2018 was the year of sharing racist and hate-fueled incidents on social media — like these
2018 was the year of sharing racist and hate-fueled incidents on social media — like these
A lot happened in 2018, but perhaps what social media users noticed most was the uptick of racist and hate-fueled incidents dominating their newsfeeds.
Here a sampling of some of the incidents, ranging from racism to bullying to being just plain mean, that went viral in 2018.
“White” and “colored” water fountains
A Wisconsin high school student was disciplined after labeling school drinking fountains as “white” and “colored.” Images of the signs gained a lot of attention on Facebook …
The only thing you’re allowed to hate is hated itself
If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe imbecility as third choice. That would criminalise most of the people in the country I cannot abide, including all of the Lib Dems, Momentum and Justine Greening.
Sadly, the state of mind which the government wishes to ban is that rather more useful quality, hate. You are not allowed to hate anything any more, except for hate itself. But at least in hating hate you can really let yourself go, even if it is usually a wholly imaginary hate that you are hating. You can spew out your bile suffused with self–righteousness, sententiousness and imbecility. You can have yourself an anti-hate hate fest, safe in the knowledge that your hatred of hate is commendable. You can even join the organisation Stop Hate UK, which is trousering up plenty of funding for directing its hatred at hatred.
Stop Hate UK (SHU) doesn’t hate only hate, it also hates Brexit and people who argue that perhaps we’ve had too much immigration or are a little nonplussed when told that a muscular bloke with a beard in a dress is as authentically female as a real female. In other words, it hates a majority of the population.
You see, there is a lot of scope in hating hate: you are allowed a certain mission creep. If you weren’t, you would simply be a hippy. Anyway, SHU argues that it is ‘indisputable’ that hate crimes have increased enormously since and as a consequence of that hateful Brexit vote. Hatey people are going around beating up Poles and Pakistanis, or shouting out nasty things to them (‘whatever they call you, call us,’ demands SHU).
Egyptian Women and the Fight for the Right to Work
Almost no one works in an Egyptian clothing factory because she wants to. The teen-age girls are saving for their dowries, and they will quit when they have enough money. Some of the older women are divorced and have children to support. The married ones usually need money badly enough that their husbands have reluctantly allowed them to work. Rania didn’t quite fit into any of those groups. She was married but living apart from her husband when, eight years ago, she started working at the Delta Textile Factory in the city of Minya, a hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo. As long as they were separated, her husband, Yasser, wouldn’t find out. Unhappiness creates its own freedom, although Rania didn’t know that yet. She was twenty-two years old, with acne-scarred red cheeks, full lips, and a black wool hijab that wrapped her face in a small circle and made her appear younger than she was.
On Rania’s second day in the factory, a Romanian-American manager named Elena asked, “Who wants to work in quality control?” Rania had little idea what quality control was, but she boldly raised her hand. Elena was the first foreigner she had ever met. She trained Rania to spot every potential problem in a pair of men’s underpants. If a leg was millimetres too short, or the seams around the crotch didn’t lie flat, a client could reject the order and cost the factory thousands of dollars. Rania developed a preternatural ability to keep the line moving while catching mistakes almost as soon as they happened. Two years after she entered the factory, she was promoted to supervisor, but she never forgot what it felt like to be a newcomer.
Rania’s capacity for work was legendary—bi-mit ragel, as the Egyptians say, “worth a hundred men.” Every month, the factory awarded prizes to its most productive workers; the line she supervised placed first more times than she could count, and the dinnerware sets and kettles she won cluttered her cabinet at home, useless in their abundance. She had a way of attracting notice and charging into conversations. Executives or clients visiting the plant always asked who she was. In her red supervisor’s tunic, silver flip-flops, and wide-legged black trousers (she was often the only woman in the factory wearing pants), Rania moved around the production floor as if she were at home, and in a way she was.
In the summer of 2016, the company’s executives called a meeting of the factory employees and announced that they planned to hire their first local production manager, who would oversee a bloc of ten assembly lines. Such positions had always been held by an expatriate man, but everyone in the meeting immediately turned to look at Rania. Before the meeting, in fact, Ian Ross, the company’s C.E.O. in Egypt, had told Rania that she was being considered for the job. He warned her not to make problems with the other supervisors, with whom she sometimes fought.
“I don’t make any problems,” Rania answered coolly, but inside she felt excited and proud. She was determined to show everyone that she could be the first female production manager in Upper Egypt.
A racial discrimination suit against a leading cable company may move forward, U.S. appeals court says
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the case had been decided. In fact, the case has not yet been argued, and the ruling by the Ninth Circuit decided a procedural question that will allow the lawsuit to continue.
A racial bias lawsuit involving one of the nation’s largest cable companies will be allowed to proceed after a black-owned provider of television programming alleged it had been discriminated against, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Not only did racial animus pose a plausible factor when Charter Communications repeatedly rejected negotiations with Entertainment Studios, the TV programmer, but the First Amendment cannot be used to throw out the suit, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The three-judge panel’s decision on the free speech issue holds particularly sweeping implications, some legal experts say, because it could undercut a rising trend of companies citing the First Amendment to defend business practices or to attack regulation.
The opinion on Charter’s motion to dismiss also marks a victory for the 25-year-old programming firm founded by comedian Byron Allen, which bought the Weather Channel in March and accused Charter executives in court of hurling racist insults at Allen and other black Americans in numerous encounters.
In one alleged instance, Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge called Allen, who is black, “boy” at an industry conference and advised him to change his behavior, according to court documents. In another alleged example, the court said, Charter’s senior executive in charge of programming, Allan Singer, approached a group of black protesters outside Charter’s offices to tell them to “get off of welfare.”
Charter told the court that its decision not to carry Entertainment Studios was not related to race but rather other factors, such as that the company lacked operational resources.
How schools can foster civic discussion in an age of incivility
foster civic discussion in an age of incivility
What is the role of classrooms in an era of political polarization and rising extremist ideologies, hate crimes and violence?
Schools have the opportunity, and arguably, an obligation to address civic engagement and political civility. The extent to which schools foster political deliberation, engagement, understanding and empathy has far-reaching implications for our democracy.
But can schools really do that?
Canadians have become more aware of the troubling realities of the full legacy of educational systems in Canada and how they have worked.
How to beat hate crime in London
With anti-Semitism making headlines and hate crime on the rise, Sophie Wilkinson investigates how the capital is responding.
We often talk about the need to learn from history, but increasingly the present is echoing the worst of the past,’ said Home Secretary Sajid Javid, the UK’s most powerful Muslim, at a vigil for the 11 Jews murdered in Pittsburgh two days before.
In a heartening display of unity, he stood alongside London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Jewish religious and community leaders and Londoners of all faiths, including US Ambassador, Woody Johnson.
The victims of the shooting, congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue, were murdered by a suspect who cried out ‘All Jews must die’. Their loved ones’ torment has since reverberated with Jews and their allies across the world, including London, where anti-Semitic crime has risen in recent years (2.6 times higher in the 12 months to July 2018 than the 12 months to March 2011). Meanwhile, last week Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dickannounced her officers have launched a criminal inquiry into allegations of anti-Semitic hate crimes within the Labour Party.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a charity providing security advice and assistance for British Jews, records 100 incidents of anti-Semitism every month. Until 2016, ‘you could identify one trigger event, usually it’s if Israel has a war,’ says Dave Rich, head of policy at the CST. He cites 2014’s Gaza conflict, after which incidents of anti-Semitic abuse recorded by the Met Police rose 178 per cent. ‘But for the past two years, it’s just month after month, the same daily grind of anti-Semitic incidents on the streets.’ These incidents tend to be, Rich explains, ‘old-fashioned bigotry towards Jewish people’, unleashed by men, mostly young, shouting ‘stuff about the Holocaust, the Nazis, Israel’.
The typical victim is a man, perhaps because Jewish men — like Muslim women — are more likely to be identifiable by their religious dress. And if he’s ‘unlucky’, Rich says, ‘Someone might throw something at him, or try to beat him up.’ Against a backdrop of a rise in all hate crime post-Brexit, an anti-Semitic incident can be in response to something as innocuous as taking too long to park a car. Jemma Levene, deputy director of Hope Not Hate, an advocacy group campaigning against racism and fascism, tells me, ‘In north-west London, children in Jewish school uniform are being abused on buses.’
New York man hit with hate crime charges in the serial theft of LGBT rainbow flags from church
A 21-year-old New York man was arrested on hate crime charges tied to the repeated theft of LGBT rainbow flags from in front of a church, a series of crimes that the openly gay pastor called “unnerving” for him and his congregation.
The suspected thief, Ronald Tyler Witt, was arrested around 8:05 p.m. Tuesday at his home in Sayville, New York, less than four blocks from the Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ, according to the Suffolk County Police Department.
Witt was arrested on suspicion of six counts of petit larceny as a hate crime and is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday at the First District Court in Central Islip, on New York’s Long Island, police said.
It was not immediately clear if Witt had hired an attorney.
Rev. Ray Bagnuolo, the openly gay pastor of the Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ, said the first theft occurred in July and that he contacted police when subsequent flags were stolen.
“Amazon has me on speed order for rainbow flags. I just kept ordering them and putting them up,” Bagnuolo told ABC News on Wednesday. “It wasn’t for any reason other than you can’t let people stop.”
Suffolk police said the rainbow flags, measuring 12 by 18 inches, were stolen on July 29, Sept. 23, Oct. 7, Oct. 15, Oct. 20 and on the Tuesday just before Witt was arrested.
“I’m happy they found out who he is and that it can stop because it was unnerving,” Bagnuolo said. “These types of things are meant often to send a message. Sometimes there just a dumb thing that people do, but repeated over and over it begins to feel like there’s a targeting going on here and there’s a message.”
He said the stolen flags were displayed on the church lawn next to an American flag and a prisoner of war flag, which were not touched.
The pastor said that after the second flag was stolen, he put up a sign in front of the church reading, “You destroyed our welcoming Rainbow Flag twice. It WAS an act of fear. It IS an act of hate. Do you realize that? IT WAS NOT KIND. IT IS HURTFUL. Instead of doing it again, talk with us. We will talk with you. You, too, are welcome here.”
How homosexuality became a crime in the Middle East
IN THE 13th and 14th centuries two celebrated male poets wrote about men in affectionate, even amorous, terms. They were Rumi and Hafiz, and both lived in what is now Iran. Their musings were neither new nor unusual. Centuries earlier Abu Nuwas, a bawdy poet from Baghdad, wrote lewd verses about same-sex desire. Such relative openness towards homosexual love used to be widespread in the Middle East. Khaled El-Rouayheb, an academic at Harvard University, explains that though sodomy was deemed a major sin by Muslim courts of law, other homosexual acts such as passionate kissing, fondling or lesbian sex were not. Homoerotic poetry was widely considered part of a “refined sensibility”, he says.
Stop hate speech, Obi tells El-Rufai
The Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Mr Peter Obi, on Saturday urged Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, to stop making inflammatory statements capable of inciting hate among Nigerians.
Obi was reacting to a statement credited to El-Rufai in his (El Rufai’s) twitter handle, where he called Obi ‘a tribal bigot.’
The governor tweeted that Obi stopped him from moving around Anambra State during the governorship election in the state in 2010.
But Obi while speaking with journalists on the matter at a youth programme in Nnewi, Anambra State, on Saturday, said he was shocked to read such an outburst of hate from El-Rufai, especially when ‘the statement came unprovoked.’
He said, “This is suggesting that it was what he sat down to think of rather than thinking about how to solve the many problems plaguing the country.
“What Governor Nasir El-Rufai said about me has been brought to my attention. I believe that as we grow older and are saddled with more responsibilities, we are expected to become circumspect in our thinking and avoid recklessness in our speeches and utterances.
“How does the circumstance he referred to relate to bigotry to warrant such a label? All I do for people like El Rufai is to pray for them and encourage them to concentrate on doing those things that will better Nigerians rather than engage in hate speeches that will divide and destroy the country.’’
“What Governor Nasir El-Rufai said about me has been brought to my attention. I believe that as we grow older and are saddled with more responsibilities, we are expected to become circumspect in our thinking and avoid recklessness in our speeches and utterances.“How does the circumstance he referred to relate to bigotry to warrant such a label?
Community hits out over rise in racist hate crimes
Community hits out over rise in racist hate crimes
ALMOST 250 more Islamophobic hate crimes have been reported to police this year compared to 2010, according to new figures.
A Freedom of Information request found the police are receiving thousands of racist hate crime reports every year.
The figures show 3,922 racism hate crimes were logged up to August 2018, compared to a total of 2,140 throughout the entire of 2010.
A total of 4,434 racism hate crimes were reported last year, 317 hate crimes were for Islamophobia and 53 for Anti-Semitism.
In 2010, the figures stood at 2,140 for racism, 30 for Islamophobia and nine for Anti-Semitism.
The rising figures have created concern in the Asian community.
