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Politics & Prejudices: Trump Traumatizing children

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By Jack Lessenberry
Metro Times

For nearly a year now, the media has been fascinated by Donald Trump’s every utterance, the more sexual and outrageous the better. Did he really talk about his schlong?

Did he really say “blood coming out of her whatever?” Did he really say John McCain wasn’t much of a war hero because he was captured? Well, yes, yes, and yes.

Will he really be the GOP nominee for president? Absolutely, comrades. When it comes to a Trump presidency, there is a hell of a lot to be concerned about.

But one of the biggest and so far too-overlooked ones is what the Trump campaign is doing to our nation’s children. Richard Cole is one of the grand wise men of this state: a fixer who was Gov. Jim Blanchard’s chief of staff, worked with Mike Duggan at the Detroit Medical Center, and was a senior executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Not to speak of a host of other jobs, including stints as a professor at Michigan State and Ferris. Cole directed me last week toward a stunning new study by Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been crusading against hate and racism for many years. They surveyed schoolchildren — and found those from immigrant or minority backgrounds are terrified about what President Trump might do to them.

That’s not surprising, given that attacks on immigrants and promises to deport at least 11 million undocumented residents have been a hallmark of Trump’s campaign. The SPLC study looked hard at this.

The results were shocking: More than two-thirds of educators reported that young people in their schools — most often immigrants, children of immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, and other students of color — had expressed concern about what might happen to their families after the election.

The study found that these kids, not surprisingly, are scared, stressed, and in need of reassurance and support from teachers. Muslim children are harassed and worried.

Even African-American children, whose families arrived here (as slaves) in some cases before the American Revolution, ask about being sent back to Africa.

Cole, who as a professor has written widely about the problems of child abuse, told me that “Childhood trauma comes in many forms, and the Southern Poverty Law Center national survey of teachers has documented a new form of child abuse in the form of political hate speech.

“Children across America, particularly minority children, are being traumatized by the mean-spirited political rhetoric Donald Trump has used to gin up his angry base.”

Worse, teachers often feel powerless to help, he told me, since many of them “seem fearful that their attempts to buffer the impact of this rhetoric on the children in their care will be seen as the kind of overt political statements that could jeopardize their careers.”

I rushed off to read the study, and found he was exactly right. This may be a real threat in Michigan especially, where we have higher-than-average populations of Muslim and African-American children.

Last week, I talked to my colleague Alicia Nails, an attorney and a journalist who runs our highly successful Journalism Institute for Media Diversity at Wayne State.

JIM, as we call it, has had the goal for more than 30 years of making America’s newsrooms look more like America. While some of our students are white young people with an interest in diversity, most are black, Muslim, Hispanic, or high-achieving members of other minority groups.

Nails told me her students are more cynical than scared, at this point, though they do talk about moving to Canada if Trump were to win. But it’s a different story for younger kids.

She went last month to talk at a career day at Clippert Academy Middle School in Southwest Detroit.

“The students in the six rooms I visited were 95 percent Latino — some not yet speaking English — with a few black, white, Arab, and Asian students among them,” she told me.

“The Latino students in one class absolutely brought up the issue. Trump IS on their minds as a crazy wild man with crazy wild ideas about excluding some Americans.”

How could they not have him on their minds?

The Southern Poverty Law Center found that this was definitely getting in the way of kids learning. A Tennessee kindergarten teacher said she has a student who constantly asks if the wall has been built yet. “Imagine the fear in my students’ eyes when they look to me for the truth,” she said.

They found Muslim kids who fear they would have microchips implanted under their skin, and bullies who taunted classmates of color that they would soon be deported.

Worse, some teachers have decided to avoid talking about the election entirely, either out of distaste, uncertainly about what to say, or fear for their own jobs.

Others vow to do the right thing, vowing, as one Indiana high school teacher did, “to take a stand even if it costs me my position.” Cole, who has four daughters of his own, hopes “American teachers don’t allow fear of retaliation to (have them avoid) the important role they can play in comforting our African-American, Latino, and Muslim kids who are feeling the toxic stress caused by the hate speech dominating so much of the nasty reality show playing out on the campaign stage.”

Studies have shown the effects of trauma like that can last a lifetime. Comparisons of any politician to Hitler ought to be avoided if at all possible.

Trump is certainly not a Nazi (he actually is rather more the swaggering Benito Mussolini) and is not anti-Semitic. But I can’t help wondering if he has left America’s minorities feeling a little like Jewish kids in Germany felt in 1932.

Hillary and Bernie wars

With the Republican smashmouth nominating campaign over, the ravenous cable news vultures have fastened on the remaining contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

They want a headline every minute — and have been seeking to inflate the Bernie-Hillary battle into a war of toxic nastiness that is destined to rip the Democrats apart.

Don’t bet on it. If you are too young to remember, there was much snippiness and nastiness between Hillary and Barack Obama at this point eight years ago, when it was becoming increasingly clear that he had the nomination won, despite her string of primary wins late in the contest. Many of her supporters vowed never to support him, no matter what.

In the end, they virtually all did. And that was when the alternative was John McCain, not a swaggering slob who seemed sneeringly proud he knew little about government.

Hard Choices, Clinton’s 2014 memoir of her years as Obama’s secretary of state, begins with her historic meeting with Obama when it was clear he’d won the nomination. Issues and bitterness there were — but according to Clinton, both agreed not to blame the other for the excesses of their followers.

That will happen again. This time, assuming Bernie doesn’t pull off a miracle, Hillary Clinton will be the nominee.

She should be; she will end up with more votes. Does anyone really believe that anyone sane who supports Bernie Sanders could switch to the vulgar xenophobe discussed above?

Nor should any of them think staying home, or wasting a vote on a third-party candidate is a morally legitimate choice.

Trump has to be stopped.

And nobody should be allowed to forget it.

Source: www.metrotimes.com

Nadine Naber: Anti-Imperialism and Black-Palestinian Solidarity

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New York, August 20, 2014. Photo credit: AP. By Nadine Naber Kzoo.edu Dr. Nadine Naber explores Black-Palestinian solidarity in this excerpt from her forthcoming article in the Critical Ethnic Studies Association journal, Volume 3, Issue 2. In the summer 2014, as activists in Ferguson, Missouri, faced the military-grade weapons of four city and state police … Continued

The Chilling Effect of Anthropology Studies on American Campuses

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The Electronic Intifada By: Yasmin Nair In 1989, the queer theory professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a founder of the field, presented a paper, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” at the annual gathering of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Although few read or heard the paper – the conference is only open to members – … Continued

A startup sparks conversations with Syrian refugees

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By REEMA KHRAIS 

Cape and Islands.org

About once a week, Kelsey Norman plops into a chair at her kitchen table in Los Angeles, fires up Skype and dials Asalah Razzouk, a refugee living in the mountains of Lebanon.

A Syrian TV show echoes in the background as the two catch up. They chat about the weather, weekend plans and the trash piling up in Lebanon—all in Arabic. Razzouk listens carefully to Norman’s pronunciation and grammar, ready to give feedback.

The two have been meeting this way for months through a startup called NaTakallam, or “we speak” in Arabic. The online platform pairs Syrian refugees like Razzouk with people around the world who want to brush up on their Arabic. 

“This is a way for me to continue speaking with someone,” said Norman, a PhD student studying migration and citizenship, who’s been learning Arabic for the last few years. “Also, I spent a lot of time in the past two years interviewing refugees and migrants, and I know how difficult it is to find work.”

Over the last few months, Norman has done more than 20 sessions with NaTakallam, at about $15 an hour.  Has her Arabic improved?  

“I hope so,” she said with a laugh. “[Razzouk] would be a better judge of that than me.”

“Yes, she is better,” Razzouk said, chuckling. 

Razzouk, 32, fled Al-Salamiyah, Syria a couple years ago, leaving her family behind. She and her husband are among the more than 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, where 70 percent live below the poverty line. 

“Everything in Syria, I miss it,” she said.

Razzouk used to teach middle school. She also has a degree in economics and had planned to continue her education before the war broke out. Her resume, however, doesn’t amount to much in Lebanon, where locking down a job as a refugee can be difficult.

“I look for a job and I talk with many friends, but I cannot [find one],” she said.  

Before her new gig, she kept busy reading books at the library and watching American TV shows while her husband, a journalist, was at work. Today, she chats with several students around the world– Switzerland, Australia, U.S. – making roughly $400 a month. 

“We clearly know that there’s an impact,” said Aline Sara, who co-founded NaTakallam. “We have Syrians who are making a full-time salary, or two or three times the minimum wage in places like Lebanon and Egypt.”

Syrian tutors receive $10 an hour; the rest of the money goes toward operating costs, like maintaining the website and travel. To help recruit teachers, the startup has been working with the Beirut-based nonprofit organization Sawa for Development and Aid.

Sara said she came up with the idea for NaTakallam last year after finishing graduate school at Columbia University. As a Lebanese-American, she wanted to sharpen her own Arabic.

“My grandma would tease me and say, ‘You’ve been studying Arabic for so many years and you still speak with a broken accent!’” she said with a laugh.

But perfecting her accent is nothing compared to launching a business. She’s had to battle stereotypes about Syrian refugees, deal with unpredictable internet and electricity in foreign countries and, of course, raise money.

So far, NaTakallam has signed up roughly 30 Syrians around the world – from Brazil to Egypt – to work with more than 150 students at a given time.

“It’s not us helping them because they’re desperate refugees. It’s us leveraging everything they have to offer,” said Sara, adding that many of the refugees are architects, lawyers and former students.

For language learners, it’s an opportunity to practice conversational Arabic, which is often left out in U.S. classes. Most language courses focus on classical Arabic. 

In fact, some universities have decided to team up with NaTakallam to give their students a chance to complement their traditional classes with Skype conversations. Swarthmore College and George Washington University, for example, are setting aside small funds to help cover costs.

“It’s a nice way to be in your bedroom in Brooklyn and talk to someone who’s in the mountains in Lebanon who can share your story, but also help you practice your Arabic,” Sara said.

Source: capeandislands.org

Why Does PEN American Center Reject BDS, but Support Boycotts Elsewhere?

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By Patrick Connors 

AlterNet 

Israeli government threats against the well-being and freedom of expression of Palestinian civil society leaders who organize for a boycott of Israel have pre-occupied human rights organizations and made headlines in recent weeks. Simultaneously, the Israeli government is escalating attacks on Palestinian writers. It is currently detaining 19 journalists and a poet.

Given these realities, it may seem surprising that just a few weeks ago an organization that promotes itself as a leading defender of writers and freedom of expression, PEN American Center, spurned calls to drop Israeli government sponsorship of PEN’s annual literary festival that ended in early May.

This long-simmering controversy bubbled over last month when over 200 writers, poets, translators and editors, and 16,500 other individuals, signed a letter initiated by Adalah-NY asking the New York City-based PEN American Center to reject Israeli government funding for PEN’s World Voices Festival (PWVF). The letter is anchored in the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Literary figures including Angela Davis, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Eileen Myles, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Walker, and Cornel West signed the letter. This backing reflects the growing consensus that, as with apartheid South Africa, a civil society boycott is an appropriate response to Israeli violations of fundamental Palestinian rights, which are enabled by our government’s uncritical support for Israel.

The letter asserted that:

Partnership with the Israeli government amounts to a tacit endorsement of its systematic violations of international law and Palestinian human rights, including the right to freedom of expression for writers and journalists. This is not, we emphasize, a call to boycott individual Israelis or to deny their freedom of expression.

PEN responded negatively, stating, “PEN does not and cannot subscribe to cultural boycotts of any kind—which impede individual free expression—no matter the cause.“ PEN American Center subsequently noted a 2007 policy opposing cultural boycotts.

PEN’s response was PR spin that didn’t engage the letters’ substance. As frustrated writers highlighted, the letter and the Palestinian cultural boycott call explicitly target the Israeli government and complicit institutions, do not target individual Israeli writers, and aim to preserve freedom of expression. In a meeting that I attended, PEN American Center’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel rejected offers by writers and publishers to fundraise to cover Israeli writers participation. With Israeli writers not targeted, PEN American Center never explained whose freedom of expression it claimed to be protecting.

Adding to the hypocrisy, weeks after rejecting the letter, PEN American Center endorsed cultural boycott activities targeting Azerbaijan by signing letters asking Pharrell Williams, Enrique Iglesias and Chris Brown to “stand for human rights in Azerbaijan and cancel your Baku performance.”

PEN American Center Board Chair Andrew Solomon has, in the past, highlighted the effectiveness of cultural boycott, explaining that the cultural boycott of South Africa in the 1980s “served to undermine” and “speed the demise of apartheid.” In 2006, Suzanne Nossel proposed a “sports boycott” of Iran to support Israel.

Israel’s funding for PEN is part of a government public relations initiative called Brand Israel that uses cultural productions to distract from violations of Palestinian rights. Following Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza, Arye Mekel,  Israeli government’s ministry’s deputy director general for cultural affairs summarized the strategy, saying, “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits… This way you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”

The Israeli government has benefited from associating itself with PEN for years. The letter noted the only three statements that PEN American Center has issued about Israeli violations of the rights of Palestinian writers and journalists. This is despite decades of abuses.

PEN American Center didn’t report, for example, on Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian American novelists and PEN members Susan Abulhawa andRanda Jarrar to visit Palestine. Nor did it report Israel’s jailing of Palestinian cartoonist Mohamed Saba’aneh. Though the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Israel number 101 out of 180 countries in press freedom, PEN American Center reports minimally on Israel’s escalating repression of Palestinian journalists. Only after days of social media pressure this April did PEN American Centercriticize Israel’s arrest of journalist Omar Nazza and express meek “concerns” about poet Dareen Tatour’s arrest.

PEN American Center’s current executive director Suzanne Nossel worked for the State Department for years, most recently under Hillary Clinton, where the “defense of Israel” was among her priorities. Nossel is now a volunteer adviser to Clinton’s presidential campaign, and is rumored to aspire to a post in a possible Clinton administration.

Nossel coined the term “smart power,” writing:

“Smart power means knowing that the United States’ own hand is not always its best tool. U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others,” including “international institutions.”

She also asserted that “military power and humanitarian endeavors can be mutually reinforcing.” Some PEN members told us that PEN’s positions increasingly resembles those of the State Department, and they fear it is being turned into an instrument of an interventionist, militaristic US foreign policy, as Nossel is accused of attempting when with Amnesty International USA.

Candidate Clinton has repeatedly stated her unwavering commitment to Israel, and falsely conflated the movement to boycott Israel with anti-Semitism. Therefore, it seems likely that Nossel doesn’t want PEN to be seen as acceding to the boycott.

Still there is hope for change, because so many are troubled by PEN American Center’s unprincipled stance. Significantly, PEN International, the organization’s global hub, has vowed to act. PEN International’s president Jennifer Clement wrote in a press release, “PEN International shares your concern. At present we are formalizing our recommended guidelines for the world’s PEN Centres regarding funding from countries with a poor record on freedom of expression.”

PEN American Center may try to extricate itself by adopting a policy prohibiting funding from repressive governments, including the Israeli government, while sidestepping a formal endorsement of a boycott of Israel. This would be a victory for human rights. Still, it would be more intellectually honest for PEN American Center to directly grapple with the Palestinian cultural boycott’s emphasis on individual freedom of expression, and to address PEN’s contradictory endorsement of cultural boycott activities targeting Azerbaijan.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, the broad support for PEN to reject Israeli government funding is another example of the growing strength of the Palestinian boycott movement for freedom, justice and equality.

Source: www.alternet.org

Internationally Renowned Women’s Rights Advocate May Rihani Joins University of Maryland

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University of Maryland Press Release College Park, Md.—The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) at the University of Maryland proudly welcomes May Rihani—known internationally as a pioneer in girls’ education and a tireless advocate of women’s rights—as the director of the George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace. In this … Continued

Arab American Commencement Speaker tells UMass Graduates: Embrace Diversity

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Martin T. Meehan, president of the UMass system, listens as Elkhansaa Elguenaoui gives her speech at the commencement in Amherst.   By Christina Bagni Boston Globe UMass Amherst chose Medford resident Elkhansaa Elguenaoui, a first-generation Arab American, as the student speaker at its May 6 commencement. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Morocco … Continued

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