Anti-Racism
Some reject the notion that they should apply the word consistently, without regard to whether the usage will upset their audience.
A long-running debate about when to use the word racist resurfaced this month, prompted by mass grappling with how to cover Donald Trump’s recent attacks on four House Democrats. Trump’s short political career includes denying that Barack Obama was born in the United States, calling for a ban on Muslim travel here, characterizing masses of Mexican immigrants as rapists, and asserting that a judge was unfit to hear a case because of his Mexican heritage.
Statistics gathered by the anti-discrimination charity showed reports of racism in English football rose by 43% – from 192 to 274 – last season.
“I think you can’t not link them together,” Wood told BBC Sport.
“We’re seeing a lot of reports of ‘go back to where you came from’ which we haven’t seen for a while which seems to be on the back of Brexit.”
Factoring in all forms of discrimination, reports of abuse in professional and grassroots football increased by 32% to 422, up from 319 during 2017-18. A further 159 reports were received via social media.
Reports of faith-based discrimination – including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism – rose by 75% from 36 to 63, a higher percentage than any other form of abuse during the period.
It is the seventh consecutive year reported incidents of discrimination within football have increased, and the 581 total reports is more than double the figure from five years ago.
“If we’re seeing a rise in hate crime, the Home Office is seeing a rise in hate crime and other bodies are seeing a rise in hate crime, it’s linked because that’s what is going on in society at the moment. If it’s there, we’ll see it in football,” Wood added.
“In some of the cases we have seen, there is a real hatred there which we haven’t maybe seen as much of in the past where it’s really violent and very targeted, particularly on social media.
“Some of the social media reports we’ve seen you wouldn’t want anyone to see.
“We’re talking to people all the time that feel, post-Brexit, that ‘maybe this country isn’t for me’.
“[Politicians] have to take that responsibility very seriously, they are the leaders of the country and they need to set the tone. Society is reflected in football.”
Reports of racist abuse rose by 43% last season, Kick It Out figures show
Democrats Should Attack Trump’s Racism, but That Won’t Be Enough to Beat Him
One of the raging debates among Democrats and progressives going into the 2020 elections is whether the president’s white-nationalist tendencies should be central to the campaign to oust him or whether, instead, (a) the focus should be on his corruption and the broken promises to his voters, or (b) his opponent should largely ignore him and emphasize her or his own policy proposals. The discussion over this question is heavily influenced by fears that white working-class voters are amenable to Donald Trump’s racial appeals and are better persuaded by appeals on other issues.
But when Trump is so blatant in his racism, as he has been since his July 14 hate tweets against four nonwhite members of Congress, it feels morally as well as politically feeble to try to take race off the table for 2020. Now comes a voice speaking from the experience of a fight against a far more notorious racist demagogue — Louisiana’s David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-racism activist Tim Wise, a veteran of two anti-Duke campaigns (a Senate race in 1990 and the famous gubernatorial “Race From Hell” in 1991), argues in a Washington Post op-ed that you have to call out racism vocally and relentlessly:
Johnson’s racist and Islamophobic remarks make him unfit to be PM, anti-racists says
Johnson’s racist and Islamophobic remarks make him unfit to be PM, anti-racists says
BORIS JOHNSON’S racist and Islamophobic remarks should be enough to disqualify him from being prime minister, campaigners said today after his premiership was announced.
Anti-racism activists joined a vast number of politicians, trade union general secretaries and campaigners who have called for a general election after Mr Johnson was “elected” by just under 100,000 Conservative members.
They referred to his comments about veil-wearing Muslim women looking like “letterboxes” and “bankrobbers” and accused him of fuelling and legitimising Islamophobia.
The activists from Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) also referred to his statements in which he described black people as “piccanninies” and of having “watermelon smiles,” which Mr Johnson claimed he had made “ironically.”
They also pointed to his failure to condemn US President Donald Trump for telling four congresswomen of black and ethnic minority backgrounds — three of whom were born in the US and one a naturalised citizen — to “go back home.”
SUTR co-convener Sabby Dhalu said: “Boris Johnson’s racism and Islamophobia should disqualify him from the office of prime minister.
Japanese Canadians across the country are meeting to discuss how an apology by the British Columbia government could be backed by meaningful action for those who were placed in internment camps or forced into labour because of racist policies during the Second World War.
The federal government apologized in 1988 for its racism against “enemy aliens” after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 but the president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians said British Columbia’s apology in 2012 did not involve the community.
Lorene Oikawa said the association is working with the provincial government to consider how it could follow up on the apology to redress racism. The majority of about 22,000 interned Japanese Canadians lived in B.C. before many were forced to move east of the Rockies or to Japan, even if they were born in Canada.
“We weren’t informed about the apology so it was a surprise to us,” Oikawa said about B.C.’s statement, which, unlike with the federal government’s apology, did not go further to resolve outstanding historic wrongs that saw families separated and property and belongings sold.
“We accepted the apology but we just want to have that follow-up piece that was missing so that is what the current B.C. government has agreed to and started with this process of having community consultations,” she said of the redress initiative funded by the province.
Consultations began in May and by the end of July will have been concluded in Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and seven other communities in British Columbia. Online consultations are also being conducted before recommendations will be forwarded to the province this fall.
So far, some participants have asked that school curricula include racism against Japanese Canadians as well as initiatives to educate the general public about the intergenerational trauma that families have experienced, Oikawa said.
When did we arrive at the point where applying the words racist and racism were more radioactive than actually doing and saying racist things and demonstrating oneself to be a racist?
How is it that America insists on knowledge of the unknowable — what lurks in the heart — in order to assign the appellation?
Why are so many Americans insisting that racism requires conscious, malicious intent in order for the title to be earned?
Last week, much of America wrestled with whether to label the president racist after he published racist tweets about four congresswomen of color, demonstrating once again in the most overt terms that he is indeed a racist.
And yet many, including those in the media, struggled with whether or not to label his tweet, and by extension Donald Trump himself, as racist.
As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, some outlets did label the tweets as racist, but “On the whole, however, the news desks of mainstream news organizations did not call the tweets racist, or at least did not do so consistently across their output.”
In many cases it was up to critics, pundits and columnists to be the loudest voices in the chorus willing to call a thing a thing. And many of those voices were people of color who have been properly labeling Trump what he is from the beginning.
But, this raises a very serious question, particularly for our white colleagues in journalism and our fellow white citizens: What took you so long? Were these tweets really your racial Rubicon? Or, were they simply your last straw? Did nothing else in his decades-long track record earn him the designation? Or, do you simply reset the racism dial every few months?
Denying Racism Supports It Denying Racism Supports It Denying Racism Supports It
Anti-Racist Historian: Attacks on Rep. Omar Rooted in Belief “America Is for White People”
Anti-Racist Historian: Attacks on Rep. Omar Rooted in Belief “America Is for White People”
On Thursday, President Trump attempted to distance himself from the racist chant of “send her back” about Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar at a Trump campaign rally Wednesday in North Carolina.
The chants rang across the rally in response to Trump’s own verbal attack against the congresswoman. He did nothing to intervene. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a resolution condemning Trump’s racist remarks against Congressmembers Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We speak with Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
Trump is building his reelection campaign on a foundation of racism
Trump is building his reelection campaign on a foundation of racism
Let’s give that hateful crowd of Trump supporters in Greenville, N.C., some credit here.
With their chants of “send her back,” about a nonwhite member of Congress who happens to be an immigrant, they have laid bare the fact that President Trump is building his hopes for a second term on a foundation of racism.
The poisonous sentiment at his campaign rally was so blatant, so undeniable, that even Trump was compelled to disavow it as public revulsion rose on Thursday. “I was not happy with it. I disagree with it,” he said.
Donald Trump is on an Orwellian mission to redefine human rights
It has long been abundantly clear Trump has no respect for human rights. Now Pompeo wants to build a new framework to justify the rollback of protections
The president of the United States makes racist comments against members of Congress. He puts kids in cages. Attempts to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Praises dictators.
It has long been abundantly clear that Donald Trump has no respect for human rights. Now, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, wants to build a new intellectual framework to justify the administration’s rollback of human rights protections.
That is the only way to understand Pompeo’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights. In launching the group Pompeo explicitly stated that the purpose of the commission is to start from scratch in defining human rights. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Pompeo described part of the commission’s mandate: It will “address basic questions: What are our fundamental freedoms? Why do we have them? Who or what grants these rights?”
But it seems clear the intention is to both narrow the definition and application of rights. Pompeo said that the commission’s goal is to exclude “ad hoc” rights. While he does not elaborate on what “ad hoc” rights are, he attacks “politicians and bureaucrats” who “create new rights”, and many of the members of the commission appear to have been selected in no small part because they also want to roll back human rights.
As journalist Ali Rogin reported, one commissioner praised Saudi Arabia and defended it over the murder of the Washington Postjournalist Jamal Khashoggi, while another commissioner praised the United Arab Emirates and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic power grab. The commission chair, Mary Ann Glendon, opposes reproductive rights and marriage equality.
While the Trump administration seeks to redefine human rights, it is clearly ignoring the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which itself built on the fundamental freedoms enshrined in America’s own bill of rights. Developed by a commission composed of members from around the world and chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the declaration was forged in the wake of the second world war and adopted without dissent by the UN general assembly. A truly historic breakthrough – with countries of all political leanings and cultures backing a common definition of rights – the declaration has been a global north star ever since.
What makes Trump’s tweets racist? A historian explains
What makes Trump’s tweets racist? A historian explains
When President Trump tweeted on Sunday that “‘Progressive’ Democratic Congresswomen” — an apparent reference to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, who are all women of color — should “go back” to their countries, the backlash was swift. It also sparked another conversation: What makes something racist?
Ibram Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, joined “CBS This Morning” to address that question from a historical perspective and discuss whether racist actions or words make someone a racist.
Kendi explained the important historical context behind telling a person of color to go back to where they came from.
“In the 19th century, there were many, many reformers, racial reformers who thought the way to solve the race problem, the Negro problem, was to essentially send back all free blacks [to Africa]. And that started with Thomas Jefferson, his Notes to the State of Virginia which was published in 1787, and went up to Abraham Lincoln,” Kendi said.