Most nights, after watching a half-hour of American news, my presence at the dinner table is suffused with cynicism and disgust. Tales of violence, savagery and complete disregard for other people depicted nightly will do that to a person. However, occasionally amidst all of the mayhem, a light emerges and I am reminded that despite the myriad failures of our species, there are strong, good, even noble people in our midst.
Such is evident in the following interview of two of the three Palestinian-American students who were shot last November in Burlington Vermont, presumably for being Palestinian. The depraved gunman has pleaded not guilty.
One of the victims, 20-year-old Hisham Awartani, was paralyzed in the assault. It is he who speaks so eloquently about the experience. Although well-aware that racism was the basis for the attack, he expresses gratitude for the medical treatment he has received and a heartfelt concern for those Palestinians in the homeland who have no access to such care.
As you will see, he is mature and self-possessed well beyond his years.
I very much doubt I could act with such grace under his circumstances.
If you don't know the tragic story of Emmett Till, you can click here to read something I posted about him a few years back. It is the kind of history that Ron DeSantis doesn't want Florida students to know about, as I noted in a recent post.
Fortunately, Joe Biden's administration is making it harder to forget the ugliness of American racism.
President Biden on Tuesday will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was abducted and killed by white supremacists in 1955, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who helped galvanize the civil rights movement by bravely displaying her child’s brutalized body for the world to see.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will span three protected sites in Illinois, where Emmett was born 82 years ago, and in Mississippi, where he was killed at the age of 14 after being accused of whistling at a white woman.
The monument stands as a sharp rebuke to those who would have Americans forget or ignore their innate racism.
Since Mr. Biden took office, more than 40 states have introduced or passed laws or taken other measures to restrict how issues of race and racism are taught, according to Education Week.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, referenced Florida’s new standards on Monday, saying the Till monument was arriving “at an important moment.”
“Let’s not forget what we’ve seen these past several months, as we’ve witnessed extreme officials in Florida and across the country lie about American history — the most recent example shamefully, shamefully promoting a lie that enslaved people actually benefited from slavery,” she said. “It’s inaccurate, insulting. It’s hurtful and prevents an honest account of our nation’s history.”
This isn't the first time the White House has invoked the memory of Till's horrific murder.
During a White House screening of the movie “Till” in February, Mr. Biden told the crowd that he chose the movie because “history matters.”
“To remember history is to shine a light on the good, the bad, the truth and who we are as a nation,” he said at the screening. “And our history shows that while darkness and denialism hide very much, they erase nothing. They can’t erase the past, and they shouldn’t.”
He also said that signing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime, in March 2022, was “one of the great honors of my career.”
Despite what some would have people believe, history matters, and it renders judgements. To revise and pervert that history, as so many in the U.S. seem intent on doing, is yet another stark illustration of the ongoing systemic racism that continues to cripple and diminish that nation in the eyes of the world.
If you would like to know more about the monument and Emmett Till's fate, go to the 17:50 minute mark of the following:
Keeping both Black and white people ignorant of their history is the main strategy of the Florida governor. God help the Americans if he becomes their president.
Fate can be cruel. It is not unheard of to be going about, minding one's own business, when a person of unknown provenance accosts you and demands a photo with you. Results of such encounters can vary.
There was, one may recall, an incident in 2002 when the Mayor of Toronto shook hands with a member of The Hell's Angels.
Mel faced some criticism for that encounter, but claimed he had no idea that the outlaw biker gang dealt in drugs, guns, and violence.
Just a victim of circumstances.
No serendipity was involved in the disgusting picture of former PM Stephen Harper shaking hands with quasi-dictator Viktor Orban of Hungary. For this, he made no apologies, and at least owned up to the fact that the handshake was intentional as he advocates closer ties with him.
But the case of Pierre Poilievre, or, as I like to call him, PP, is a whole other category. Photographic misfortune stalks him. One remembers the time he posed with Jeremy Mackenzie, founder of the Diagolon group, during the former's leadership campaign.
PP's explanation:
“Over the course of my campaign I have shaken hands with literally tens of thousands of people at public rallies. It is impossible to do a background check on every single person who attends my events,” Poilievre’s campaign team said in response to Global News’ request for comment on Aug. 20.
“As I always have, I denounce racism and anyone who spreads it. I didn’t and don’t know or recognize this particular individual.”
And now that the prime ministerial aspirant has doffed his glasses and donned makeup, his photographic presence is in even greater demand:
But again, poor PP is just a victim of unfortunate circumstances:
A spokesman for Pierre Poilievre said Mondaythe federal Conservative leader does not agree with the message of “straight pride,” after he was photographed with a man wearing a T-shirt bearing those words.
Sebastian Skamski said Poilievre had been posing with “hundreds of people” at the Calgary Stampede on Saturday when he was photographed with an individual “without reading what was written on his shirt.”
The bright green T-shirt featured the symbols for men and women that are often posted to the doors of public restrooms.
It said, “Thank a straight person today for your existence,” in black capital letters, with “straight pride” written at the bottom.
Skamski said that “Poilievre does not agree with the message displayed on the T-shirt,” adding that Conservatives are working to build a country where everyone is free to be themselves, “regardless of their sexual orientation.”
PP's lapses are alarming to some; however, I suspect they are very loud dog whistles to others.
Circumstances, fate, or character revelation? You decide.
UPDATE: Dean Blundell has his interpretation that aligns with mine.
Interestingly, that is exactly what Marlon Brando was talking about in 1972, when he refused the Oscar for Best Actor (The Godfather). He was opposing the portrayal of Native Americans on the screen. To make his point, he sent his refusal via Sacheen Littlefeather. As I recall, she was met with hoots of derision from the Academy attendees.
The following interview with Brando explains more fully what he was hoping to emphasize in his refusal.
Amazing how little the non-cinematic world has learned over the 50 years since this interview.
I am one who firmly believes that far too many people are far too easily offended today, whether it is reflected in demands to tear down statues because of historical transgressions, as in the case of Sir John A., or tossing out all of Winston Churchill's accomplishments because of his and the Empire's historical racism ( as opposed to making the statues part of history's lessons). That being said, there really is no excuse today for people to be blowing dogwhistles that appeal to a very base base.
Such is the case with the much-publicized cancellation of Dilbert, thanks to its creator, Scott Adams, opining that Black people are “a hate group” that white people need to “get the hell away from.”
Adams deserves every cancellation he gets, but he’s not alone in deserving our opprobrium. He might not have made the specific racist remarks he made but for Rasmussen Reports, which, smack-dab in the middle of Black History Month, decided to ask a pair of questions more befitting of Confederate Heritage Month.
Rasmussen Reports pollsters asked 1,000 people to agree or disagree with two statements: “It’s OK to be white” and “Black people can be racist, too.” Nothing good was ever going to come from those questions, and it was irresponsible and incendiary for Rasmussen to use those questions, and only those questions, in a survey.
White supremacists know such statements well.
“It’s OK to be white” is a sentence that has been embraced by white supremacists who oppose good-faith efforts to make our country more diverse, equitable and inclusive. “Black people can be racist, too,” is another sentiment one hears primarily from white people who don’t want to be reminded of the oppression white Americans have carried out. They are the same people who, contrary to all the evidence, argue that racism in America works both ways.
Of course, as is often the case in such matters, Adams sees himself as a victim, but I have both an observation and a little advice on this matter for him and his fellow travellers.
First, I think we have to admit that very few of us are completely without biases. Some of them might be minor, or they might be very significant. None of us is without blame in our lives. As long as we recognize and acknowledge to ourselves those prejudices or inclinations, we can choose not to act upon them.
Now I know many will say that if you have those biases, they will inexorably reveal themselves through what they like to call microaggressions. They may be right, but human nature offers the opportunity for growth, and I am of the firm opinion that we can choose to resist evil, because its embrace is a conscious act, doubtlessly influenced by conditioning and even unconscious underpinnings.
My advice to people like Scott Adams and his ilk is simple: keep your views to yourself. To pronounce upon such matters from a position of some influence does no one any good. Indeed, I would extend that advice to everyone. We have to realize (and it can be humbling) that the larger world is not thirsting for our views, and that any impulse to believe otherwise is sheer egoism.
And haven't we had more than enough of that nonsense in recent years?
Education. Well, it's part of the answer anyway. And the question? How does society mount a serious effort to combat racism in its many forms, be it directed against Muslims, Asians, Jews, Blacks, Indigenous or anyone else who falls within the sights of the benighted and the evil?
Recent data from Statistics Canada paints a disturbing picture about who is involved in hate crimes. According to the agency, nearly a quarter of those accused of hate crimes between 2010 and 2019 were between the ages of 12 and 17, a majority of whom were male.
And the effects of racism are even higher:
Hate crimes, described as message crimes by the American Psychological Association, are a threat to the safety and well-being every person in Canada deserves to feel.
“Hate crimes send messages to members of the victim’s group that they are unwelcome and unsafe in the community, victimizing the entire group and decreasing feelings of safety and security,” reads an analysis by the association. “Furthermore, witnessing discrimination against one’s own group can lead to psychological distress and lower self-esteem.”
The role of education in all of this should be obvious. While many advocate teaching so that students have a better grasp of things like Islamophobia and how online hate is propagated, it seems to me that a better counter-strategy would be to establish a mandatory course, likely attached to the history department, in which students can learn from a Canadian perspective about the various cultures that are under attack, thereby, if you will, better 'humanizing' them. Such a course would include our own country's mistreatment of the Indigenous, the Asian, the Sikh, the Jewish and the Muslim, as well as stories of collaboration and easy co-existence. How many know, for example, that the first mosque in Canada was established in Edmonton in 1938?
Such an approach would not, of course, eradicate the stench of racism that will always linger. And my experience as a teacher, despite education's perceived role as an equalizer and answer to society's woes, is that we have limited impact in countering the home environment that sometimes fosters an array of attitudes that infect children, much to their detriment.
Education has often been described as shedding light on the darkness. Even if it has only limited impact in addressing all that ails us, it seems a good place to start.
Now that the U.S. has announced its land borders will be open to vaccinated Canadians sometime in November, many, especially snowbirds, are exultant. There are, however, numerous reasons to temper that enthusiasm, including the poor rate of full vaccination south of us (only 57%), the ever-present threat of violence, and the other perennial American pandemic, hatred and racism, the latter of which I shall turn to in a moment.
Edward Keenan suggests the need for caution in his column today. He cites Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on non-essential travel:
“I’m going to quote Eileen de Villa, the Toronto Public Health officer, who offered some really good advice,” Freeland said. “She said, ‘Just try to do the things you need to do, and maybe hold back on doing the things you just want to do.’ And I think, if you just keep doing that a few more weeks, Canada can really fully put COVID behind us.
The key medical authority in her government, Health Minister Patty Hajdu, said over the weekend that Canadians should travel to the U.S. only when it’s “absolutely necessary,” specifically warning against going to some U.S. states where COVID-19 is “very, very out of control.”
But as I suggested above, there are other reasons to avoid unnecessary travel to the U.S., including its twin plagues of violence and racism. It is the latter I will examine next, and I have to warn you, it gets ugly.
There is a man named Michael Slawson who has been exposed on Twitter for what he really is, and what follows is somewhat hard to watch:
It also appears that Slawson has an unhealthy interest in young girls:
I am happy to report that Slawson's Twitter account has been suspended. I am sure I'm but one of hundreds who lodged a complaint about him, so can hardly take credit for his removal. And one would be foolish to think that there are not countless others like him still spewing their hatred on various social media platforms.
My admiration and respect go out to Danesh and Michael Mc for exposing this dangerous malefactor whose hatred and perversion is but one of the many reasons I cannot see myself ever returning to the United States.
There is a scene in the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, (about the Scopes Monkey Trial) where Spencer Tracey and Frederic March, courtroom adversaries, discuss faith. March insists it is necessary for the masses to believe in something beautiful; it makes their lives more palatable. Tracy counters with a story about his childhood yearning for Golden Dancer, a rocking horse he had long coveted in a store window. With much scrimping and saving by his parents, he awoke one morning to find it at the base of his bed.
But the story does not have a happy ending. The first time he rode it, it fell apart, so poorly constructed was it, "put together with spit and sealing wax. All shine and no substance." This story relates to the ignorance and bigotry that hides behind great displays of religiosity, as evident in a previous scene, and is a major subtext of the entire film as science, in the form of evolution, confronts biblical literalism.
That got me thinking about the power of myth, both for good and ill, which brought me around to the often destructive influence of national myths, ones that are foundational to how people see their countries and themselves. Some are obviously destructive, such as American exceptionalism and the belief in the United States as a land of unparalleled opportunity, where anyone can become anything.
Then there are those that suggest something good, like Canada being an accepting, tolerant land that welcomes all and treats everyone well. As recent events have shown, we can no longer accept such anodyne myths as approximations of truth. They conceal too much ugly reality.
Before the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in British Columbia last month, two-thirds of Canadians say, they knew a little or nothing about the history of this country’s residential school system.
It’s one of the findings in a survey commissioned by the Canadian Race Relation Foundation and the Assembly of First Nations.
They polled Canadians the week after the discovery at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., was announced.
For many Canadians, it seems to have been a moment of shattered ignorance.
As Tom Parkin reports, ignoring reality was at the forefront of Jagmeet Singh's recent angry speech in the House of Commons, prompted both by the unmarked Indigenous graves and the horror that took place in London, Ontario.
“Some people have said, ‘This is not our Canada,’ ” Singh told MPs.
“But the reality is, this is our Canada. We can’t deny it. We can’t reject that, because it does no one any help. The reality is: Our Canada is a place of racism, of violence, of genocide of Indigenous people.”
Singh may be sensing a widespread mood. In an opinion poll Leger released last week, 57 per cent of Canadians said the Kamloops graves made them “question the whole moral foundation that Canada has been based on.”
Parkin says this is not a message that Canada's political and business leaders will take kindly to or promote.
The deaths and burials at residential schools were known by Indigenous families, but news media didn’t tell those stories. Nor is the frustration with ongoing racism, and fear of violent racists, new in Canada. Many Canadians live with both every day.
These are the experiences of what political science calls the “subaltern” classes of society — groups who have no say and no command in politics or business. And they certainly don’t decide the meaning of their country. Not usually, anyway.
Subaltern society is divided into identities, each pushed to the margins of political discourse, isolated from each other, and without the common networks, culture, or political language to tell a common and unifying story. That now seems to be changing.
“This is our Canada” isn’t just a demand to look objectively at Canada’s past; it’s a call to disparate people to find a new moral basis for their country.
And it is also a call for all of us to take a good, long look in the mirror.
Recent events here have served to amply remind all of us that, as Canadians, we do not walk on the side of the angels. However, events south of the border serve as yet another reminder that the United States is a toxic nation that all of us would do well to avoid.
Some will find the language in the following offensive, but I think you will agree that the courier doing the videoing had ample provocation.
John’ asks me to show I.D. while I’m delivering Narcan in Pacific Heights
For those who don’t know it’s reputation, pac heights is one of the most affluent, snobby, and white neighborhoods in San Francisco. It’s a neighborhood of old money, unlike the heavily gentrified neighborhoods where new tech money has displaced historically black and brown communities. Everyone who grew up here knows that There is an invisible line drawn on the corner of Fillmore and Sutter that separates pac heights from uptown Fillmore, a line which I rarely care to cross(because this type of thing is a common occurrence in my everyday life). On this particular day I found myself on the wrong side of the line. I was doing a Narcan delivery (for the @the.d.o.p.e.project ) to the 2200 block of Clay street when a man called out to me from a 3rd story window. He asked me what I was doing, and I replied my job. He asked me who I worked for and I told him to mind his business. He then followed me to the halfway house I was delivering to and stood in my way as I tried to leave. I’ve never seen this guy before in my life. I posed no threat to his safety or his property. He threatened to call the cops on me, and after I talked some shit to him he admitted that it was an empty threat. He explained that things have come up missing in the neighborhood, so it must have been me who stole his shit. I’m guessing that in his mind I had no right to be walking down his street, and I must be looking for something to steal. I have a strong feeling that he wouldn’t have harassed me of I was of a lighter complexion, but this is an everyday thing when you’re a man of color living in America. #alwayscarrynarcan#narcansaveslives#harmreductionsaveslives#narcan@harmreductioncoalition
Although we are fast-approaching the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I am almost ashamed to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about it until I watched HBO's Watchmen series last year. That it took a fictional show to apprise me of it is perhaps not totally surprising, given that it was a tragedy many assiduously tried to scrub clean from history. As Charles Blow writes,
in 1921, white citizens of that city — aided by the National Guard, it should be noted — destroyed the Greenwood section of that city, a prosperous, self-sufficient community known as Black Wall Street, killing as many at 300 people and leaving 8,000 others homeless.
One of the most remarkable things about that massacre was the concerted effort by the city to erase it from history, and just how effective that campaign was.
They were fully aware of what they were doing:
“After the massacre, officials set about erasing it from the city’s historical record. Victims were buried in unmarked graves. Police records vanished. The inflammatory Tulsa Tribune articles were cut out before the newspapers were transferred to microfilm.”
The Times continued, “City officials cleansed the history books so thoroughly that when Nancy Feldman, a lawyer from Illinois, started teaching her students at the University of Tulsa about the massacre in the late 1940s, they didn’t believe her.”
If you are a NYT subscriber, the paper did a masterful job, including the use of 3D modelling, to show the full breadth of the tragedy. Failing that, the following report offers some insight into this atrocious event:
I'm not entirely sure why these things bother me so much, but I suspect it has a lot to do with my hope and expectation that Canadians are better than their American counterparts in dealing with Covid-19.
As you can see in the following ugly incident, which occurred at a Mississauga T&T Supermarket between an employee and a benighted fool, that is not always the case:
Perhaps the original poster of the video put it best:
"My heart was broken and tears shed ... When that guy shouted at him, he didn't know how to fight back, he kept saying 'I'm Canadian.' Obviously, Canada is his home! Where is our multiculturalism? Where are our national values?"
"Even PM Trudeau called grocery store employees heroes! Why are heroes treated like this? I don't understand."
In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus Finch famously tells his daughter Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
That statement, that call for empathy, may sound obvious, but far too many of us have a hard time seeing, really seeing, what others see, and feeling, really feeling, what others feel.
I find the following quite powerful; although I have watched it more than once, it continues to break my heart. People, especially those who are parents, will find a hard time not being moved by the painful reality that black children must learn about far, far too early in their lives.
Almost two years ago I wrote a series of posts on racism, starting with the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy horribly tortured before his death. Here is that post, and if you would like to read the entire series, you can click here
From this tragedy large, diverse groups of people organized a movement that grew to transform a nation, not sufficiently but certainly meaningfully. What matters most is what we have and what we will do with what we do know. We must look at the facts squarely ... The bloody and unjust arc of our history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here.
- Timothy B. Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till
As a species, we are terrible students of history. Although its tools have become much more refined over the years, its lessons seem all too frequently lost on many, either because we prefer comforting illusions or we see them through narrow ideological lenses. Refusing to confront ugly truths ensures their longevity.
One of the most emotionally difficult books I have read in a long time is The Blood of Emmett Till. This excerpt from a NYT review sums up the murder of Till, the 14-year-old black lad from Chicago who, in the summer of 1955, was visiting relatives in Mississippi:
On a Wednesday evening in August, Till allegedly flirted with and grabbed the hand of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked as the cashier at a local market. According to recovered court transcripts released by the F.B.I. in 2007, he let out a “wolf whistle” as she exited the store to get a gun from her car. Bryant later informed her husband and his half brother, who proceeded to uphold a grim tradition: Till was abducted, beaten, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. A 74-pound gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire, with the hope that he would never be found.
Despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt, his murderers were, in the Southern tradition of the time, found not guilty. Despite the absence of justice, Till's mother, an indefatigable woman, changed the course of civil rights history by insisting that the horribly mutilated body of her son rest in an open coffin, of which photographs were published in prominent magazines, while an estimated 240,000 filed by his casket.
The purpose of this post, however, is not to revisit the horrific details explored in the book that go well beyond the murder of a young teen. Rather, it is to draw parallels between the language and justifications of the racists of Till's time with those of the contemporary white supremacist movement. While over 60 years separate the two eras, the echoes of history are evident for all who care to look.
The most obvious parallel evolves around efforts to discredit the veracity of events. Examples of this 'strategy' abound in the book:
The editor of the Picayune Item snarled that a "prejudiced communistic inspired NAACP" could not "not blacken the name of the great sovereign state of Mississippi, regardless of their claims of Negro Haters, lynching, or whatever [emphasis mine].
Sherriff Strider, a racist who was friends with the accused, sought to constantly undermine the evidence and question whether or not the body was, in fact, that of Till's, telling reporters the following:
"The body we took from the river looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy. It was also more decomposed than it should have been after that short a stay in the water."
Soon after, Strider told reporters, "This whole thing looks like a deal made up by the NAACP."
During the trial, Strider was happy to share his racist view with reporters, disguised as questioning the evidence:
"It just seems to me that the evidence is getting slimmer and slimmer. I'm chasing down some evidence now that the killing might have been planned and plotted by the NAACP."
Of course, there was no such evidence. Just as there was no evidence to support a convenient claim that Till had been spirited out of Mississippi and was now living in Detroit, again part of the larger effort to cast doubt on the evidence and the integrity of the NAACP.
Why the attacks on the NAACP? Besides trying to sow doubts about the murder, it was part of a pattern of extreme resistance to school integration and voting rights that Hodding Carter wrote about in The Saturday Evening Post:
Whites considered the NAACP "the fountainhead of all evil and woe," and the factual nature of most of the NAACP's bills of particulars ... doesn't help make its accusations any more acceptable. "The hatred that is concentrated upon the NAACP surpasses in its intensity any emotional reaction that I have witnessed in my southern lifetime." This reflected the NAACP's demands for voting rights and school integration as much as it did their protests over the Till case.
Any fair-minded person who reads The Blood of Emmett Till cannot emerge from the experience without a deep sense of outrage over the horrible injustices meted out to Black people over the years, as well as a profound admiration for those extraordinary souls who, countless times, braved both physical and economic reprisal in their long battle to be treated exactly as they were: American citizens demanding their full rights.
And the battle continues today. In Part 11 of this post, I will look at the tactics employed by white supremacists today, tactics that eerily echo those of a much earlier time as the racists among us seek to turn back the clock and once more subjugate those they deem their inferiors.
Georgia State Representative Erica Thomas was subjected to a vicious racist verbal assault while shopping. Painful to watch, it once againt attests to how primitive our species really can be. Notably, the racist who attacked her quoted Trump:
Colin Kaepernick is someone I admire. As previously noted in this blog, the former NFL player, whose decision to protest police brutality against blacks by taking a knee during the American national anthem, has paid dearly for his integrity. But vindication has finally arrived, vindication sure to end Donald Trump into new paroxysms of outrage:
Last week, an arbitrator ruled that Colin Kaepernick’s collusion grievance against the NFL can go forward. This week, Nike unveiled a new ad campaign starring the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who rose to prominence in 2016 when he began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against black Americans.
Given that Nike is the official uniform supplier for the NFL, this move is not without risk, but one the company believes is worth taking. And the backlash has already started. Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #JustBurnIt or #BoycottNike for some examples:
FVCK U NIKE THIS IS FOR SUPPORTING A MAN THAT DISRESPECTS OUR MEN IN BLUE #JustDolt #JustBurnIt
Ripping my Nike Air Max to own the libs #BoycottNike
Nike shares slipped as much as 3.9 percent to $79 as of 9:31 a.m. Tuesday in New York -- the biggest intraday slide in five months.
They had climbed 31 percent this year through Friday’s close.
The fallout was no surprise but Nike may be betting that the upside of a Kaepernick endorsement is worth angering conservative Americans and supporters of President Donald Trump.
To its credit, this is not the first time Nike has waded into controversial waters:
Just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration last year, the company launched a high-profile “Equality” campaign featuring LeBron James and Serena Williams. The campaign’s ambassadors included Ibtihaj Muhammad, a Muslim American fencer who wears a hijab when competing, and transgender triathlete Chris Mosier.
Now, all of this, of course, is about market share, but it is nonetheless refreshing to see a company taking a calculated risk while so many in Trump's America seem so keen on hewing to a very conservative, even reactionary, line.
And of course, for students of human nature, the reactions to this campaign constitute a fascinating Rorschach test, yet another conduit into the tortured and fractured American psyche.
Not to mention another dog whistle for the increasingly beleaguered Trump to blow.
Colin Kaepernick, the young NFL quarterback about whom I have previously posted, has shown remarkable integrity and fortitude dealing with the furor following his decision to 'take a knee' rather than stand for the U.S. national anthem. His action, to protest the brutalization of Black people at the hands of the authorities, has been roundly condemned by reactionaries for 'disrespecting the flag'. (The fact that 'taking a knee' has been a traditional show of respect by those entering Catholic church pews, I guess, is neither here nor there in this fraught environment.)
That Kaepernick no longer has a team to play for reveals much about systemic racism, both in the league and throughout America. Now, he has decided to fight back. He has filed a grievance against the NFL on Sunday, alleging that he remains unsigned as a result of collusion by owners following his protests during the national anthem.
It would take mental gymnastics worthy of a denizen of Nineteen Eight-Four not to be able to see the cause-and-effect at work in the erstwhile quarterback's ongoing unemployment:
Kaepernick's supporters believe he's being punished for protesting police brutality by refusing to stand during the national anthem last season. This movement has spread throughout the NFL this season, drawing sharp criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Last week, CBS Sports reporter Jason La Canfora said that Kaepernick would be willing to go anywhere to work out for a team and wanted to be judged solely on his football ability.
While a difficult grievance to actually prove, all the evidence points in the direction of the NFL owners blackballing him:
San Francisco safety Eric Reid, Kaepernick's former teammate, has been kneeling during the anthem before games, including Sunday's 26-24 loss at the Washington Redskins.
"I'll have to follow up with him," Reid said after the game. "It sure does seem like he's being blackballed. I think all the stats prove that he's an NFL-worthy quarterback. So that's his choice and I support his decision. We'll just have to see what comes of it."
The NFL players' union said it would support the grievance, which was filed through the arbitration system that's part of the league's collective bargaining agreement.
Colin Kaepernick is clearly a deeply principled person who is likely running a real risk of further repercussions as he pursues this grievance. But that is often how the finest manifestations of personal integrity work, isn't it?
On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in a horrific racist crime that reverberated throughout the world.
In April of this year, Jazz Night in America recorded Wadada Leo Smith performing a portion of his original composition "Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless" while canoeing down the Little Tallahatchie River in Glendora, Miss.
In Part 1, I discussed the murder of Emmett Till, the exoneration of his murderers, and the tactics used by the racists of 1955 Mississippi to try to discredit both the NAACP and the entire trial. Efforts went so far as to suggest Till had not been murdered at all but was in fact living in Detroit, part of an elaborate scheme by the NAACP to embarrass the South and discredit its traditions.
Fast forwarding 2017, it is apparent that not much has changed in the racist camp, now known as 'White Nationalists'or the'alt.right', euphemisms that do little to obscure what they really are. Following the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that became abundantly clear.
There was, of course, the now infamous press conference by Donald Trump which seemed to use the time-honoured, disingenous and quite cowardly tactic of arguing for a moral equivalency between the swastika-bearing white supremacists and the many who showed up to oppose them.
"What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at, as you say, the 'alt-right,' do they have any semblance of guilt?" Trump asked. "What about the fact they came charging with clubs in hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do."
He added: "You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now."
From the never subtle or nuanced Trump, it was an obvious and rather pathetic display of his leanings. Other efforts can sometimes be more subtle. And that subtlety often comes in the form of presenting the racists as victims of intolerance and 'liberal' hypocrisy rather than as perpetrators of hatred. Consider, for example, two of the aggrieved memes circulating widely on the Internet:
Of course, racist strategy goes far beyond such memes. In the Charlottesville violence, the torch-bearing supremacists presented themselves as full-throated Americans marching in favour of free speech and the preservation of historical monuments, yet their real motives are clear to most. As Patrick Sisson recently wrote:
“The Charlottesville protesters revealed what we know to be true about these monuments: They are monuments to white supremacy, and the threat that we’ll tear them down is a threat to their ideology and movement.”
Those not certain of this need only to listen to the chants of Charlottesville 'protesters.'
Casting doubt on the veracity of events is also a time-honoured racist tactic. As noted in Part 1, there were dark hints that the NAACP had engineered the 'killing' of Emmett Till as a tactic to advance their cause. That very same approach was recently used by Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka who, in answering why his leader did not make any comments about the August mosque bombing in Minnesota, discussed Trump's need to have all the information about the bombing (a restraint he has never practised in attacks initiated by Muslims) before offering a public statement to ascertain it wasn't a "fake hate crime."
"We've had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left," he said.
In Till's day, there were efforts to present the NAACP as a communist-infiltrated organization whose purpose was to upend American society. Efforts are also underway today to conflate those involved in clashes with the supremacists as hypocrites and violent thugs:
Then there was the shocking, disgusting Twitter post by Jason Kessler, the far-right activist who organized the Charlottesville march, to denigrate and slander the 32-year-old woman killed by a hate monger during the demonstration:
“Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist,” the post said. “Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.”
Or consider the smear campaign uncovered by the BBC:
Far-right activists are using fake Twitter accounts and images of battered women to smear anti-fascist groups in the US, an online investigation has revealed.
The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.
One image shows the slogan "53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this", above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol.
The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women's Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.
How about this one, another picture promoted on a false Twitter account:
This is the kind of post that could go on almost ad infinitum with examples of racist strategies. Rather than prolong it, I will recommend that you check out two articles that are quite instructive: Michael Coren's recent article, Lessons on how to confront fascists, and How I Became Fake News, Brennan Gilmore's account of what happened to him after he posted his video of the car heading toward and killing Heather Heyer.
But I will close now with the hope that people will be more critical in their thinking and not let their biases blind them to such basic tasks as checking the bona fides of news sites, especially those that abound on the Internet, go to multiple legitimate sources of information, not fall down the rabbit hole of mindless conspiracy theories and, most importantly, use the brains they were born with to constantly assess and reassess the best approximations of the truth we can have in this life.
Oh, and just one more thing. Lest we feel smug and think racism and discrimination are things that afflict only our southern neighbour, this disquieting video from Manitoba should be a source of shame for all Canadians:
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