried to cuff him, Ms. Minassian said, and remained on top of him until he stopped talking. “I told them, ‘My brother can’t breathe,’” Ms. Minassian said through tears. “We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die.”
‘Please take the mask off’

Despite years of concerns about some of the potentially dangerous techniques used to subdue people in custody, law enforcement agents have continued to use them.

In the 2018 case involving Ms. Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, officers struggled to get him into jail after arresting him on suspicion of vandalism and public intoxication.

The Sheriff’s Department had produced training materials as early as 2004 warning about the dangers of suffocation when people were restrained face down or hogtied with their hands and feet linked behind their backs.

But those warnings apparently went unheeded. Mr. Miles, 36, was hogtied while being brought in by the California Highway Patrol, even though the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, no longer allowed the restraint. Deputies removed him from the hogtie but held him face down for more than 15 minutes as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” They then carried him handcuffed and shackled to a cell, where at least three deputies put their weight on his facedown body while he groaned ever more faintly. About two minutes later, he fell silent and then stopped breathing, according to video of the death.

An autopsy concluded that he died from a combination of physical exertion, mixed drug intoxication and restraint by law enforcement. Hogtie restraints were used in four other deaths over the past decade that were examined by The Times.

Another technique used in a series of cases with fatal outcomes, including at least two this year, has been the use of hoods or masks designed to prevent people from spitting on or biting officers. Law enforcement agencies around the world have grappled with whether to use them to protect officers despite concerns about whether the masks are safe.

Video from 2012 shows how one of the masks was used on James W. Brown, an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso who had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sergeant Brown, 26, was supposed to serve a two-day sentence at the county jail for a drunken-driving conviction, but officials said he became aggressive after learning he would be jailed longer.

With his hands cuffed behind him, Sergeant Brown can be seen in a video seated in a chair, surrounded by guards in riot gear holding him down. Deputies had placed a mesh-style mask over the lower half of his face, and he wore it for more than five minutes before telling the guards and a medical worker that he could not breathe.

“Please take the mask off,” Sergeant Brown pleads. “I cannot breathe. Please!”

He passed out shortly afterward, and he was pronounced dead the next day. A county autopsy ruled that his death was caused by a sickle-cell crisis — natural causes — but a forensic pathologist later hired by the county concluded that his blood condition had been exacerbated by the restraint procedures.

Sergeant Brown’s relatives sued El Paso County, the jail and 10 officers for wrongful death and other claims. The case was later settled.

“I feel like they treated him like he was less than an animal,” said Sergeant Brown’s mother, Dinetta Scott. “Who treats somebody like that?”

Ebony and Ivory

Bad news for those in culture wars we got 998 other problems than a simple issue over those between those who are black and those who are white. Sorry folks I have been in public education to long to realize that we got a big spinning wheel that never quite lands on that lucky seven.  And it about seven colors and identities that I can think of the top of my head that don’t include the top two: Indigenous, Indian, Arabic, Latin, LGBQT, Mixed Race, Asian, Religion. Now within each of those categories are sub classifications just look at LGBQT, and now they have added a plus for some reason I am not sure, experimenting? I don’t know.. then we have binary, non binary, cis and the rest  Get it? Got it? Good.  No of course you don’t. By God even I am sick of all the constant hyphenated  markers we seem to need to identify ourselves.

In my morning discussion with the Concierge at my desk, one of the more annoying and oddly arrogant ones who has more hyphens than an English Lord, we were discussing race and how many confuse him as being Black in identity.  He is West Indian on his father’s side and Puerto Rican on his mothers side.  His fiancé is of  Philippine descent and he knows little to nothing about that side of his cultural history. And given what I know of him that makes sense as he is the most self involved individual I have ever known.  He is what my mother calls an “Eye” Specialist as everything is Me.I.Mine.  He sees everything in his world view from his own prism and that is via a Gay, West Indian, Latino male.  That is a lot going on right there.  Once we run through his indignities or beliefs on subjects that relate to him and his experiences alone we have little more to say as I doubt he has ever read a book or a newspaper that is about anything outside of himself.  And why? I also think he believes no one else knows this as he rarely moves outside a circle of people who have knowledge outside their selves either.   We call “those people” a Narcissist.  Again race and sexual identity and gender have little to do with it, it truly is a colorblind disorder!   And living in a bubble of people just like you may make you feel better but it also makes you really fucking boring and that is how I feel even after a 10 minute exchange with this young man, bored out of my skull.  Seriously folks learn to talk to people even boring ones then you can find way more ways to hate people than based on race/gender/etc.

But you see if you have this discussion today with anyone you will have a blowout. You will be promptly labeled, culture canceled and of course lose your job and be shamed on social media, which in turn mainstream media will pick up as it was a slow news day and now everyone knows your name, your fuck up and what an asshole you are.  What a great day ahead for anyone who needs to be “schooled” or simply ignored as having their own opinion and it has nothing to do with you.   Who the fuck cares about what someone whom you encounter on your day to day has to do with you and your quality of life is beyond me.  Again you can apply that to those who are racists, homophobes, conservatives, religious crackpots, etc, etc, etc. And they are to be left alone, literally left alone, as what you accomplish is well nothing and if it happened to you how would you feel.   Seriously digging up past regressions on folks does what to them? And what more importantly, for you exactly?

And this brings me to my discussion with the Concierge and race. He was at Target with his fiancee and a woman without a mask was in the store and they refused to help her or ring up her purchases.  (I am assuming it was not this bad) As it was early they only had two registers open and the line was backing up.  The woman refused, ranting about how she has health problems and the masks have Co2 and the rest, so he decides to explain to her what Co2 is and that she is wrong and just put on a mask. During this encounter the woman calls him a “Nigger” and his fiancé  a Mexican and that is why Trump is building a wall to keep his people out.   Okay lets stop for a minute here.  Why are you bothering.  Just walk around her and demand to be rung up or walk away and find self check or get a Manager. The scene escalated and guess what?  He never told me the end of the story if the woman was escorted out, her shit rang up and did he get his shit and how long this all went on for an what about all the others standing through this shit.  I have no clue, as then it was about how he has only been called that name three times and that first was Fourth grade and then in some other grade at another different school and then there at Target.  Oh wait, he was called “Sand Nigger” by a Southern woman on the subway one day going to work and he was wearing scrubs so she should have known he was not a Terrorist, which is what she accused him of being.  (Don’t start me on the scrubs that is farce right there and please change your clothes at work) So this story is a circle jerk at this point so, okay, point being? Oh wait this is about you.  Okay. then.  So here is your discussion on race, its a one up game where you all share your indignation and stories of shame and then who has the worst one, maybe the one where you end up being murdered on the street by a Cop sitting on you wins.  Fuck me.

When we are focusing on the singular racist history of America with regards to the indignities done to Black Americans we are neglecting the rest done to others, and done largely thanks to those who were both white and male.  (Yes women were involved but again they are largely marginalized in society as well so get over it) It is why I am not engaged with the protest when I see a sign on a store that says Black Trans Lives Matter that seems very specific and direct and what about the other folks who are Trans? Do their lives not matter?

The one thing we do share is a state of being and that is being a Human.  I have long identified as Humanist when asked about my religion, versus saying Atheist, as that seems less hostile. Although in Nashville I felt enough of the hiding, it was like being Gay in the 50s, I needed to come out and be open but I still think humanism is a point made clear.  It takes my age, my gender and my color out of the equation for a minute.

In my years of teaching I have met many kids of many backgrounds from many cultures and lives unlike my own and that has taught me compassion, empathy, understanding, and more importantly acceptance and tolerance.  True kids are really annoying but that again is colorblind.  My great fear is that kids now will see me and immediately presume I am an enemy just by the color of my skin,  and test that in ways that normal hazing of subs will be magnified.  It is already bad as a Substitute Teacher and this summer of unrest will fuel that confusion and rage as they have already been out of school for six months when September comes so I don’t see this being a great year right off the top.   This is where I do the Nashville way where I don’t write my name on the board, just the instructions, make them do self attendance and speak as little as possible.  Good times folks.  But my days of engaging kids in free thinking discussion and open dialog I am afraid is over.  And when I hear repeatedly that I am of white privilege it diminishes me and my personal narrative; This is the concept most important in activism, that of the personal story or history that lends to engagement and connection.  Yes judge me lest be judged.

I share this opinion piece from The Daily News and note that one of the author’s is Robin Quivers who has been the sidekick of Howard Stern for decades now.  And again during all the strum and drang of Howard’s own role if perpetuating some seriously disturbing issues around gender, sex and identity including racism I think it is telling that they have been work partners through this all and managed to resolve any conflicts to maintain that partnership.  It is one we could all learn from.

The trouble with our talk about race: Maybe obsession over racism is the problem
By Naomi Aeon and Robin Quivers
New York Daily News
Jun 22, 2020

The racial mess we’re in is bigger than we realize. Versions of terror and brutality, for generations, have been wielded against black people, from slavery to segregation to lynching to the KKK, to all manner of prejudices, biases and micro-aggressions.

We have never properly reckoned with the problem. As a result, overt and covert forms of racism — against black, mixed, indigenous and other people of color — pervade American culture to this day.

Then along came this latest spate of police killings, each of them an outrage, and an assault on the collective human soul. It’s become all too repetitive, this vicious circle of “incident, protest, riot, calm.”

What’s promising is that the response in the larger society feels different this time. It’s dynamic. As if there’s finally a true awakening to the magnitude of a problem many are in denial about. It’s exciting to consider the possibility of race relations improving.

There’s reason for hope and optimism. And yet, looking closer, we find ourselves skeptical and more than a little concerned. A question looms in our minds: Could it be that the conversation on race in the U.S., as it’s emerged in these past few weeks, is creating as many problems as it’s attempting to resolve?

For all the earnest attempts to school the masses on race, we still so often talk about blacks and whites as though they are two clear, binary categories, and the only two that matter. It’s an oversimplification of the facts.

To truly move forward, we need to understand that blackness and whiteness — like all racial categories — are complicated, layered and paradoxical. Both labels contain within them all the diverse range of human experiences, in the U.S. and across the planet.

We suspect that, because it largely ignores this reality, the current conversation on race may do as much to reinforce race-based thinking as it does to address racism. The way we are “educating people” about racial problems is doubling as a form of social conditioning.

Here everyone, read this particular handful of books, watch these videos, say these approved phrases, repeat these words. Here everyone, gesture and posture appropriately. It’s surely unintentional, but it winds up reinscribing a narrow strand of race-thinking.

It’s an inadvertent mass brain-washing rather than an opportunity for genuine, deep, transformative education that touches the heart and mind.

We thought about this as we watched the “Sesame Street” CNN Town Hall for children and families.

It sounds so sensible to learn how to teach your young kids how to be anti-racist. The show shared an inspiring message. Excellent questions were asked, including: How can we grow the circle of who we care about and expand our hearts? How can we improve how we treat each other and how we perceive of each other? We found this instructive and wise.

The overriding theme of the show was, “we can do better,” and who could argue with that? Yet even as we were moved, we couldn’t help but give pause. Does it really make sense for a young child to have the seed planted within them to “do better”? Are they doing badly? Are they guilty of something?

Are we inadvertently planting shame and guilt in our kids by reflexively repeating certain mantras? Are we telling black viewers — planting within them a seed — that they are somehow inferior? Are we underlining their victim status, rendering it official?

Are we limiting the way young people see the world by demanding they think of themselves, first and foremost, as members of a race rather than, first and foremost, as human beings?

Race-based thinking will never solve the problem of racism. Strident race-based thinking only adds to the problem. It’s turning out that racism has a kissing cousin in this sudden rise of rigid race-thinking. It’s a pollution in the air with a suffocating effect. All of us must learn to think more nimbly. All of us must breathe.

Aeon is a consultant and teacher. Quivers is a broadcaster.