#I think pandemic has only led to more violence against women

[scotianostra]

Birthday, singer and actress Lorraine McIntosh born 13th May 1964 in Glasgow.

Lorraine was brought up in Cumnock, Ayrshire from about the age of three. She has been a member of one of Scotland’s favourite bands Deacon Blue since they formed in Glasgow in 1985.

Lorraine didn’t have an easy upbringing, she lost her mother and she said her Dad coped for a while then fell apart, hitting the bottle he started missing rent payments which led to them being evicted, she said the council waited until she had turned 18, a week after that the were out. In an interview for The Big Issue Lorraine poured her heart out saying………..

“I got a phone call from a social worker saying I wasn’t to go home, as dad had been evicted. I was at the bus stop with my friend, but couldn’t get on the bus. She phoned her mum and I ended up staying with them at first. No clothes, no nothing. We lost everything. It just got put in the street. And the saddest thing was I lost all my mum’s things, her clothes, wee bits of jewellery, all put on the street. Gone.”

I empathise with this entirely except I actually got home from school and found all our belongings on the street after we got evicted, I was 13 at the time………..

Lorraine was a regular on the Scottish soap, River City, she has also appeared in three episodes of Taggart playing different roles, more recently she turned up on Outlander last year as Mrs. Sylvie, the owner of a popular brothel in the town of Cross Creek. Also last year Deacon Blue’s 10th album, City Of Love, shot to No 4 in the UK album rankings the week before lockdown, giving the Glasgow outfit their biggest chart success since 1994.

During the pandemic, as well as coping with the strain of lockdown, Lorraine, who lives with Ricky in Glasgow, was taken ill with coronavirus in the early stages of the outbreak.

She said: “It has taken quite a while to get over it completely. I was in bed for three weeks, and then recovered.”

In 2020 Lorraine joined up with the Simon Community’s Nightstop campaign, to encourage people to open their homes to vulnerable young people. The Nightstop service offers young people aged 16 to 25 a safe place to stay when they find themselves in a crisis. All the volunteer hosts are fully vetted and trained. Since starting in Glasgow last year, eight families have provided 96 nights of emergency accommodation. She and her husband, Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross, are considering signing up as hosts – but only if the Simon Community think that their high profile won’t get in the way.

I really like Lorraine, and Ricky’s humanity, specifically Lorraine visited Rwanda two years ago to raise awareness of sexual violence against women when she was moved to tears by the testimony of victims. She has recently spoken out against the plan to send refugees coming to the UK to the country and said the country was still recovering from a genocide inflicted during the civil war in 1994 and for ministers to consider sending asylum seekers there is deplorable.

On her trip, she heard of shocking conditions, including child slavery, youngsters being burned to death, and rape being used as a weapon of war to destroy communities.

On her final day in Rwanda, she made a pilgrimage to one of the most infamous genocide sites in the country called Nyamata where thousands were slaughtered in and around a church.

She said: “I was unprepared for the sight of thousands of items of clothing from the fallen folded and piled up on the church pews. The ceiling pockmarked with bullets and a line around the bottom of the wall which our guide tells us is the blood line from the carnage. A river of blood. In the gardens outside 50,000 people lie buried.

Hubbie Ricky made a simple tweet yesterday, the post read "33 years today ❤️" with the photo

Lorraine is set to appear in the new season of Shetland.

The song is my favourite where she sings a strong vocal.

[castawavy]

gals if ur reading this stay safe, yeah? 😔

[feministfocus]

Cautious, Vigilant, Fearful: On Being Asian American

Art by R. Kikuo Johnson

By Cynthia Lin

The mother and child wait for the subway. The mother grips the hand of her daughter tightly, her other hand raised to check the time. A simple illustration, yet the mother’s and daughter’s eyes catch my attention. They are cautious, vigilant, fearful.

I realize what else makes me uneasy. The mother wears a turtleneck sweater beneath a long blazer and wide black pants. And tennis shoes. The sneakers clash incongruously with her formal attire—why wear sneakers with a blazer? Unless you fear you will need to run.

The New Yorker’s recent cover, “Delayed” by artist R. Kikuo Johnson, comes at a time in which racial violence against Asian Americans has surged. Just a few days before, a man was filmed kicking and stomping on a 65-year-old Philippine-American woman while onlookers from the nearby building watched. One even shut the door in her face.

It’s simple to blame the violence on the pandemic and the subsequent xenophobic rhetoric, but it’s not as if racism against Asian Americans did not exist before—it’s just that the public is finally made aware of it. It’s difficult to argue that racism is just overblown paranoia when there is widespread video evidence of the harassment.

For a while, I used to debate with myself whether someone was being racist towards me. Is it all in my head? Why am I making a big deal of this? Am I too sensitive? Can I not take a joke? It is exhausting to constantly question whether or not an action is racially motivated. I did not want to be so overly sensitive that every slight I experienced came down to race. You start to doubt yourself—is it not worse if you think it is racially motivated when it is not? Am I being hampered by my race, using race to excuse others’ treatment of me when it is just their reaction to me? But then again, my Asianness is written all over my face; how can you react to me without reacting to a core part of my identity? So there must have been some part of that action that was racist, even if it was mostly ignorant.

But it is easier to wonder what you did that made you seem so foreign, so “un-American” to warrant that might-be-racist action. You start overanalyzing your past actions, and you turn silent and reclusive, thinking it best that you should not bring more attention to yourself, but then you realize that by being quiet you are contributing to the Asian stereotype of meekness. You wish that there was a clear line distinguishing what is racist and what is “all in your head.” But that is the issue, isn’t it?

When the news first broke, I think I might have even believed the narrative the investigators spun about how the spa shootings in the Atlanta area were not racially motivated. In my mind, I hovered between calling the shootings a “hate crime” or a “crime.” It did not strike me until I read the words “sex addiction”—the excuse the shooter used to explain his murder of the eight people, six of whom were Asian women—that I realized the label “racial motivation” contributes to the falsehood that there is a distinct line separating what is racist and what is not.

“Racial motivation” is the covert label we use for the obviously racist. But the phrase doesn’t take into account the subtleties, the dangerous norms we have adopted to mark what is foreign and what is “American.” Or even more relevant, the generations of popular culture over-sexualizing and fetishizing Asian women. Perhaps the shooter’s alleged sex addiction is not inherently anti-Asian, but depictions of Asian women in film and television have dehumanized them into objects of desire, generalized them as “docile,” “demure,” and “obedient.” Easy targets.

But why this compulsion to explain the actions of the perpetrator? This desperate grab for a motive every time a racist crime is committed? Whether or not the shooter’s intent was racist, the ramifications still exist. Asian Americans, especially the elderly, do not feel safe in America. I worry about my grandparents’ recent move from Brooklyn’s Chinatown to Staten Island, where they are cut off from all that is familiar and comforting. After living in America for over twenty years, is it not their right to go on an afternoon walk without fearing for their safety?

Anti-Asian sentiment in America has not recently materialized; it’s only resurfaced in our collective attention span. Lately, I have been digging deeper into Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history, approaching it with the intent to examine the longevity of the community’s residence in America, not just the well-taught immigrant story. Asians have been here before many Europeans immigrated through Ellis Island, but even to me, these “newer” Europeans seem to fit better with the American mold. How can they not, when U.S. history lessons consistently depict Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as foreigners and national security threats? When the few times the curriculum touches on Asian American history, it focuses on Chinese immigration in the mid-19th century, the subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act, and the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II? The Asian Americans I learn about in history class seem to exist solely in the backdrop of exclusion, which only serves to highlight their “otherness.”

What of Larry Itliong and his efforts in organizing the Delano Grape Strike? Or Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives? Why is it that these milestones in Asian American and Pacific Islander history aren’t taught more? By acknowledging the multifaceted and ever-changing nature of the Asian community in the U.S., we acknowledge the progress made and what we have yet to achieve. Instead, I learn about AAPI history through an antiquated lens—depictions of Asian Americans have remained stagnant, fixed in time, and painted in broad strokes of homogeneity. The diversity of the AAPI community has often been forgotten, pushed aside for the ease in generalizing one collective group of people. This has not only perpetuated the harmful myth that most Asians, being the “model minority,” have attained success in America, but has also led to blame on the whole AAPI community for the pandemic.

In high school, race was a political topic, one made so controversial that even now, there is still some ingrained part of me that hesitates to voice my opinions for fear that I would “get it wrong.” It was only through my college search that I realized a major like “Ethnicity, Race, & Migration” even existed. And if I, someone who plans to study race, feel this way, how do others —students, teachers—even begin to broach this topic without fear of controversy? Focus on eradicating the stigma behind racism without fixating on being politically correct? So, besides a reevaluation of curriculum, we must also change the culture of avoidance we have fostered in schools, end the mindset of avoiding uncomfortable conversations.

Perhaps during the first discussions, we’ll stumble over a few social faux pas, reveal some implicit biases we’ve kept locked away under niceties, but it is better to acknowledge these societal problems than pretend that ignoring these issues will make them disappear. Uncomfortable conversations elicit defensiveness, but they can also be an opportunity for growth, a way to find empathy for others who at first seem entirely unlike ourselves. Having these conversations can help make true social change, can even help materialize a world in which a mother doesn’t have to fear for her and her child’s safety while doing something as mundane as taking a subway.

Chen, T. (2021, March 22). Asian women are Hypersexualized, so don't tell me the killings In Atlanta aren't about race. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/asian-women-fetish-racist-atlanta-shootings

Fan, J., Hsu, H., & Park, E. (2021, March 19). The Atlanta shooting and the dehumanizing of Asian women. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-atlanta-shooting-and-the-dehumanizing-of-asian-women

If the mass killing of six Asian women isn't a hate crime, what is? (2021, March 18). Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-03-17/killing-six-asian-women-hate-crime-atlanta

Mouly, F. (2021, April 13). R. Kikuo Johnson's "Delayed". Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2021-04-05

Waxman, O. (2021, March 30). Why the Asian-American story is missing from U.S. Classrooms. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://time.com/5949028/asian-american-history-schools/

[jordanianroyals]

8 March 2021: Queen Rania raised the alarm on growing global inequality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that the crisis has exposed and exacerbated long-standing disparities within society.

Speaking live via video call to the virtual John F. Kennedy (JFK) Jr. Forum hosted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics, Queen Rania warned that, “for the first time in 20 years, extreme poverty is back on the rise,” with so many people reeling under parallel pandemics of hunger, violence, and increasing illiteracy.

Her Majesty described this as “a vicious, destructive cycle,” explaining that inequality fuels the global spread of COVID-19, and in turn, the ensuing health, economic, and education crises fuel further inequality. (Source: Petra)

Addressing Harvard students and faculty in a conversation conducted by Harvard University Professor Melani Cammett, the Queen identified surging inequality as a “defining feature of our world,” crossing geographies as well as income, gender, and racial divides.

Noting that low-income countries are less able to devote resources toward pandemic mitigation and recovery, Her Majesty pointed out that “poorer countries simply lack the liquidity to dedicate to stimulus packages that are much needed to resuscitate their economies.”

The Queen explained that the pandemic has “unveiled a tale of two realities,” drawing a comparison between those who could easily work from home and those who could not afford to self-isolate because “staying at home meant they would die of hunger.”

Her Majesty also stressed the pandemic’s impact on women in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, stating that they were already at a considerable disadvantage prior to the pandemic.

“They only account for 20% of the labor force, although they do five times as much unpaid care and domestic work,” the Queen said, adding that lockdowns and school and daycare closures have only deepened this gender divide.

“That is really difficult for moms and their families, but we also need to remember that it’s terrible for our economies,” she warned. “According to the World Bank, if we could bring women’s lifetime earnings in the MENA region to equal those of men, then we could add around 3 trillion dollars’ worth of wealth to our region. That’s 3 trillion-worth of lost opportunities.”

Queen Rania suggested that the adoption of flexible work-related practices in the wake of COVID could foster increased workplace inclusivity, for women as well as “people who are traditionally shut out from the workplace because of their circumstances,” such as those with disabilities, single parents, or refugees.

Arguing that the pandemic’s economic fallout has increased the predicament of the global refugee community, the Queen warned that in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, the COVID crisis has pushed more than 1 million Syrian refugees further into poverty.

Her Majesty added that the pandemic has even disproportionately affected refugees living in high-income nations, who are at greater risk of unemployment, and pointed that there are those who would use the pandemic as a “political tool” against refugees to stoke panic by attempting to draw a link between refugees and the spread of COVID-19 for political gain.

“What a lot of these politicians and some of the people who vote for them miss is that, in many instances, refugees and immigrants give back to society,” adding that refugees with backgrounds in medicine have contributed to combatting the pandemic in Jordan, France, Peru, and elsewhere.

Referring to the key role played by immigrants in vaccine development, Her Majesty said, “the two co-founders of Moderna and their chief critical scientists are originally immigrants, and so is the chief executive of Pfizer.”

The Queen underlined that these examples “vouch for the power of diversity,” and reminded her audience that “more often than not, refugees and immigrants benefit, not burden economies” as international studies classify them as net job creators, not job takers.

During the Forum, Her Majesty also discussed deep-rooted inequalities in education access and reflected on the pandemic’s toll on the state of regional education.

She explained that in the Middle East, one in five children were already out of school prior to the pandemic, and disruptions to education have put an entire generation at further risk, with 40 percent of schoolchildren in the MENA being cut off from remote schooling in 2020, according to UNICEF.

The Queen emphasized that the COVID crisis should compel the international community to prioritize equal access to quality education, underscoring that this need is even more pronounced in the Middle East because of its unique demographics.

“We have a youth bulge: close to 70% of our population is under the age of thirty. To reap that demographic dividend, we really must make these urgent investments in quality education,” she said, calling for expanding on the hybridization of education by investing in in-person and remote learning methodologies and ensuring educators are prepared to deliver on those effectively.

Despite shining a spotlight on pervasive inequality, Her Majesty said the crisis has also afforded us an “opportunity to reimagine a new future” and the “impetus to make the changes that are so long overdue.”

Queen Rania also highlighted the role COVID-19 has played in changing attitudes surrounding climate change, and credited the pandemic with increasing people’s awareness of their environmental impact, with lockdowns around the world temporarily contributing to cleaner air and lower pollution rates.

Noting that accountability for the climate crisis has long been shirked by humanity as a whole, Her Majesty expressed optimism that the world is finally taking action. “I think now there is a sustainability revolution underway that is led mostly by young people but that is being heard by everyone.”

The Harvard University Institute of Politics John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum regularly hosts heads of state, leaders in politics, government, business, labor, and the media. The institute’s mission is to unite and engage Harvard students with academics, politicians, activists, and policy makers to inspire them to consider a career in politics. Her Majesty was previously a guest speaker at Harvard University in May 2007.

[sibidikkokarca]

Siberian surgeon’s drawings show devastating rise in domestic violence in Russia due to Covid-19 pandemic

Ruslan Mellin turned to art as a refuge from the brutal reality of lockdown and the effects of the virus

Ruslan Mellin is a facial surgeon based in Siberia who has been treating victims of brutal domestic violence for years—and, more recently, of Covid-19. Art is his salvation and a window onto the humanity of his patients. His drawings have attracted attention in Russia and are now becoming noticed internationally thanks to Meduza, a Russian news site that has profiled him and his work.

“The work was hard and if not for my art, I’m not sure how it would have ended,” he tells The Art Newspaper about the death and despair of 2020, which he has also described in a documentary. “Many colleagues died. Art helped me hide from this horror. Every day at least two or three patients died.”

Lockdown exacerbated the domestic violence he had depicted on the faces of countless female patients and in the rage of their abusers, whom he has also drawn.

“The number of patients with broken jaws, especially women, started to grow,” he said during a late evening telephone conversion after his hospital shift. “Most of them said they had provoked their husbands. These were women with high-level job, bank managers and doctors, with serious injuries.”

A major issue in combating domestic violence in Russia is that the victim is often blamed and takes the blame. “I hope things will change for the better,” Mellin says. “I think this happens because they are degraded and beaten and they think this is how it should be and they are afraid to leave, they think this is normal.”

Kemerovo, the Siberian mining city where he is now based, has in recent weeks become a flash point for Russia’s domestic violence crisis. A man is on trial for beating his girlfriend to death over the course of many hours, while police dismissed neighbours’ calls for help. Legislation from 2017 that decriminalised first-time battery offences has led to a nationwide spike in cases and an activist campaign to repeal the law. Russian government statistics are notoriously imprecise, but studies in recent years count from 5,000 to 14,000 women who die annually from abuse.

The memory of one of Mellin’s early patients, in another city, haunts him to this day. She was an orphan who was taken in by an alcoholic who then brutally attacked her.

“He was drunk and beat her with an axe,” deforming her hands and arms and smashing her face, Mellin says. “The blunt force destroyed her face, her frontal sinus, bone fragments flew off where he hit her against the floor, some covered her eye which went blind.” A significant part of her nose was crushed as well.

Although Mellin, who is 27, studied drawing for years as a child, growing up in a poor family in which his parents had an abusive relationship (“I know about domestic violence because I lived through it”, he says) led him to choose medicine as his profession.

“I loved art, but I understood that if I go into painting I might end up being as poor as my parents and wouldn't achieve anything in life,” he says.

To protect the privacy of his patients, Mellin draws their wounds, but uses the facial features of fellow doctors.

Now, Kemerovo’s medical university will be hosting an exhibition of his works. A central state art gallery in the city had rejected his works, he says, because a government official learned that he was not a credentialed artist. However, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a Russian government newspaper, has been sponsoring a touring exhibition of his drawings of Covid-19 patients to libraries in the region. He also posts his works on his Instagram account.

Further afield, Mellin’s works also feature on the website of Licht Feld Gallery in Basel, Switzerland, as an entrant in its Corona Case competition of Covid-themed art.

Fredy Hadorn, the artist who founded the Swiss gallery, describes Mellin’s work as a “combination of the scalpel and the pencil and the stories of the people affected” in a way that is “interesting and shocking also in relation to the home office situation imposed by the virus.” The art highlights that “in many countries, domestic violence is on the rise and leads to outbreaks of violence.”

Mellin has a particular affinity for the works of Van Eyck and Rembrandt, whom he especially admires as a “master of shadow and light.” He has been teaching himself to paint by reading about their technique via his extensive personal library of art books. Mellin recalls art teachers when he was a child who “were breaking me psychologically” by imposing Impressionism as the only acceptable style, and is grateful to another teacher who set him on his current trajectory.

“We had art history, which I loved, with a good teacher, who had a good Moscow education,” he says. “She was the director of our school. She told us in detail about anatomy, about muscles and how they are drawn, and instilled a love for biology. Then in ninth grade, when we were studying human anatomy, I loved looking at muscles in biology textbooks. I think art determined my future profession.”

[aion-rsa]

Warrior: The Real History of the Race Riot that Shook San Francisco

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Warrior spoilers.

In “Enter the Dragon,” the ninth episode of Season 2, Warrior rips a page out from history with its depiction of San Francisco Riot of 1877. On July 23, two nights of racial violence tore through Chinatown, killing four and destroying over $100,000 worth of Chinese-owned property. In Warrior there’s a much higher body count, but the show is “historical fiction” and never set out to be entirely accurate.

According to Warrior’s head writer Jonathan Tropper, “What’s important to us are the themes and the characters of the truths of the racism and the difficulty of the immigrant experience at that time. We’re taking all of our inspiration from historical characters and events, but we’re not telling a any kind of docudrama level, historical story.”

Race Riot in the City of Angels

The San Francisco riot was preceded by other attacks on Chinese Americans in a what is known as the “Driving Out.” In another Californian riot, the Chinese Massacre of 1871 happened in Los Angeles on October 24 when a mob of around 500 white and Hispanic rioters struck in Old Chinatown after hearing that a policeman was shot, and a rancher killed by a Chinese. It is estimated that 20 Chinese were lynched (although a few were shot dead prior to being hanged). In 1850, Los Angeles had a proportionally high number of lynchings for its size. 

Like in Warrior, the Los Angeles massacre was traced to a rivalry between two Chinatown tongs, but instead of the Hop Wei and the Long Zii, they were real tongs: the Hong Chow and the Nin Yung. Prostitution was rampant in Chinatown, an aspect that Warrior depicts with disturbingly accuracy, and Chinese women were commonly kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. Local police might attempt to rescue these women and return them for a fee. The abduction of a woman named Yut Ho sparked a feud between the Hong Chow and the Nin Yung and the policeman and rancher got caught in the crossfire. 

Ten men were prosecuted and eight were convicted of manslaughter for the lynchings, however the convictions were overturned due to “technicalities” after an appeal. In 1863, California law made it so that Asians could not testify against whites in court. That made Chinese easy targets for racial injustice by the time that these anti-Chinese attacks began occurring. 

Other Chinese massacres took place in the wild west. There was the Rock Springs Massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885. That left nearly 30 Chinese dead and many homes destroyed. The government did offer some restitution for property loss, but no one was ever arrested or held accountable for the bloodshed. In 1887, same year as the San Francisco riot, there was the Hells Canyon Massacre in Oregon. Some 34 Chinese gold miners were killed. Again no one was ever held accountable. In 2005, the site was renamed Chinese Massacre Cove.

Race Riot in the City by the Bay

Starting in 1873, the United States suffered the “Long Depression,” which was originally called ‘The Great Depression’ until the 1930s when another economic depression usurped the title. Unemployment levels were staggering across the nation and this was long before the U.S. had established any government protections for the unemployed. The Long Depression carried on throughout the 1870s, the period in which Warrior is set. In Episode 17 “If You Wait by the River Long Enough…” the Panic of ’73 is mentioned. That panic was the historic catalyst for the Long Depression. 

San Francisco was hit hard. Unemployment was up to 20% and the Bank of California had failed. On July 23, 1877, a labor strike led by the Workingmen’s Party rallied in a vacant lot – nicknamed a ‘sand-lot’ – near the newly established City Hall of San Francisco. The Workingmen’s Party was founded in 1877 and is often confused with the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS) which was founded around the same time. The WUPS changed its name soon after to the Socialist Labor Party and it is the oldest socialist political party in the United States.

The Socialist Labor Party still active and is currently headquartered in Mountain View, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The San Francisco Workingmen’s Party, more formally known as the Workingmen’s Party of California eventually rose to enough power to rewrite the state’s constitution. The sand-lot meeting was just the beginning. 

Some 8000 people showed up to that fateful sand-lot gathering strike. Initially, blaming the Chinese was not part of the platform. But then an anti-coolie procession pushed their way in, demanding to be heard. The crowd on the outskirts of the gathering turned on a Chinese passing by, attacking him, and shouting the rallying cry “On to Chinatown!” That launched the San Francisco Riot of 1877.

The mob destroyed property, mostly Chinese laundries. That old stereotype of Chinese laundries was based in fact. Laundry work was difficult prior to industrial washing machines and considered unmanly, but the Chinese were willing to do it. In 1880, San Francisco had some 200 Chinese laundries. The laundries were obvious targets, along with any challengers or bystanders that crossed the mob’s path. 

The next morning, the rioting grew. One of the mob organizers placed an ad in the local newspaper that said “RALLY! RALLY! Great anti-coolie Mass Meeting at the New City Hall, Market street, at 8 o’clock p.m.” On July 24, the Beale Street Wharf was set aflame.  From 1872 to 1907, the Beale Street Wharf was the city’s largest coal dock, and arsonists stoked the fire with 100 barrels of whale oil. However, it was a diversion to draw the city’s emergency resources away from downtown and Chinatown, where the riots would continue. That fire caused some $500,000 worth of damage and lost goods. 

When the mob marched on Chinatown, the Chinese houses in their path had been listed and were complete sacked. Wooden sidewalks were torn up to be used as battering rams. Homes were robbed. Laundries were burned. People were shot. The rampage lasted for two days until it was finally quelled by the combined forces of the SFPD, the California militia, and a thousand members of the Pick-Axe Brigade, a citizen vigilance committee that armed themselves with hickory pick-axe handles. Special 24-hour badges were issue by the SFPD to civilians willing to help. And the police were eager to break out their newly issued police batons, which according to the San Francisco Bulletin were “more effective than any other instrument in the business of skull-cracking.”

The Match that Lit the Fuse

The end of riot was not the end of anti-Chinese sentiments. Quite the opposite, it was just the beginning. Denis Kearny was one of the agitators from the Workingmen’s Party who participated in the sand-lot rally and the riot. He emerged as political leader for the anti-Chinese and anti-capitalist movement, pushing the slogan “The Chinamen Must Go.” Anti-Chinese sentiment kept growing in the United States, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers. It remains the only such law to prohibit a specific ethnic group or nationality ever established in the United States and it wasn’t repealed until 1943. However, Chinese immigrants were still restricted to only 105 per year for the entire country. This was upheld until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. 

Warrior has been moving towards the Chinese Exclusion Act throughout the show. It has been brought up several scenes set in San Francisco’s political arena, especially by Buckley (Langley Kirkwood), who has made this Act the focus of his manipulative agenda. Recently there has been rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States as the nation has become more racially divided. Extremists have blamed the pandemic on the Chinese, calling it the China flu or the Kung flu, and attacks on Chinese Americans have been increasing in many major metropolitan cities across the nation. Warrior has been hitting eerily close to home with its depictions of history and its comments on the ramifications. 

Here is where Warrior captures the spirit of Bruce Lee the best. Martial arts aside, Lee transcended race to become one of the world’s greatest icons. In his famous interview by Pierre Berton, Lee was asked if he thought of himself as Chinese or North American. His reply was timeless, “I think of myself as a human being, because under one sky we are but one family, it just so happens we look different.”

As writer and philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Even though it is fiction, Warrior‘s insightful Easter Eggs of these darker times in American history. It reminds us to honor the diversity of our great nation and remain united as Americans.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2KQZwxv

[science-fiction-is-real]

STOP TRYING TO GET ME TO VOTE FOR BIDEN.

Okay.  Look.  If you plan to vote for Biden, I won’t stop you.  And I understand.

But I would like to make a few points as to why I personally will NOT be voting for Biden.

We do actually have other options.  Biden is evil, not just “less than perfect,” but actually evil.  Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems, and this becomes especially clear when you look at the behavior of past Democratic presidents and when you apply a little Marxist theory regarding the State. Also A Biden victory is in itself a form of harm, not harm reduction.

1) WE DO ACTUALLY HAVE OTHER OPTIONS BESIDES VOTING FOR BIDEN.

First of all, the fact that you can even mention 3rd and sometimes even 4th and 5th party candidates indicates that: Yes, we LITERALLY DO have other options.  Are they LIKELY to win? 

No.  But only because people don’t vote for them. We are not trapped in a two party system, though we may be trapped psychologically.  It IS actually possible to create new political parties, and for existing small parties to grow into large parties.  This is a long-term goal, and probably not something that will happen by November.  But the first step is to realize that the democratic party are not our friends.

Second, and most important, voting is a tiny plastic water gun in the vast nuclear arsenal we have at our disposal when it comes to political activity.  Historically speaking, even the most nasty and reactionary asshole presidents suddenly start acting REAAAAAL progressive when they are faced with mass populist movements causing civil unrest.  This also applies to senators, congresspersons, and members of the court.  Remember Richard Nixon passing landmark Women’s Rights legislation?  In fact, the level of political activity of the masses is 8 millions times more important than who is in the Whitehouse.

Where we should really be focusing our efforts is in organizing and movement building.  Protest. Go on strike.  Propagandize.  Obstruct.  Disrupt.  And most importantly:

JOIN AN ORG! Join an org.  Join an org. Join an ORG!  Join labor unions.  Join political parties.  Join non-profits.  Becoming a dues-paying member of a Socialist organization is worth a thousand votes.  You will meet experienced comrades who know the ins and outs of political activism, who will show you the ropes, and will put you to work doing something productive.

Join the Democratic Socialists of America.  Join the Industrial Workers of the World. I’m a member of a political party called the Socialist Alternative.

2) BIDEN ISN’T “LESS THAN PERFECT.”  HE IS A MUSTACHE TWIRLING SUPERVILLAIN.

Biden is not a Liberal.  He’s a center-right conservative.  He embraces Neoliberal policies that leave working class people to die in poverty and debt.  He has made no serious attempts to cater toward Bernie’s base.  He is unspeakably Racist, and actually wrote the bill that created Mass Incarceration as we currently know it.

As part of the Obama Administration he was complicit in all of Obama’s abominable atrocities.  From the drone strike program which killed countless civilians, to the escalation of a draconian surveillance state, to the mass deportation of 3 million immigrants.  Obama created the structures that Trump is currently using to terrorize immigrants, minorities, and protestors.  And he created them for the very purpose Trump is using them for.  Biden was there every step along the way.  Biden has espoused violent rhetoric about doing violence against protesters, arresting people with certain political beliefs, and condoning police brutality.

Biden is better MAAAAYYBE better only on 2 issues.  Abortion rights and LBGT rights.  And while those issues are important.  I highly doubt he will make any progress on those issues.

Biden has said over and over again that he would pander to the republicans and compromise with them every chance he gets.  He certainly has stated callous disregard for the lives of working class people.  And we can only assume that he will betray women’s rights and LBGT rights the moment he finds it politically convenient.

And don’t give me crap about RBG.  Biden will not replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another liberal.  He will replace her with a centrist, or do what Obama did and let the Republicans pick the replacement for him.   And also the supreme court is a tyrannical, undemocratic institution anyway and should probably just be abolished full-stop.

Joe Biden’s rhetoric isn’t even less fascistic than Trump's either.  He says his racist, sexist, anti-working-class sentiment out loud.

And with his billionaire and corporate backers, he certainly can’t be trusted to act on climate change.

He will not respond positively to the pandemic either.  He has expressed out loud no plan of how HE would handle the pandemic, and if his democratic colleagues in congress give us a clue… well, the Dems have been incredibly stingy with their money, refusing funds for relief for the working class.  They have not put up a serious fight for any measures to actually stop the Virus’s spread.

If he’s the “Lesser of Two Evils.”  He is just evil.  

3) IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER WHO THE PRESIDENT IS.

Trump is not actually the cause of our problems.  He isn’t.  Donald Trump is a fat asshole with a desk job.  Donald Trump did not invent racism.  He did not invent sexism or xenophobia or hatred against the LBGT+ community.  If Donald Trump died tomorrow, the forces of reaction would carry on their merry way.  Donald Trump is in office because he is willing to carry out policies that are favorable to the ruling class.  And the moment he stopped doing that, he would be quickly disposed of, either by impeachment or by a military coup.

And in fact, the violence we are seeing from the Trump administration comes from the way the government itself is constructed.  Not from some diseased ideology unique to the American Right Wing.

So let’s think about this a little more carefully.  Why do we have a government in the first place?  You know, a government, the “state,”  the law itself?  It’s not to negotiate peace between different conflicting segments of society, because they are obviously very bad at that.  It’s not to ensure the public good and protect the rights of the citizens.  Because the government doesn’t really do that either.

And this isn’t just a problem when Republicans are in power.  See my previous examples of Obama’s unspeakable atrocities.  

The reason we have a government is to enforce and maintain class based society.  The State is nothing more than Armed bodies of men who exist for the purpose of allowing one class to suppress another class.  The government’s job is to suppress uprisings, control the working class, assume risk on behalf of the capitalist class, and to fight wars on behalf of the capitalist class.  That’s why the Feds are kidnapping protestors.  That’s why immigrants are being put in cages.  That’s why the police harass and intimidate Black people.  To maintain and enforce the power structure.

All of these bad things happened when Obama was president.  And All of these bad things will continue to happen if Biden is elected. This violence we’re seeing isn’t the result of Trump.  You can’t even call this violence Fascism, because this is NORMAL. Fascism is a specific political phenomena that occurs under very specific circumstances . This violence is literally just the government doing its job.  It’s worse now because the economy is going through a rough patch, which isn’t the government’s fault, it’s just because Capitalism is unstable.

The Right and Left Parties represent different segments of the ruling class, and the election process is about the ruling class negotiating differences among itself.  The democratic party does not represent the interest of regular people like You and me, and you DO NOT OWE THEM YOUR VOTE.

2) VOTING FOR BIDEN ISN’T HARM REDUCTION.  IT IS ITSELF A HARM.

A Biden Victory could have several negative consequences.

The democratic party will continue its decades-long drift toward the right.  The democratic leadership will see once and for all that they can get away with running any evil sleazy candidate they want who will serve the interest of their corporate benefactors, and that the public will remain loyal as long as they coat their sleeziness with “Woke” rhetoric.  If the Democrats learn that you will vote for them no matter what they do, then your vote loses all of its power.

It could trigger violent backlash from Trump’s far-right base.

It gives legitimacy to an ultimately UNdemocratic system which is breaking at the seams.

It could pacify a lot of the militant, but less educated segments of the working class who have swallowed the rhetoric that Biden is their ally.  They will disperse from the streets, meanwhile Biden is free to continue the violent, racist, war-hawkish, neoliberal agenda that Trump, Obama, and Bush did before him.

CONCLUSION

Joe Biden is not our friend.  The Democratic Party are not our friends.  Trump is awful, and he sucks.  If we DON’T vote for Biden, Trump may very well win the Presidential Race.  But considering that Biden himself is very evil, and that Trump is not the true cause of the violence and hatred we see coming from our government, the stakes in this race are a lot lower than you have been led to believe.

A protest vote could send a strong message to the Ruling Class that we are not satisfied with racist, violent, neoliberal leadership, and that we want real change.  

Also, we actually are NOT stuck in a two party system.  There is a growing movement within the United States to create and grow a worker’s party that represents truly progressive ideas, one where regular people hold party leadership directly accountable, and the party is forced to serve our interests instead of those of the ruling class.  The first step in building such a party is to let the Democrats go, and stop placing our hopes in people who do not care about us.

But the most important thing to remember:

The ballot box is not the end-all and be-all of political activity.  The ruling class has created this little ceremony of “voting,” inviting us working class folks to come and play their little game of “pick the dictator,” and giving us the illusion that this makes a real difference.  But we have no way of holding politicians in office accountable when they break their campaign promises, and we are only allowed to vote for options the ruling class allows us to see on the ballots. 

We DO have power to change the system, but we have to do it outside the ruling-class’s terms.  We have to be organized and active and militant enough that the ruling class believes we pose an actual threat to their authority.

We have to do the type of things we currently see American’s doing in the streets right now.  Causing a major disruption, threatening the capitalists’ profits, and threatening the politicians’ sense of authority and control.

But we have to remain organized and militant even after the current wave of protests dies down.  And we do that by building left wing institutional power -- by JOINING ORGS.

JOIN A GOD DAMN ORG YOU COWARDS.

[kirstymcneill]

It’s time for a leadership revolution

This piece first appeared on Medium on the 16th of December 2021. 

The climate emergency. An epidemic of violence against women and girls. Racism. A global hunger crisis. A pandemic still claiming lives around the world. This year has been full of yet more reminders of just how urgent the work of repair and renewal is in our hurting world. This is the decisive decade — the one where humankind chooses whether we want a fair, liveable future on a safe planet or whether we want to continue on a path that depends on our exploitation of one another and of nature. The nature of climate science means we have fewer choices this year than last and fewer still than the one before that. We are running out of time to get this right so it is worth being blunt: the future depends on the quality of our collective leadership and we aren’t good enough to win right now.

Earlier this year I was honoured to speak at the launch of Poles Apart, the book by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne and Alexandra Chesterfield and was asked to share my thoughts about a time I’d changed my mind (the theme of their great podcast). The format of the night was the terrifying PechaKucha — 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The photograph is of my notes for the final few slides but the basic thrust of the talk was an invitation to the audience — activists, funders, social entrepreneurs — to think about whether we are being as generous and focused with our leadership as these times demand. It’s easy to point fingers but are we all reflecting on our own role and obsessing about how to bring the best of ourselves in this movement moment?

I’ve spent much of this year collaborating with colleagues working on nature, climate, Covid, gender justice and international development as part of Crack the Crises, a coalition bringing together organisations representing more than 12 million people, and it is striking how few changemakers think we are currently more than the sum of our parts and have the right level of ambition and urgency among our leadership.

It’s become quite common in social change circles to shy away from acknowledging that there even are leaders in our work or to downplay their role lest it enable the kind of toxic behaviour that’s harmed so many people. I used to agree — I spent a lot of my time in activism and in politics thinking only movements mattered — but here’s the place where I’ve changed my mind. I no longer believe only the conditions facing a collective matter and think individual leaders — their skills, strategic abilities and character — matter just as much. And I think until we grasp the need for a leadership revolution, we’re going to keep losing — and deserve to.

This doesn’t mean a return to an old model of singular, patriarchal leadership, but a new model fit for the 2020s. This new leadership will come from people who, in the words of the IPPR’s Making Change report, focus on the things that are in everyone’s interests but nobody’s job description. The people who realise that relationships are everything.

These new leaders will have to be obsessed with the mission — not the brands or funding of their organisations. The leaders we need are people with a calling not a career. People who are relentlessly focused on measurable, sustainable, equitable change and whose starting point is strategy and how to play their best part.

They’ll hold themselves accountable for victory — not vanity metrics like the size of their list or lead generation for fundraising. When they lose they’ll not rest until they understand why and when they win they will worry more about identifying the variables that led to victory than fighting for the credit.

They’ll want to talk with the country, not preach to the choir and will do work that’s depolarising by design. The leaders of the 2020s will know that their job is to end the culture wars, not to win them, and they’ll build broad and unusual coalitions that can build 21st century solidarity.

And above all they will act like trustees of our movement — always thinking about the other leaders they can develop and where every single hour and pound is best spent. You’ll know them because they regularly make introductions, pass the mic and build movement infrastructure for us all.

That’s the leadership revolution I think we need. But if I’ve learnt anything in the last quarter century of campaigning, it’s that I get it wrong again and again and again. This might be one of those times so I’d love to know if I haven’t changed your mind and if so why not. But if I’m right, I think every single one of us needs to ask if this is how we are showing up and, if not, what we can do to support those who are. So let me end where I started. We’re not good enough to win today. It’s up to each of us to decide whether we will be tomorrow.

[ravenmorganleigh]

This is about the erasure of lesbians, which is pandemic. Lesbian erasure is global: Lesbians are being erased from every aspect of society, in both state-sponsored male violence and individuated violence. Lesbian erasure is in our families, our places of worship, our schools, our workplaces. Lesbian erasure is, increasingly, in our own LGBT community. Lesbian erasure is even, at times, within our lesbian selves.

There are many ways to erase a lesbian. As almost any lesbian can attest, that erasure begins with our families of origin telling us we aren’t really lesbians or it’s just a phase or we are really just tomboys or we are too pretty to be “dykes” or God wouldn’t approve or we’ll never have children if we hook up with women or we just haven’t met the right man or sometimes, all of the above.

The attempt to erase our lesbian identity broadens as we begin to out ourselves in the world beyond our families. That experience can be harrowing. Many lesbians become substance abusers in an effort to blunt the pain of lesbophobia and the concomitant pressures of the closet or the risk being rejected and despised from even those people we thought respected and loved us, such as friends or co-workers.

Some lesbians attempt suicide. Others attempt heterosexuality. Some transition as FtM only to transition back when they realize they were lesbians and not men, like their trans men friends.

Despite the prevalence of lesbians in heterosexual pornography as titillation for men, society has deemed lesbians best not seen, not heard, not existing. To that end, from our own families to the state, lesbians are being erased.

The literal erasure of lesbians through murder has been, especially over the past decade, statistically on the rise. Lesbians are being killed all over the world just for being lesbians. Even as you read this, the state-sponsored erasure of lesbians–the femicide of lesbians–in nearly half the countries of the world doesn’t even elicit headlines.

Which is a double erasure.

In 79 countries it is illegal to be a lesbian. Illegal to exist. Laws specific to and solely addressing lesbians and gay men are not less in 2015, they are more. In fact, as the West provides superficial acknowledgment of lesbians and gay men, mostly through changes in marriage laws, in other parts of the world harsher penalties for lesbianism and homosexuality are being created and implemented, causing terror for millions.

Not all such crimes against lesbians are state-sponsored. Many are religious and cultural in origin. Honor killings are a weapon against women in a range of Muslim nations and lesbians are among the women threatened by this practice. Even a cursory Internet search turns up dozens of articles on honor killings of lesbians or lesbians fleeing the threat of honor killing. In Gaza, which Al-Jazeera reported last March led the world in honor killings, lesbians attempt to flee into Israel to escape death at the hands of their own families. But honor killing is not just a crime perpetrated against lesbians in the Middle East. In June 2014 a black lesbian couple, Britney Cosby and Crystal Jackson, were murdered in Texas. James Cosby, Britney’s father, was arrested for the killings. The alleged motive was saving his family’s honor from the sin of the couple’s relationship. The couple was survived by their young son.

In South Africa, corrective rape of lesbians has become so common it is now considered pandemic in that country. More than half of all lesbian victims are also murdered. These rapes and killings are often at the hands of gangs and are especially gruesome. One young woman had her intestines ripped out through her cervix. Another was raped with a toilet brush which ruptured her uterus. Eudy Simelane, a lesbian soccer star in South Africa, was gang raped and beaten and stabbed to death. She had more than 100 wounds, even on the soles of her feet. Noxolo Nogwaza was raped and stabbed multiple times with glass shards. Her skull was shattered. Her eyes were reportedly gouged from their sockets.

International rights groups assert there are more than a dozen such rapes each week, though not every lesbian is killed in the process. Pearl Mali reported that when she was 12 years old, she was raped for the first time by an older man that her mother brought home from their church. He raped Pearl in her own bedroom, which he did daily until she was 16. Mali told the New York Times, “My mother didn’t want me to be gay, so she asked him to move in and be my husband. She hoped it would change me,” she said.

It only traumatized her.

Corrective rape has also become commonplace in Jamaica, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Keshema Tulloch, 33, a Jamaican lesbian, was attacked in Kingston last year and then shot by police for attempting to defend herself against the man beating her. She was arrested and charged with attempted murder. No charges were brought against her attacker nor the police officer who shot her but international rights groups are trying to free her.

Maria Barin, from a family originally from Iraqi Kurdistan, was murdered in Lanskrona, in southern Sweden, stabbed to death by her brother in an honor killing because she refused to marry a man to help her family financially.

Lesbians are being stoned to death in Saudi Arabia, burned at the stake in several African nations, beaten to death in India, raped and hanged in Cameroon, raped and set on fire in Nigeria.

The first time a lesbian is reported to law enforcement for lesbianism in Sudan, she is given 1,000 lashes in public. One thousand. The lashings often result in death.

In Russia, lesbians are imprisoned for “defiling” Russian culture where some mysteriously die.

Kygyzstan is implementing a new and highly repressive law aimed at lesbians and gay men which begins with imprisonment. The same thing is happening in Egypt where being a lesbian or gay man is now illegal.

All this violent erasure yet lesbians do not make the news.  There is no “Lesbian Day of Remembrance.” Even the word lesbian is erased from a majority of news outlets which use “gay” as inclusive of gay men as well as lesbians. Among the major websites using this language are even the left-leaning Think Progress.

Violence against lesbians is on the rise, but news reports of it are rare. Last week a young lesbian couple in Ireland, Roisin Prendergast and her girlfriend Ciara Murphy were left bleeding and unconscious following an unprovoked attack in Limerick. The only comments on this crime I saw on Twitter were my own.

Lesbians seem only to become news when we object to our own erasure.

For nearly two years I have been writing about Aderonke Apata, a native Nigerian who has been fighting to remain in the U.K., requesting asylum, because she fears death in her native country. This is a not unreasonable fear, as she has explained to me in several interviews for Curve magazine, because lesbians are killed for being lesbians in Nigeria. And in the 11 years Aderonke has been in the U.K., members of her family have been killed and other lesbians seeking–and denied–asylum have been returned only to die.

Jackie Nanyonjo died in Uganda on 8 March 2013 after being deported from the infamous Yarl’s Wood detention center where Aderonke herself, along with many other lesbians seeking asylum, has been detained. Another Ugandan lesbian, Prossie N, was seriously ill at the time of her deportation in December 2013. Prossie N has been in hiding in Kampala ever since her deportation while activists attempt to get her back to the U.K.

Now it is Aderonke fighting for her life.

On March 3 Aderonke appeared in London’s High Court to challenge the Home Office’s refusal to grant her asylum. As she had explained to me in an interview last year, she was forced to submit what she considered pornographic videotape of her having sex with her fianceé, Happiness Agboro.

But the London Home Office, which has been denying that lesbians are lesbians for decades, has determined that Aderonke can’t be a lesbian because she has had children–like at least a third of all lesbians.

As Aderonke explained to me, the fight to stay in the U.K., which she now considers both her home and the place where she feels safe from persecution, despite the treatment she has received at the hands of the Home Office, has left her physically and mentally fragile. She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress (the circumstances of her fleeing Nigeria where her former partner was killed are harrowing). In 2005 she attempted suicide.

The argument the Home Office is making against Aderonke is that she can’t be both lesbian and heterosexual. But as she explained to me, she has always been a lesbian. Like many women, however, compulsory heterosexuality was imposed on her by the state as well as the culture in which she lived in Nigeria. Which is why she fled.

There will be a ruling by the end of the month on her case at which point, if the Court does not find in her favor, she will be deported to certain death in the place she no longer considers home and which has enacted even more stringent anti-lesbian laws since she fled more than a decade ago.

The outrage I feel over Aderonke’s case–her voice is calm and lilting when she talks, but the frisson of fear is there, understandably–is far from singular. Last week lesbians were arrested in Russia and tossed into jail. Word of their condition has not been forthcoming. Last month a local lesbian activist in my city, Kim Jones, was killed in broad daylight while waiting for a bus. Her killer came up behind her and shot her in the head at point blank range.

I could list case after case after case of horrifying attacks on lesbians and murders of lesbians. But why do I have to? Why must I plead for an end to lesbian erasure and a recognition of our status–or lack of status–in the world?

A recent furore erupted on social media between some lesbians and Owen Jones, a columnist for The Guardian UK. Jones had been opposed to the letter calling for an end to the no-platforming of lesbians that had appeared in The Guardian and been widely discussed and debated on social media and which I previously wrote about here.

Jones had written a column which many objected to in which he basically re-wrote gay and lesbian history to put trans women at the forefront of the Stonewall Rebellion, erasing the  lesbians who were actually at the forefront as well as the gay men, all of whom risked their lives in the days of that battle.

In the volleys that followed on Twitter between U.K. lesbians and straight feminists, the canard that lesbians are transphobic if lesbians don’t consider trans women as sexual partners was tossed into the mix by Jones, who seemed to have blocked every lesbian in the U.K. who has a presence on social media calling each “obsessively transphobic” as he tweeted on the morning of March 4.

On March 3, I witnessed an exchange between him, Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman, a British actress I know and a de-transitioning trans man. The exchange consisted of Jones calling my friend a homophobe and his totally ignoring the comments of the former trans man who actually could speak to the issue of dating gay men as a trans man.

The debate was over whether Jones, a gay man, would perform cunnilingus on a trans man, which, not surprisingly, appalled him as gay men are not sexually interested in women. (Just like lesbians are not sexually interested in men.)

I personally find this whole debate over who gets to play with the bodies of lesbians (and gay men) intrusive and have since it was first raised several years ago as an issue being forced upon lesbians. But perhaps Jones should have considered that fraught history when he told lesbians that if they didn’t accept trans women into their beds, they were transphobic. (And I will note here that there are women and men who are happy to be partnered with trans women and I know several. But that’s not the issue under discussion–lesbian sexual autonomy is the issue.)

When the tables were turned and Jones, as a gay man, was asked to accept trans men into his bed, Jones cried “homophobe” at the lesbians asking him to embrace what he had previously proclaimed was the moral and political duty of all lesbians everywhere to accept. Their autonomy be damned.

Goose/gander, pot/kettle, ultimately, hypocrite. If Jones cringes at the thought of opening the trousers of a bearded trans man to find a vagina, then perhaps he should understand this might be the same response of a lesbian unveiling a penis where she expected  a vagina.

Gay men, while still suffering the very real threats imposed by actual homophobia (which was not what the U.K. lesbians of Twitter have any ability to impose, even if that were their intent, which it is not) are not under any of the same proscriptions as lesbians because they are not female. Oppression is not a contest–despite some wanting to make it so–but from within the confines of the LGBT community, it is beyond offensive to accuse lesbians of anything other than choice for their sexual desires or lack of same.

This is where erasure comes into play.

Lesbian sexual identity and choice is being eroded, erased and elided. This is being done by the literal obliteration of lesbians by state-sponsored violence, by the “corrective rape of lesbians” (imagine the 12 year old Pearl Mali being given the worst sort of reparative therapy by her very own mother), by the harassment and violence, by the firings (lesbians face more job discrimination than any other group within the LGBT alliance), by the enforced and compulsory heterosexuality of every society on earth. Aderonke Apata has been forced, by men, to provide not just spoken testimony and a pending marriage license, but also a sex tape of her having sexual relations with her partner to “prove” her lesbianism to the men who want to erase that aspect of her identity–the very identity that puts her and millions of other lesbians at risk of imprisonment and/or death.

If Jones is crying homophobia at being asked to accept a trans man as male, how is he not transphobic when he insists, as do many, that a lesbian who says she does not want a penis in her bed is transphobic?

Lesbian sexuality should be off limits from men–straight, gay or undecided–under any and all circumstances. It is the one thing–our own beds, our own bodies–that we have been able to keep sacrosanct from an outside world that either tells us we think we are men if we are butch or tells us we really are straight if we are femme and tells us what we can and cannot do with our lives and our loves every second of every day in every place on earth.

When you–be you straight, gay, bi, trans, queer, questioning–tell a lesbian what she should do with her body, you are no different from the presidents and prime ministers who want to wipe lesbians off the face of the earth for choosing women over men, choosing ourselves over what others would have us do.

In February the Lesbian Helpline in Chennai, India, was opened  to offer support and services for lesbians who are nearly invisible in India. The helpline was established following the suicide pact  of two married women from Chennai who set themselves on fire rather than be separated. The Indian Community Welfare Organisation which runs the helpline says many women are still afraid to come out as gay because of the violence they might face from either their families or Indian society.

But increasingly the problem at the helpline is that men are calling looking for the phone numbers of lesbians. For sex.

This is what lesbians face. This is what erasure looks like–the endless effort of men, either deliberately and maliciously, as arbiters of the state, or simply ignorantly, like Jones with his Twitter tirade against all lesbians.

Lesbians are being no-platformed out of our very existence, whether through the insidiousness of silencing or the oppressive demands of compulsory heterosexuality or through violence that at best leaves us shattered and at worst, dead. Lesbians deserve the same level of autonomy as any other group, be it minority or majority. If you aren’t supporting that autonomy, then you are inadvertently or directly a participant in the erasure that is perhaps slowly but very definitely steadily, wiping us off the face of the earth.

**

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer and the author and editor of nearly 30 books. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 SPJ Award for Enterprise Reporting in May 2014. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a columnist and contributing editor for Curve magazine and Lambda Literary Review. Her reporting and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer. Her book, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for cultural&historical fiction. Her novel about violence against women, Ordinary Mayhem, was published in February 2015. Her book on lesbian erasure will be published in 2016. @VABVOX

[your-dietician]

As the Taliban gain ground, how long can the U.S. Embassy in Kabul stand?

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/as-the-taliban-gain-ground-how-long-can-the-u-s-embassy-in-kabul-stand/

As the Taliban gain ground, how long can the U.S. Embassy in Kabul stand?

Some U.S. intelligence estimates reportedly project that the government in Kabul could fall in as little as six months after the U.S. withdrawal, which could be finished in days. On a visit to Washington last month, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his country faces an “1861 moment,” a reference to the dawn of the U.S. Civil War.

“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if it continues on the trajectory it is on,�� Gen. Austin Miller, the commander of the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, warned Tuesday in a news conference. “That should be a concern for the world.”

This time, how long the U.S. keeps its diplomats in Afghanistan is a more complicated question than in the past.

Three decades ago, Americans lost interest in Afghanistan once the occupying Soviet military left, pushed out in part by U.S.-backed militias. Now, there’s a recognition that America can’t ignore a country whose chaos in the 1990s spawned the plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and where more than 2,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives in the 20 years since.

The State Department remains highly risk averse given the U.S. political battles that erupted over the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, but it’s also accustomed to running embassies in violence-ridden places such as Iraq. U.S. officials know that a diplomatic withdrawal from Kabul would send a terrible signal to other countries that have worked alongside Washington to try to stabilize Afghanistan over the past two decades. That includes other members of the NATO military alliance, which is in the latter stages of unconditionally withdrawing roughly 10,000 troops from the country by President Joe Biden’s Sept. 11 deadline.

“This decision is a dynamic — constantly changing,” said Ron Neumann, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. “As long as the Afghans are not losing the war ultimately, there’s a real reluctance to pull out [of] the embassy, because it will trigger a stampede.”

Biden insists that although he’s withdrawing the last U.S. combat troops, America is not abandoning Afghanistan economically or diplomatically, and that it will still fund the Afghan military and help the country on a humanitarian level.

However, once the troop withdrawal is done, the U.S. military mission will shift from training the Afghan security forces to protecting U.S. diplomats and building a new relationship with Kabul, Pentagon officials say.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul at the moment does not have an official ambassador; it is led by Ross Wilson, a veteran U.S. diplomat who carries the title of chargé d’affaires.

Biden plans to leave roughly 650 troops behind to provide security for diplomats at the U.S. Embassy, a facility that has been expanded and fortified significantly since 1989. The embassy compound covers some 36 acres in a central part of the Afghan capital, and it includes a mix of various-sized office and residential buildings, some of which stand out with their yellow and rust-colored exteriors. Access to the site is heavily restricted.

The embassy was placed on “ordered departure” in April, meaning non-essential staff were sent away, but even now roughly 4,000 people work at the facility, including Afghan employees, diplomats and contractors. Roughly 1,400 are Americans, a senior U.S. Embassy official in Kabul said. In recent days, the embassy has faced a major outbreak of Covid-19 that has added to staffers’ difficulties.

The Biden administration also is working on plans to temporarily relocate thousands of Afghan interpreters who worked for the United States to one or more other countries as they await American visas. Those Afghans face threats from the Taliban.

Scott Weinhold, the assistant chief of mission at the embassy, pointed out that many of the people working there are accustomed to operating in difficult conditions.

“I think people in a way are almost redoubled in their energy to try to help partners and the people that they work with, because you see the concern among our Afghan contacts, and especially a lot of our women contacts, about what’s coming,” he said. “People are really focused on how do we help them, how do we try to assist the key people that may be at risk.”

Every U.S. embassy is supposed to have an Emergency Action Plan, which typically contain a set of “decision points” that lay out scenarios in which U.S. officials should consider moves to increase protection of America’s diplomats.

POLITICO obtained a version of the Kabul embassy’s decision points that appears to be about three years old; the current ones are classified. The decision points seen by POLITICO nonetheless remain relevant to conditions today, covering an array of dangerous situations, both man-made and natural.

Some are relatively obvious, such as “a terrorist attack within Kabul or the surrounding environs and/or violent confrontations that threaten the security perimeter of the Embassy” — risks that the diplomatic mission has prepared for and faced for a long time.

Others, though, lay out conditions likely to arise or be exacerbated in the event of a civil war or a Taliban strangulation of Kabul.

For instance, one decision point comes if there are “anticipated long-term or actual disruption of utilities, fuel, water, goods, and services (including means of communications), which eliminates [the embassy’s] ability to maintain safe and healthy conditions for staff.”

Another comes if “the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorates such that security forces in Kabul are diminished or otherwise unavailable, weakening the host government’s ability to respond to … requests for security support.”

Some of the decision points POLITICO viewed seem downright prescient. One warns of “an outbreak of disease with pandemic potential” as a scenario for which to prepare.

Just because a situation described by a decision point becomes a reality, it does not mean that U.S. diplomats will be sent home or that the embassy will be shut down. Not even the collapse of the Afghan government would necessarily trigger an embassy closure. But top embassy officials are expected to use moments described by the decision points to evaluate the overall situation and take mitigating measures. Those can include everything from reducing staff to holding a town hall for employees.

James Cunningham, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2012 to 2014, recalls how one day a rocket flew into a room above him at the embassy. He downplays it now: “It was only one rocket, and it didn’t do anything except burn up some old computers.” The embassy was in lockdown but resumed business after the attack ended, he said.

Cunningham also cautioned against assuming that the Taliban will immediately try to seize Kabul and overthrow the Afghan government once U.S. troops are gone.

“They may well decide it’s not in their interest to do that,” Cunningham said, noting that’s especially the case if the militant group wants to “have a relationship with the international community.” Besides, he added, many Afghans resent the Taliban and will fight against their return to power.

According to the embassy’s Emergency Action Plan, one key decision point comes if “ground and/or air access” to the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul is “disrupted and/or commercial flights become limited or stopped.”

If the airport cannot be secured, a major point of access to the land-locked country by diplomats, contractors and aid groups could be cut off. The U.S. military on Friday quietly handed over Bagram air base to the Afghan security forces, eliminating most of the U.S. ability to provide air support to and leaving the coalition headquarters at Kabul as the only remaining U.S. military presence in the country.

Officials are still working out the details of a potential security arrangement between the United States and Turkey for the Hamid Karzai International Airport, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday.

Under the agreement, Turkish forces, which currently number about 600, would remain in place to secure the Kabul airport. However, the negotiations are complicated by tensions between Washington and Ankara over issues such as the U.S. support to the Syrian Kurds and Turkey’s purchase of Russian antiaircraft systems.

Turkey is looking for other nations to contribute forces to the mission to secure the airport. A few hundred American troops will reportedly remain temporarily to help Turkish forces provide security.

Taliban fighters have made significant gains in recent weeks, overrunning the demoralized Afghan security forces in many areas, often without a fight. Surrendering Afghan forces have abandoned large caches of U.S.-supplied weapons, including ammunition and armored Humvees, as well as night-vision devices and other equipment, according to an analysis by Bill Roggio, editor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal.

Since Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the Taliban have taken over 80 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts, and now control 157, according to Roggio. Many of the gains are in Afghanistan’s north, threatening multiple provincial capitals. The Taliban have historically been strongest in Afghanistan’s south.

In the years since 1989, the United States has waxed and waned when it comes to the risks it is willing to take with its diplomats.

The United States reestablished an embassy in Baghdad in 2004, more than a year after invading Iraq and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. As in Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — which is now a massive compound roughly the size of Vatican City — has faced constant security threats, particularly in the chaotic years after the invasion. In early 2005, two Americans died when insurgents successfully targeted the embassy with a rocket.

Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States shut down its consulate in the Iraqi city of Basra, citing Iranian security threats. It warned it might close the embassy last year, too, unless the Iraqi government did more to fend off rocket attacks targeting the facility. But the embassy has stayed open.

One incident likely to have factored into the Trump-era moves was the 2012 death of four Americans, including Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, in an attack by militants in the city of Benghazi. That tragedy became political fodder for Republican attacks on Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of State and expected to run for president.

The political fighting over Benghazi rattled the State Department; it’s one of, though not the only, reason many U.S. diplomats today operate in strict, almost isolated conditions in certain countries considered hardship posts, veterans of the Foreign Service say. (U.S. diplomats assigned to Libya work out of Tunisia.) There have been calls in recent years, including from lawmakers, to reverse that bunker mentality.

When it comes to Afghanistan, a collapse of the government may take longer than observers expect.

Three decades ago, the Soviet-backed Afghan government, led by Mohammad Najibullah, held out for a few years after the Soviet military withdrawal, thanks in large part to continued economic and military aid from Moscow. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant an end to that assistance, and Najibullah was out of power by April 1992.

Afghan rebel groups, however, fought one another, bringing about years of chaos that largely ended when the ultraconservative Islamists of the Taliban managed to take over much of the country.

The Taliban in 1996 tracked down Najibullah, who had been in staying in a U.N. compound in Kabul. They killed him and hung his beaten body from a traffic control tower near the presidential palace, a warning to Afghans and foreigners of the dark days to come.

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[scotianostra]

Happy 58th Birthday, singer and actress Lorraine McIntosh born 13th May 1964 in Glasgow.

Lorraine was brought up in Cumnock, Ayrshire from about the age of three.  She has been a member of one of Scotland’s favourite bands Deacon Blue since they formed in Glasgow in 1985.

Lorraine didn’t have an easy upbringing, she lost her mother and she said her Dad coped for a while then fell apart, hitting the bottle he started missing rent payments which led to them being evicted, she said the council waited until she had turned 18, a week after that the were out. In an interview for The Big Issue Lorraine poured her heart out saying………..

“I got a phone call from a social worker saying I wasn’t to go home, as dad had been evicted. I was at the bus stop with my friend, but couldn’t get on the bus. She phoned her mum and I ended up staying with them at first.  No clothes, no nothing. We lost everything. It just got put in the street. And the saddest thing was I lost all my mum’s things, her clothes, wee bits of jewellery, all put on the street. Gone.”

I empathise with this entirely except I actually got home from school and found all our belongings on the street after we got evicted, I was 13 at the time………..

Lorraine was a regular on the Scottish soap, River City, she has also appeared in three  episodes of Taggart  playing different roles, more recently she turned up on Outlander last year as Mrs. Sylvie, the owner of a popular brothel in the town of Cross Creek. Also last year  Deacon Blue’s 10th album, City Of Love, shot to No 4 in the UK album rankings the week before lockdown, giving the Glasgow outfit their biggest chart success since 1994.

During the pandemic, as well as coping with the strain of lockdown, Lorraine, who lives with Ricky in Glasgow, was taken ill with coronavirus in the early stages of the outbreak.

She said: “It has taken quite a while to get over it completely. I was in bed for three weeks, and then recovered.”

In 2020 Lorraine joined up with the Simon Community’s Nightstop campaign, to encourage people to open their homes to vulnerable young people. The Nightstop service offers young people aged 16 to 25 a safe place to stay when they find themselves in a crisis. All the volunteer hosts are fully vetted and trained. Since starting in Glasgow last year, eight families have provided 96 nights of emergency accommodation. She and her husband, Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross, are considering signing up as hosts – but only if the Simon Community think that their high profile won’t get in the way.

I really like Lorraine, and Ricky’s humanity,  specifically Lorraine visited Rwanda  two years ago to raise awareness of sexual violence against women when she was moved to tears by the testimony of victims. She has recently spoken out against the plan to send refugees coming to the UK to the country and  said the country was still recovering from a genocide inflicted during the civil war in 1994 and for ministers to consider sending asylum seekers there is deplorable.

On her trip, she heard of shocking conditions, including child slavery, youngsters being burned to death, and rape being used as a weapon of war to destroy communities.

On her final day in Rwanda, she made a pilgrimage to one of the most infamous genocide sites in the country called Nyamata where thousands were slaughtered in and around a church.

She said: “I was unprepared for the sight of thousands of items of clothing from the fallen folded and piled up on the church pews. The ceiling pockmarked with bullets and a line around the bottom of the wall which our guide tells us is the blood line from the carnage. A river of blood. In the gardens outside 50,000 people lie buried.

On the music front, Deacon Blue recently played The Hydro in Glasgow to a sell out audience. The band released their tenth studio album entitled Riding on the Tide of Love in February this year, they next play in Scotland on July 9th on Edinburgh Castle Esplanade, they have other gigs before and after this throughout Europe. 

[orbemnews]

These Asian American health care workers are fighting two viruses: Covid and hate Among them are countless Asian American medical professionals, serving as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians and more. But as they work around the clock to stop the virus from spreading, many are having to confront another danger: hate. Here is what Asian American health care workers have to say about what it feels like fighting two viruses at once: Kathleen Begonia Kathleen Begonia, 34, is a Filipino American registered nurse and a specialists in nursing informatics in Floral Park, New York. She said the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes makes her feel unsafe. Begonia has stopped taking public transportation and carries pepper spray and a personal alarm everywhere she goes. “I actually signed up to take self-defense classes because I still carry my childhood experiences of racism with me,” Begonia told CNN. “I don’t trust that anyone else can take care of me, not even police, so I make sure that I can defend myself. I run every day and keep fit in case I need to defend myself.” Begonia said she’s experienced racism all of her life. As a child, she noticed people would yell racial slurs at her family and throw garbage on their lawn. Someone even ignited fireworks in their mailbox, she said. Begonia and her parents are all nurses working on the front lines of the pandemic. She said they treat all patients without regard to race, religion or beliefs. She’s disheartened that not everyone feels the same. “Thinking about how we are nurses taking care of anyone who comes into the hospital — it can be infuriating. The very people who insult us in public can also become vulnerable themselves and require our care,” Begonia said. “So, when I see people hurting the Asian American community, it saddens me because we are also your health care providers.” David Wu David Wu, 56, is a Chinese American and the executive director of the Pui Tak Center in Chicago, Illinois. Among his many duties, Wu assists with Covid-19 testing and vaccination distribution within the Chinatown community, which was hit particularly hard due to ignorance and xenophobia. “Businesses in Chinatown was significantly slowing down because people thought it would be the first place where the virus would appear,” Wu said. “We wanted to give employees from Chinatown who were laid off and stressed out a place in their community, a place they can trust, where they can get a vaccine.” For some Chinese Americans, it can be scary trying to get vaccinated outside of the Chinatown community, where hateful people could target them, Wu said. So far, Wu and the Pui Tak Center have distributed more than 2,500 vaccine doses to city residents, he said. And while community members are grateful, he knows many are hurting and living in fear. “A lot of the time Asians don’t want to make a big deal or draw attention to themselves, but we want people to know they can share their stories and the challenges they faced,” he said. “Voicing the struggles of being Asian in this country is the first step.” Atsuko Koyama Atsuko Koyama is a Japanese American emergency medicine physician in Phoenix, Arizona. She has spent much of the last year treating children with Covid-19, some of whom lost parents to the virus. All the while she has been concerned about the rise in anti-Asian crimes. “It’s sad this is our life,” Koyama told CNN. “I have Asian friends in health care who work in San Francisco and New York who are stressed about going to work and friends who are on heightened awareness in their daily lives. It’s a stressful way to live.” Koyama said she’s faced discrimination and bias throughout her career — even in subtle ways, like being asked to use a nickname instead of her full name. “Being an Asian American woman especially can be difficult,” Koyama said. “Throughout American history, Asian women have been bought to the US and trafficked for sex, contributing to the fetishization of women in our community. There’s a long history of it and it really affects the way people see us as Asian women.” Along with a rise in hate crimes, police brutality and Covid-19 mortality which disproportionately impacts the Black community “inspired and moved” her to become more involved in in anti-racism education in her field, she said. She’s been teaching colleagues about systemic racism against Asian Americans and other communities of color. “All Asian people are unique, we bring our own histories, our family histories, our personal histories, and our talents to the communities where we live and work,” Koyama said. “It’s also imperative we don’t erase other people’s stories while highlighting our own struggles. We need to be listening and uplifting one another in our communities so in the end, we’re all benefiting.” George Liu George Liu is a Chinese American internist and endocrinologist in New York City, as well as the president of the Chinese American Independent Practice Association (CAIPA). Liu has been working tirelessly to ensure the city’s Asian American communities receive equal medical treatment throughout the pandemic. Through his work with CAIPA, he helped establish a mobile center that tested more than 3,000 people in Brooklyn, Flushing, Chinatown, and Elmhurst for Covid-19. CAIPA says it was the city’s first mobile testing center for the virus. CAIPA also donated personal protective equipment to 55 hospitals and nursing homes throughout New York, and established a food pantry in Chinatown, where 500 families receive food twice a month. Liu has done his best to counter the hate targeting Asian Americans. In April, he led a group of more than 100 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals at a Stop Asian Hate rally in Foley Square. More than 20,000 people attended the event, he said. “We’ve been discriminated against for years, since the 1800’s and far before the coronavirus, although it definitely has made it worse,” Liu told CNN. “These situations cannot be tolerated. We are all human beings doing our best to support our country and our community, and we deserve respect.” Cherry Wongtrakool Cherry Wongtrakool, 50, is a Thai American pulmonary critical care physician in Atlanta, Georgia. She said it has been “incredibly difficult” to witness all the violence against Asian Americans. It became even harder, she added, when former President Donald Trump began using such terms as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” which seemingly blamed Asians for the pandemic. “It was demoralizing to see politicians and media outlets talk about the ‘Kung flu’ and spread misinformation when health care workers were overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients in the hospital and trying to do their best for the patients,” Wongtrakool told CNN. “That divisive speech and misinformation was harmful and continues to be harmful the more it is perpetuated.” Wongtrakool said she’s come to expect micro aggression from patients — some assume she doesn’t speak English or isn’t actually American — but the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes has been “horrifying.” “I used to not have to worry about this, even in this diverse, multicultural city I have moments where I pause and rethink what I’m doing and where I’m going,” she said Kathy Wu Kathy Wu, 44, is a Chinese American nurse practitioner at an out-patient oncology center in New York. She volunteered to work with Covid-19 patients during the pandemic. Many hospitals redeployed staff after experiencing a surge in cases. Wu chose to help by testing people for the virus and treating patients in need of supportive care like intravenous hydration. “It was a scary time but a rewarding time as well. I don’t think any one of us when we were in school and in training ever expected to be part of a pandemic crisis,” Wu told CNN. “The 7 p.m. clap for frontline workers every night brought out so many conflicting feelings for me. I felt simultaneously uplifted but burdened as well, as I felt the weight of the pandemic squarely on our shoulders.” That’s not the only burden Wu felt. Following a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, she began to worry for her safety. “I had a sinking feeling as soon as I heard President Trump utter the words “Chinese virus,” Wu said. “I was scared about what that meant for us Asian Americans. I braced myself for the uptick in anti-Asian violence.” “I’m exhausted already from working the past year dealing with the repercussions of Covid, and now I have to watch my back constantly because we’re being used as scapegoats for a virus that had nothing to do with us?” Wu has started carrying a tactical flashlight to help her fend off an attacker. “It should not be like this,” she said. Charlton Rhee Charlton Rhee is a Korean American nursing home administrator in Flushing, a predominately Asian American community in Queens, New York. Rhee manages the Covid-19 units at Union Plaza Care Center, where he distributes personal protective equipment and facilitates FaceTime meetings for families with loved ones in quarantine. Rhee lost both his parents — his only family — to the coronavirus. “What was surreal was after providing FaceTime for families, I myself had to FaceTime with a concierge on the Covid unit at the hospital to say goodbye to my mother. I was not allowed to be with her, and she passed alone,” he said. Rhee saw many people die from the virus and experienced an enormous amount of heartache. But the hate he experienced as an Asian American made it worse, he said. “It was brutal. I cried every night,” he said. “On top of the effects of the pandemic, I have to be super careful if I venture out to go shopping or consider twice before taking public transportation because for some reason, I am a target.” As a lifelong New Yorker, Rhee said he’s “mortified” by the “blatant hatred” directed at Asians because of the pandemic. “Asian Americans are your neighbors, we are your coworkers, we are business owners, teachers, doctors, veterans, lawyers. We are your church, mosque, temple members,” Rhee said. “We are exhausted fighting Covid every single day and we are a part of your community, not outside of it. We are all Americans, and only together, can we get through this pandemic.” Source link Orbem News #American #Asian #care #Covid #fighting #hate #Health #TheseAsianAmericanhealthcareworkersarefightingtwoviruses:Covidandhate-CNN #us #viruses #Workers

[dipulb3]

The number of Black women mayors leading major cities to reach historic high. Here is why they are winning

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/the-number-of-black-women-mayors-leading-major-cities-to-reach-historic-high-here-is-why-they-are-winning/

The number of Black women mayors leading major cities to reach historic high. Here is why they are winning

Her victory came just two weeks after Kim Janey was appointed Boston’s first Black female mayor following the resignation of Marty Walsh, who is now the US Labor Secretary. Janey recently announced she would run for a full term in this year’s mayoral election.

With the ascension of Jones and Janey, there will be a historic high of nine Black women serving as mayors of the nation’s 100 largest cities. Other major cities led by Black women include Atlanta, San Francisco; Chicago; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; New Orleans; Washington, DC; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Political observers say the growing number of Black female mayors signals they are gaining electoral strength and appealing to voters in races that have been historically won by White men. They say Black women have proven they are relatable with an ability to lead, organize and engage new voters. Black women are also speaking out against the racial disparities in their communities at a time when the nation is having to reckon with systemic racism and police violence against Black people.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, said as more Black women rise to political power, the electorate is seeing the importance of having diverse voices making decisions.

“Black and brown women are running with a message that is a totality of their life experiences, which transcends race or gender,” Peeler-Allen said. “And there are people who are saying ‘she may not look like me but I know we share the same experience, because she is wrestling with credit card debt, or she has a family member with addiction or she’s a small business owner, she’s a veteran.'”

Peeler-Allen said she believes the advancement of Black women in all levels of government could also be inspiring more to run for office.

In the last few years, Kamala Harris became the first Black female vice president, Ayanna Pressley became Massachusetts’ first Black woman elected to Congress, and Tish James was elected New York’s first Black female attorney general.

Stacey Abrams narrowly lost her bid to become the nation’s first Black woman governor in 2018, but is now a powerful advocate for voting rights for people of color. Some political analysts view Abrams as a viable candidate for Georgia’s gubernatorial election in 2022.

Creating equity in St. Louis

Both Jones and Janey have vowed to make racial equity a priority while reflecting on their own lived experiences as Black women.

Jones said during her victory speech that she would not stay silent or ignore the racism that has held St. Louis back.

She told Appradab she wants to address the exodus of Black residents in recent years and why they don’t feel welcome in St. Louis. The city’s Black population dropped from 51% to 45% in the last 10 years.

Jones said she wants to revitalize the northern part of the city where she grew up because the neighborhoods have been neglected.

“I am ready for St. Louis to thrive instead of just survive,” Jones said on Appradab “New Day” earlier this month. “We need to provide opportunities for everyone to succeed, no matter their zip code, the color of their skin, who they love or how they worship.”

Kayla Reed, executive director of the grassroots racial justice group St. Louis Action, said she believes Jones can relate to the plight of Black people in St. Louis because of her lived experience as a single mother from a marginalized neighborhood.

The city, Reed said, struggles with segregation, disparities in education, employment and housing, overpolicing and violence in the Black community.

Reed said Jones has embraced the demands of a racial justice movement that started in 2014 when unrest broke out in nearby Ferguson following the police killing of Michael Brown. Ferguson elected its first Black woman mayor Ella Jones last year.

Jones is listening to the concerns of organizers and giving them a seat at the table, Reed said.

“She understands the unique inequality that our communities face,” said Reed, who campaigned for Jones and sits on her transition team. “And it gives her an advantage to think through creative, innovative solutions to shift outcomes and conditions.”

Breaking the ‘steel wall’ in Boston

In Boston, Janey has promised to answer the call for equity in a city with a reputation of being racist.

Boston struggles with an enormous wealth gap, unequal economic opportunity, neighborhoods that are segregated along racial lines and disparities in access to education.

The median net worth for White families is nearly $250,000 compared to just $8 for Black families, according to a 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

There is also a racial disparity in city contract awards, with a recent study showing that only 1.2% go to Black and Latino-owned businesses. Black and Latino workers also face higher unemployment rates than White workers in Boston.

Janey wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed that she will tackle these inequities with new policies and creative solutions.

She also reflected her experience with racism as a child on the frontlines of school desegregation in the 1970s. Janey said rocks and sticks were thrown at her bus while people yelled racial slurs.

Janey told Appradab that she believes there is an added burden to being the first woman and the first Black person to serve as mayor of Boston.

“I know there is a perception and a reputation that Boston has, but I think what is important is that the reality and the opportunities that we create for residents here is one that is focused on equity, on justice, on love and ensuring that there is shared prosperity in our city and shared opportunities,” Janey told Appradab’s Abby Phillip. “It’s not to say that we’ve solved everything when it comes to racism, but I think we have come a long way.”

Tanisha Sullivan, president of the Boston NAACP, said civil rights leaders have spent decades advocating for diversity in city leadership.

Black people have been able to win seats on city council and Rachael Rollins was elected the first Black female district attorney of Suffolk County in 2018. However, Black Bostonians have hit a “steel wall” with the mayor’s office before now, Sullivan said.

“There has been more of a concerted effort and focus on breaking through with the belief that having more diversity in that office leading the way would result in public policy that was intentional about racial equity and so many other quality of life measures that would be good for our city as a whole,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said racial justice advocates are now hoping Janey will create momentum around electing a woman of color as mayor in November.

There are two Black women — Janey and Andrea Campbell — and one Asian woman, Michelle Wu, running for mayor.

Sullivan said it is past time for a Black woman to win the mayor’s office in Boston.

“We have for generations now been the engine behind the ascension of so many others to political office,” Sullivan said. “It has been our strategy, it has been our sweat equity, it has been the soles of our shoes that been worn out for others. It is not only our time, we have earned our spot.”

Black women mayors are a force

Jones and Janey are joining the tide of Black women mayors who have emerged onto the national stage in recent years.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed gained national attention when she was one of the first to lock down her city when the Covid-19 pandemic hit US soil last year.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was one of the top contenders to be President Joe Biden’s running mate. She was also lauded for her assertive response to protesters looting in city streets during uprisings last summer and speaking out against Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to lift Covid-19 restrictions last spring.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has made headlines for defending her city and standing up to sharp criticism from former President Donald Trump who threatened to send in federal law enforcement officers to fight violent crime there.

Black women in New York are also hoping to join the short list of Black female mayors making history.

Both Maya Wiley and Dianne Morales, who identifies as an Afro-Latina, are vying to become the first Black woman to lead the nation’s largest city.

Wiley has garnered the support of Black female celebrities including Gabrielle Union and Tichina Arnold. Rep. Yvette Clarke announced earlier this month that she was endorsing Wiley.

Some activists say the success of Black women in mayoral offices is creating a pipeline for them to run for state and national office in the future.

“We still have not had a Black woman governor, we still have not had a Black woman who has been speaker of the house, there is not a Black woman now in the US Senate,” Reed said. “So, there are gaps, but I’m confident that with the election on the local level, not only are we changing things but we are building a pipeline to answer those questions.”

[patriotforthekingdom]

...Shall Not Be Infringed

The second amendment to the constitution is phrased in a way that shouldn’t lead to any questions about it. It reads “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Shall. Not. Be. Infringed. 

Our founding fathers knew a little bit about tyranny and oppression, and that is why the very first two amendments to the constitution specifically spell out arguably our two most important freedoms…first: our right to free speech and second: our right to bear arms. As the saying goes, “we have the second amendment so we can defend our first amendment.” 

So why is the left constantly trying to question and remove our right to bear arms? Or in other words, why is the left constantly trying to infringe? 

Control. 

It’t that simple. 

If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that politicians on the left (and a large handful on the right) will do whatever it takes to gain even just a little bit more control over you. And they won’t stop there. Once they get that little bit of control, they will keep pushing and pushing just to see how far they can go. You are simply a pawn of their agenda and a statistic ready to be manipulated. 

Under the Obama administration, mass shootings shot up 246.7% higher than previously under the Bush administration (thegatewaypundit.com). They spent those 8 years of shootings, alongside the MSM, laying the groundwork for disarming all Americans. They thought they were in for an easy transition from Obama to Clinton, and could simply finish the job over the next 8 years. Well, as we know, they faced an obstacle to that plan in Donald Trump. 

After 4 years of relatively no media coverage on mass shootings, outside of Las Vegas, Biden is now in… and they are right back at it. 

Last week alone was nonstop MSM coverage of a shooting in Atlanta simply because the timing was right, and it fit the narrative. Don’t get me wrong, this was a horrific act committed by someone who is absolutely insane or possessed, and I have been and will continue to be praying for the families of those who were unfairly taken far too soon. But I will also be praying for the families of the 15 people who were shot the same week in another mass shooting in Chicago that went completely unreported on. Unfortunately this shooting was chalked up to gang violence which we are programmed to think is normal, frequent and unpreventable. 

However, the first shooting was seemingly a perfect fit for the MSM narrative: a white male shoots 8 women, 6 of which happen to be an ethnic minority. The MSM didn’t waste any time pushing this as anti-asian violence and somehow blaming this and any other anti-asian violence on Trump. 

Check out a few of the quotes and headlines…

Apnews.com opening line: “A white gunman was charged Wednesday with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community, which has increasingly been targeted during the coronavirus pandemic.” 

Nytimes.com headline: “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias”

Washingtonpost.com quote: “Six Asian women died in the attacks on Tuesday, prompting widespread concern that the killings could be the latest in a surge of hate crimes against Asian Americans.” 

In addition to these and many other MSM outlets covering this story nonstop, many politicians jumped into the conversation as well, including Crooked Hillary herself who tweeted, “I’m sending prayers today to the families of the people killed and those injured in Atlanta’s horrific attacks. The surge in violence against Asian Americans over the last year is a growing crisis. We need action from our leaders and within our communities to stop the hate.” Since the shooting, 4 of her 6 tweets have been pushing the #StopAsianHate narrative. 

Well, how are they going to #StopAsianHate? Control. And how are they going to take control? Disarming Americans. 

The shooter himself claimed that the shooting was not racially motivated, and the FBI, after investigating, determined the same exact thing. Oddly enough, this didn’t make any of the headlines, nor did it stop the MSM from writing about this being a racially motivated shooting. “Ironically,” the senate is due to vote on Joe Biden’s unconstitutional and far left gun control bill that he is persistent on passing. 

Is it making sense now? 

The politicians are trying to take away your freedoms. They don’t care who or what they use to do so. This time it’s guns. They are going to be voting shortly on taking away your guns, so before they do that, they have to remind you that guns are bad and scary. 

Well, Thomas Jefferson knew that the day would come when politicians would try to disarm Americans by convincing them that guns are bad and scary. He had this to say, “The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man” (buckeyefirearms.org). 

Strict gun laws don’t stop bad guys from getting guns. They stop the good guys from getting guns to defend themselves and others, leaving everyone in a far more susceptible position. 

What would’ve happened in Atlanta if one of those women shot were carrying a firearm? Could the first victim have defended herself and stopped hers and the other murders from even happening? Possibly. 

In Joe Biden’s America, we shouldn’t have the right to defend ourselves. These women who were murdered should not have had the right to defend themselves. The shooter should have known that he was not going to be able to be stopped until he decided to stop. The shooter should have known that whoever he wanted to shoot would not be able to defend themselves. 

Well, what does the Bible say about gun control? Not-so-surprisingly, nothing. However, the Bible does say that every man was assumed to have a personal sword, the gun-equivalent back in the day. Jesus himself said in Luke 22, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.” 

So, knowing Jesus supports ownership of weapons for self-defense, what about acts of self-defense? Well, Exodus 22:2 says, “If a thief is caught in the act of breaking into a house and is struck and killed in the process, the person who killed the thief is not guilty of murder.” It continues in verse 3 to say, “But if it happens in daylight, the one who killed the thief is guilty of murder.” This tells us that it is not ok to kill someone simply because they break into your house. Pastor Tom Tell says about this passage, “In the dark, it is impossible to see and know for certain what someone is up to; whether an intruder has come to steal, inflict harm, or to kill, is unknown at the time. In the daylight, things are clearer. We can see if a thief has come just to swipe a loaf of bread through an open window, or if an intruder has come with more violent intentions.” 

Ultimately, the Bible tells us that the right to bear arms is acceptable (if not suggested to do so), and the right to defend yourself is promoted. Deadly force should be the last resort for a christian (and also taught in basic gun training), but if necessary to do so in self-defense, it is permit-able. 

As a christian, the right to bear arms is a freedom granted to us by the Bible. And as an American, the right to bear arms is a freedom granted to us by the Constitution. 

The left is steadfast on removing this right from us, this is not a time to be silent. 

We must build up an army of patriots for the kingdom. 

BONUS BLOG!

I wrote “…Shall Not Be Infringed” (above) before the most recent shooting in Boulder, CO on Monday. I couldn’t post this without addressing a few quick thoughts that came to my mind…

You can see just how quickly the left is moving to infringe on your right to bear arms. They want complete and utter control. 

They want you afraid!

Afraid of guns. 

Afraid of terrorists. 

Afraid of white males. 

Afraid of Trump.

Afraid of conservatives. 

Afraid of anything that they feel is a threat to their control. 

And they are using the MSM propaganda to make you afraid. 

The MSM was eager to blame this shooting on a white male as the yahoo news story says, “a partially clothed white male was seen being led away from the scene.” When in reality, the shooter was identified later as Ahmad al-Issa…a devout, anti-Trump, Muslim. 

Joe Biden also wasted no time using this shooting as a way to blame guns by calling for an “assault weapons ban” and a “ban on high capacity magazines.” Want to know something funny? Colorado already has a high capacity magazine ban. So Joe, did it help? Did that stop the bad guy from getting a gun with a high capacity magazine? 

We as a people need to open our eyes to this madness the left is pushing us into. It is leading us into complete and utter destruction. 

[politicaltheatre]

To Heal

And just like that, Joe Biden is president.

For all of the talk about “transition”, the moment he was sworn in, at long, precarious last, was everything. It made the election concrete, if not entirely in the eyes of enough Americans something set in stone.

Still, Biden’s journey from local Delaware politician to the Oval Office took him almost fifty years, an era that with the benefit of time and distance will be known both for its advances in technology and social equality as well as its exponentially widening imbalances of wealth and power. Biden’s career has covered the length of it, and, for better or worse, he will now be remembered as one of its central figures.

It wasn’t always so obvious that he would be. Looking back just to the end of the 20th century, he was entirely forgettable, a senator who had done little that anyone noticed, and what they did did little to impress. His best work, in that it achieved results, was done behind the scenes, working the backrooms and corridors of the Senate and House to get things done.

In that way, Joe Biden most resembles Lyndon Johnson when he served Texas in the House and then the Senate. Johnson, too, served as Vice President to a young and green president who, like Barack Obama, had only served part of his first term in the Senate before winning the presidency.

Johnson had a notoriously bad relationship with Kennedy, but his relationships in Congress helped Kennedy and then himself in getting civil rights legislation passed despite resistance from its racist members. However, those close, chummy relationships also hampered him in pushing that legislation as far as it needed, and still needs, to go.

When we look at the 1960s, we tend to think of the Space Age and going to the moon as the big, presidential achievements, downplaying things like civil rights, Medicare, and Medicaid, and that’s understandable. It was the peak of the Cold War, and money was spent where it would hurt our adversaries the most.

As much fun as it may have been to beat the Soviets to the moon - and creating technology that shapes our lives today -  this also had the effect of spending billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives (not to mention millions of Southeast Asian lives) in a catastrophic war in and around Vietnam.

Still, in those two things we were united as never before, excited and then indifferent as we followed the space program, and blindly patriotic and then angrily disillusioned as we followed Johnson’s war.

It wasn’t really his war, though. It was Eisenhower and Kennedy’s before him and Nixon’s after, and each of them had bipartisan support throughout, men and women elected to represent the best interest of their constituents. They all failed.

So, unity is important, and at a time such as this we should grateful to have a president putting that ideal out front as the core goal of his first, and possibly only, four years, but despite President Biden’s clear desire for us to come together and achieve, as he called it in his inaugural speech, “the most elusive of all things in a democracy”, unity as an end cannot be allowed to justify the means it takes to get there, not when the easiest way is simply to forget what has divided us so bitterly and so dangerously.

We would do better to heed these words from his previous speech, the one he as President-Elect gave just the night before: “To heal, we must remember. It’s hard sometimes to remember, but that’s how we heal.”

For us to remember what was done in the past four years and in the decades that led us to the riot on January 6th, we must not fear embarrassing those responsible or hurting the feelings of those with the power to stand in the way of remembering, not if our goal truly is to heal.

We must feel free to talk about it. We must feel free to call out those who seek to bury the past and their own accountability with it. We must feel free to challenge them when they, with the same depraved indifference that has led us to the public health and economic crises we now face, seek to keep us on the same path that led us here.

That’s the trouble with President Biden’s calls for “unity”. If he and his Democratic allies in Congress are the only ones actually willing to compromise, which was the case during the Obama administration, not only will he not be able to achieve more than getting us only partially back to where we were before Trump, he will not be able to prevent even worse from being done once he, too, is gone.

Biden will surely be tempted to restore America to what is was, perhaps even to that ideal of the “American Experiment”, and consider that a success. Congressional Republicans, however, will be looking to hold onto what they gained for themselves and their benefactors in the past four years, all of it, and will do everything in their reduced power to stand in Biden’s way.

It’s only been a day, but Trump’s minions have shown every intention of continuing on as they have been. In Congress, Republicans have already shown signs that they have every intention of using the same playbook against Biden that they used against Obama. Already, cabinet nominations are being blocked by Republicans hoping to gain leverage, and any notion of power sharing in the split Senate comes only with higher and higher price tags the longer negotiations drag on.

Make no mistake, now-former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s seeming repudiation of Donald Trump and his Capitol-attacking goon squad is not a sign of seeing the light and salvation of Unity. Rather, it signals something more significant: Donald Trump has served his purpose and now, in McConnell’s eyes, may be disposed of.

That’s who Mitch McConnell is. That is how he thinks. He uses people then throws them away. That, in his eyes, is what they’re for. That’s how he sees the world. He believes, or wants to believe, that we all think that same way, too.

This is the part of the right wing that strivers like Donald Trump never really understand, and that in no small way is why they all end the way they do. That Trump was popular and influential made him useful; now that Trump is neither, just a has-been, wannabe autocrat facing lawsuits and criminal charges, he’s a liability, useful only for one thing and that is being seen to be ostracized.

Odds are, McConnell stopped taking Trump’s calls weeks ago. He would have done well in Hollywood. Like Hollywood, Washington only ever changes when faced with scandal, and those brought down are only ever the ones who can no longer deliver profits. Its stars rise and fall in the same way. It’s the money they can make for you that counts.

McConnell has succeeded in politics because the culture of our politics rewards that same way of thinking. He is ruthless and calculating, which you and I may hate but which many in Washington and in his party in particular love.

That said, it can be defeated. Well, it can be mitigated. It won’t go away entirely. It will always be part of us. That, however, does mean we cannot teach ourselves the necessary lessons that will save us now and help us avoid repeating the same mistakes and falling into the same patterns that have led us so close to disaster.

For us heal, our health as a people and as a democracy cannot and must not be measured by our ability, pushed by so many Congressional Republicans in the past two weeks, simply to set what went wrong behind us and “move on”. We cannot allow that to be enough. If we merely close and bandage our wounds, so to speak, and attempt to move on, those wounds will fester and the infection will continue to spread.

If it seems wrong to compare all of this to a disease in the middle of a pandemic, it isn’t. The misinformation, divisiveness, and violence that were exploited on January 6th spread virally, yes? Politicians and business leaders have been profiting from that viral spread for years, yes?

We must think of this in those terms, so that we may recognize and understand what it was that has harmed us and, at its worst, threatened our survival. It still does, both literally and figuratively. What we learn we may spread the same way, though for less profit. Those lessons will be like cultural antibodies that, if we succeed, we may pass down to protect future generations.

If, then, we follow President-Elect Biden’s advice to remember and we resist attempts by McConnell and others to move on in order to forget, we stand a chance. That means calling these “dead-ender” attempts out for what they are and challenging them openly. If not, they will persist. Allowed to persist, they will thrive.

Take, for example, Georgia Representative Madison Cawthorn. At the tender age of 25, he has the name, good looks, and story of overcoming adversity to go far in national politics. He is also just as much of a craven, self-serving racist as the now-former president he vocally supported on January 6th, both before and after the riot.

Cawthorn essentially ran on a platform of protecting America’s White identity, its “heritage”, and was made to apologize for at least one openly racist ad during his campaign. He was, before and after that day, a proud supporter of those very same radicalized and delusional rioters who violently forced their way into the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags in the name of saving…the country that fought and defeated them both.

Yesterday, Cawthorn signed a letter with other incoming Republican representatives pledging to work with President Biden to achieve common goals and, through them, build unity. Given Cawthorn’s ongoing support of white supremacists and the violence of January 6th, how can anyone trust that?

During the Obama administration, McConnell and his House allies would condemn Democrats’ refusal to submit to their demands as a refusal to compromise. To them, that’s what “compromise” meant: submission by the other side.

It meant the same to them during George W. Bush’s administration and during Newt Gingrich’s run in Congress during the late 90s. That is what is will surely mean to Republicans in Congress now, and that surely include Cawthorn and those who share his “exceptional” world view.

To the right wing, “unity” is when all others submit. “Peace” is when all others submit. For them to compromise and commit to the peaceful sharing and exercise of power is an affront to the world they want to live in. They won’t do that. They just won’t, not willingly, not without Biden and the Democrats openly and fearlessly calling them out on it.

It can’t be enough to joke about it, as late night hosts and sketch shows did during the Bush years and early on in Trump’s. It can’t be enough to credulously accept lies and distractions, as network and print journalists did for so very, very long before Trump declared open warfare on them. It can’t be enough to rely on “the art of the possible” as an excuse for falling short. Again.

As trite as it sounds, healing does take time. In this case, that will be because it is our culture needs to change. The way we see some people as disposable needs to change. The way we accept less from those in power needs to change. And by “change”, we should mean, “stop”.

Our memory of these times will be essential to creating that change, the change that truly enables us to heal. Memories are a lot like antibodies. They are the basis of the stories we tell, the foundation of the worlds we build. Their strength and effectiveness at keeping us healthy and alive depends on how strongly and effectively we hold onto those memories of why we succeeded and, more importantly, why we failed. To forget is failure.

Never forget.

- Daniel Ward

[expatimes]

What happened to football in 2020 – and what is next?

Empty football stadiums resound with their histories, argues Uruguayan historian and football fanatic Eduardo Galeano: “There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators,” he writes.

His maxim has been tested repeatedly across the world this year, as football has been poleaxed by the pandemic.

“COVID has massively affected every aspect of football; from how the game is played, to how it is watched – with no fans, or restricted numbers – to the economics of the game,” journalist and author James Montague told Al Jazeera.

As COVID-19 spread rapidly in early 2020, nearly every professional league around the world was suspended.

Fans who were used to organising their lives around the regular rhythm and rituals of football matches were left with the option of rewatching old games or watching the likes of FC Slutsk take on FC Smolevichi-Sti in the Belarus Super League, the only European league to play on by late March.

Euro 2020 – with its particularly pre-pandemic friendly format of 12 host cities across the continent – was postponed to 2021, as was the Copa America.

Empty seats are seen in the stands prior to the German first division Bundesliga football match in Dortmund, western Germany

“It’s been a big x-ray and it’s been a big wake up call,” said sportswriter, broadcaster and academic David Goldblatt.

“On the one hand, the deep and profound importance of football to innumerable numbers of people and its reliance as a spectacle and a social phenomenon on a real human crowd, interacting with the thing on the pitch,” he told Al Jazeera.

“And then of course it’s revealed all the madness of the business model, at the level of individual clubs and in the game as a whole.”

FIFA estimates that COVID-19 is likely to cost football $14bn this year – about one-third of its value. It has posed an existential threat to many clubs often already floundering under debt and mismanagement amid wider inequality.

Even some of the world’s richest clubs have deferred salaries and payments, taken on huge loans, asked players to take pay cuts and furloughed or laid off staff – Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil even offered to save the club’s mascot Gunnersaurus from redundancy.

Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent at Inside World Football, told Al Jazeera smaller clubs who rely on matchday revenue have suffered most. Many clubs and entire leagues facing the prospect of collapse have been forced to seek bailouts.

“The biggest problem is really in the lower leagues and non-league football, because these clubs are struggling even to exist. They don’t have the TV revenue to fall back on,” he said.

The Olympic Stadium in Caracas is seen with empty stands due to the coronavirus pandemic, taken before the start of the closed-door 2022 FIFA World Cup South American qualifier football match between Venezuela and Chile

Empty stands

Reservations over the safety and wisdom of playing on during a pandemic were generally overruled by the brutal truth that the sport could not afford to forfeit the colossal broadcast revenues at stake.

While some countries cancelled their seasons, many leagues and competitions returned in May or June to play in empty stadiums – under strict testing and distancing protocols.

Liverpool saw out their first league title victory in 30 years playing in empty grounds. Continental club competitions returned in abbreviated formats – Bayern Munich won a Champions League that was packed into a couple of weeks in August.

Matches without fans – what the Germans call “Geisterspiele” (or ghost games) – played out to eerie soundscapes; whether from the cries of players made audible amid an ambient hum of absent fans or the artificial crowd noises added by broadcasters that jarred with shots of empty seats and often failed to compute with the messiness of real matches.

Montague says tensions between the idea of football clubs as institutions rooted in local communities and their status as globalised brands have been brought into even sharper relief this year – and the longer restrictions are in place, the greater the threat to fan culture.

“At the beginning of the pandemic I thought: it’s terrible how fans aren’t there but it’s also showing how important fans are – not just to the atmosphere, but also to the business model of football,” Montague said.

“But as it’s gone on, you start to see how people who run clubs, who run organisations in football see the need to exploit this window of opportunity to try to push through the reforms that would never have been possible before.”

Some clubs and officials – including Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez – appeared increasingly determined to push for an elite breakaway European super league during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, English Premier League clubs in October rejected the controversial Project Big Picture plan devised by Manchester United and Liverpool, which had proposed more revenue and a financial rescue package for lower league clubs in exchange for the concentration of power among English football’s elite.

Playing on

The pandemic has often produced erratic football matches and wild score-lines, as well as more penalties and goals in many leagues.

Aston Villa beat reigning champions Liverpool 8-2, Bayern Munich humbled Barcelona by the same score in their Champions League quarter-final – leading to a thoroughly disgruntled Lionel Messi. Arsenal could not win a league match for almost two months.

“I think the fact that fans have not been able to attend home games, and the lack of pressure of having to perform in front of a packed audience, has led actually to free-flowing football by most clubs, and that’s why you’re getting these strange, bizarre results every other week,” said Warshaw.

Research by the Institute of Labor Economics found that in many leagues home advantage prevailed but was often less marked in empty stadiums and that referees awarded fewer yellow cards to away teams.

Many players tested positive for COVID-19 – including Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Mohamed Salah – and picked up injuries amid a congested fixture list.

AC Milan’s Swedish forward Zlatan Ibrahimovic already played a lot pre-COVID, but having to squeeze all these games into such a short space of time is bound to have an impact on players’ physical and mental wellbeing,” Warshaw said.

Women’s football has also taken a huge hit, with many leagues cancelled in 2020. In a report on COVID-19 published in November, the global players’ union Fifpro found that in 26 percent of surveyed countries women’s clubs were not included in the return to play protocols.

Fifpro General Secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann said wage cuts, job losses and a lack of support meant there was a “real danger that progress towards gender equality in parts of world football will be set back years”.

Meanwhile, debates over altered offside and handball rules, as well as the application of the VAR (video assistant referee) technology system, have become noticeably more acrimonious this year, Montague said.

“Having more people watching in front of televisions and screens is exacerbating that problem somewhat I think,” he said.

There were some heart-warming football stories this year; Japanese football legend “King Kazu” aka Kazuyoshi Miura, 53, set a new record in September when he became the oldest starter in the history of the country’s elite division. Celtic player Ryan Christie was overcome with emotion in an interview after Scotland qualified for its first major tournament since 1998.

And, while athlete activism is nothing new, footballers in 2020 have increasingly spoken out on political, social, and environmental issues. “This is on a scale, depth and reach that is really unprecedented,” Goldblatt said.

Footballers joined a FIFA and World Health Organization campaign against domestic violence during lockdowns. Many players repeatedly demonstrated support for the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.

Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford has become a powerful force for social activism in the UK against hunger – twice forcing the British government to back down and reverse its policy over free school meals – as well as promoting reading and literacy.

Barcelona’s Antoine Griezmann cut his ties with Chinese telecommunications company Huawei over its alleged role in the surveillance of the persecuted Uighur Muslim minority.

But of course it has also been a year of profound loss in the football world.

Iraqi football legend Ahmad Radhi died after contracting COVID-19.

In 2020 the world also mourned the deaths of legendary Italian striker Paolo Rossi, former Liverpool manager Gérard Houllier, England’s 1966 World Cup winners Jack Charlton and Nobby Stiles, and Argentine great Diego Maradona.

Diego Maradona, then Argentina’s coach, waves to supporters prior the 2010 World Cup quarter-final match Argentina vs. Germany in Cape Town, South Africa

Looking ahead

Fans began returning to many stadiums across the world in the latter months of the year until surging infections and mutant strains emptied many stands again in December.

“ human cost – physically, mentally, and financially – is going to linger long after vaccines are rolled out worldwide,” Warshaw said.

Meanwhile, other trends loom on the horizon.

“A big story of 2021 will also be Brexit, and how that affects the Premier League,” said Montague, “and how much of a benefit there is going to be for other big clubs in Europe who can take advantage of the chaos.”

From January 1, 2021, all foreign players in the UK will be subject to a points based threshold, and British clubs will no longer be able to sign foreign players below the age of 18.

Goldblatt, meanwhile, pointed out that the pandemic is linked to environmental factors and the climate crisis, which will have increasingly stark implications for football and which the sport has to address now.

His research has found that the stadiums of 23 of the 92 English Football League clubs will experience partial or total flooding by 2050.

“Grimsby Town better take up water polo ASAP,” he said.

Goldblatt says football – as a sport of comebacks, shock victories, and deep cultural and political reach – generates collective hope and can play a vital role in climate activism.

“Maybe I am being too corny, but hope is a precious commodity. I don’t actually experience it in most of my life, spiritually or politically. But I do in football.”

#sport Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=16236&feed_id=26000 #coronaviruspandemic #europe #football #news #sports #unitedkingdom