Anti-communism is undeniably rooted in racism and colonialism. For what other reason would a reactionary oppose the liberation of the colonized proletariat and the natural progression of humanity? What funny logic do these bigoted white folks use to justify the forced captivity and migration of the African people to America, only to somehow act against the invisible hand of social progression of racial integration? A 21st century example of this photo are all the white republicans opposing the Asian and Chinese community in the United States as suspected agents of the Communist Party of China while happily accepting investments, commerce, and other economic benefits. At its core, the white anglo-saxon protestant is rotten, and must be reeducated in the upcoming proletarian revolution to build a successful multicultural society, similar to the USSR. Even the most exotic looking ethnic Mongolian was able to be treated as an equal to a Russian native in the glorious socialist republic.It is safe to say that the current ethnic relations in China are more progressive than the one of the stagnating American empire.
In the same exact year, fidel castro stated (as he always has throughout the entirety of his life and career) racism to be one of central and most important issues the new revolutionary government would tackle. even whilst he was in the partido ortodoxo (his political ideas were still pretty raw at that point), one of the key believes he held and campaigned for was racial equality.
“Castro’s government promised to get rid of racism in three years, despite Cuba’s violent history of colonialism. Though Cuba never had formal, state sanctioned segregation, privatization disenfranchised Cubans of color specifically.[12] Previously white only private pools, beaches, and schools were made public, free, and opened up to Cubans of all races and classes. Because much of the Afro-Cuban population on the island was impoverished before the revolution, they benefited widely from the policies for affordable housing, the literacy program, universal free education in general, and healthcare.[14] But above all, Castro insisted that the greatest obstacle for Cubans of color was access to employment. By the mid 1980s racial inequality on paper was virtually nonexistent. Cubans of color graduated at the same (or higher) rate as white Cubans. The races had an equal life expectancy and were equally represented in the professional arena.[12][15] Cuba, by 1980, had equal life expectancy rates of Black and white people, a stark contrast from the United States and Brazil who had large inequalities in terms of life expectancies. “
This week I watched Terminator: Dark Fate, which carries forward from the second Terminatorfilm,Terminator: Judgement Day (1991), wisely ignoring everything that happened in movies 3-5. Dark Fate is set in the year 2020 and follows Dani Ramos, humanity’s new hope to survive the future robot apocalypse, as she, Grace (an augmented human from the future), Sarah Connor, and Carl (a T-800 model terminator) fight against a Rev-9 sent back in time to kill Dani. Overall, to quote my sibling, the movie “isn’t a literary masterpiece,” but it is fairly enjoyable–especially if you’re thirsting over the main leads. However, because I have a feral academic-garbage brain I also wanted to spend some time unpacking what I saw as the film’s three major discourses: surveillance/technological inevitability, race politics, and human exceptionalism. These are fraught discourses, often represented in contradictory and confusing ways over the course of the film, but I think it is generative to sit with them and to try to work out what messages are intentionally and/or unintentionally being conveyed through the movie, as well as what the potentials and limitations of these messages might be.
Spoilers ahead.
i. Surveillance & Technological Inevitability
Before getting into the content of the film, one thing which may be useful to consider is how the movie previews shown in the theater before the start of the movie contextualize reception and engagement with the actual story Terminator: Dark Fate tells. There were quite a few trailers before the movie–enough so that one patron a few seats down in my row loudly commented “is the movie going to start now or what??” as yet another trailer started playing, the majority of which were either for war or horror movies. The two in particular I am interested in discussing are The King’s Man (2020)andMidway (2019), and the way that they both glorify and justify the imperialist/security state. The King’s Man trailer, for example, positions the titular agency as being an “independent intelligence agency” which essentially is able to actively “protect” people while governments fall short. In between clips from the film, title cards read “witness the rise…of the civilized,” a shockingly open and yet seemingly unconscious connection between the King’s Man narrative and British colonialism/imperialism. Immediately following this trailer is one for Midway, a WWII moving centering on the aircraft carrier USS Midway immediately after the events of Pearl Harbor, which a character in the trailer calls “the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the US”. The reason why these trailers are important to keep in mind is because they implicitly respond to some of the anxieties articulated in Terminator; if Terminator films speak to fears of technology and surveillance, these trailers argue that really technology, surveillance, and military power are all important aspects of “civilized” nations, necessary for security and safety.
This actually ties in immediately to the opening of Terminator: Dark Fate, and the death of John Connor which can be interpreted, in one sense, as a failure of surveillance. This actually specifically made me think of Inderpal Grewal’s article “Security Moms,” and the rise of the neoliberal female citizen subject as an agent of security through motherhood in the post 9/11 U.S. The “security mom, essentially, is a “conceptualization of women as mothers seeking to protect their innocent children - a figure that is not so new in the history of modern nationalisms, or even American nationalisms and racism” (Grewal 27). Much like the King’s Man trailer suggestion that private intelligence is better suited to save lives than governmentalized intelligence, “neoliberalism suggests that the state is unable to provide security and thus it disavows its ability to protect all citizens”–only in here, it is the figure of the mother rather than a private agency which becomes the new and better fitted agent of surveillance, always watching for enemies in order to protect their children (Grewal 28). In a voice over, Sarah Connor tells us that she “saved three billion people but [she] couldn’t save [her] son”; a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) model Terminator which had been sent back before Skynet was destroyed and continued carrying out orders “from a future that never happened” walks right past Sarah and shoots John. While Sarah leaps in to action after she recognizes the threat, she is unable to stop the T-800 from killing her son in seconds. This might actually be a key difference between Sarah Connor and Grewal’s “security mom”: while security moms are a largely a post-9/11 construction of neoliberal/nationalist motherhood, Sarah Connor was a successful security mom in 1991, constantly vigilant and constantly surveilling her surroundings for concealed enemies who could kill her son. In the post-9/11 era, Sarah Connor’s belief that the apocalypse has been averted causes her to believe that she and her son are safe, resulting in inadequate surveillance/vigilance and her son’s death. Much like the framing of Pearl Harbor in the Midway trailer and 9/11 in real life, disasters happen because of failures to appropriately surveil.
Technological state surveillance itself is reflected in strange ways in the film, which seems to be at once critiquing and accepting constant surveillance. Sarah Connor keeps her cell phone in a chip bag to avoid being tracked and tells Grace and Dani that they will not last without her help because they are not aware of the constant surveillance occurring at every traffic light, every store, every gas station, etc–information the Rev-9 terminator chasing Dani will certainly have access to. Terminator: Dark Fate expresses fears of technological abuse/control and surveillance, but constantly frames these fears as the failure of the government to control these technologies–the threat isn’t what the government will do or is doing with these technologies, but rather that these technologies are uncontrollable or might be used by enemy agents. While one could argue that the fear being expressed here is actually a critique of the existence of surveillance technologies–that technologies exist for a reason and will do what they are programmed to do–this framing overwhelmingly still imagines a kind of governmental neutrality, where the threat is the located exclusively in the technology itself, not in those creating and using it. Here I also want to emphasize that while in Judgement Day there’s a deeper critique of the military industrial complex and the role of private corporations, in Dark Fate it appears to be the government alone engaged in constant surveillance and the technologies which result in the robot apocalypse, with the role of capitalism largely obscured from the connection between the new evil AI, Legion. In this same vein, while it seems that Legion is built as a weapon by the government, but we do not even explicitly know which government–again, the threat isn’t government construction of Legion (although Sarah does comment “they never learn”) but rather the technology itself.
In the original movies, Skynet was a defensive surveillance software–but this is no longer science fiction; as Edward Snowden revealed/confirmed in 2013, constant mass surveillance is a real thing, and there are real ways people can avoid it (using VPNs, encryption, covering webcams, anti-facial recognition makeup (called CV dazzle), wearing disguises, etc). Despite this, and despite Sarah Connor’s awareness of constant surveillance, the characters don’t do much to avoid surveillance and just as Sarah originally predicted, the Rev-9 easily tracks them through governmental surveillance apparatuses. In the same way, surveillance and the technological abuse/carelessness which bring about the robot apocalypse are largely imagined inevitable. While there is a constant argument for agency and the idea that people can and must make choices in the present moment that determine the future, nothing is done to disrupt surveillance in the present moment, and the future seems to be unstoppable. While we can certainly think about the switch from Skynet to Legion, and the way this articulates a different set of social concerns and anxieties in 2019 than in the late 80s/early 90s, stopping Skynet delays but does not prevent what seems to be, from a material standpoint, the same future. In this same vein, when Grace dies so that Dani can use her power source to destroy the Rev-9, Grace tells Dani “we both knew I wasn’t coming back”; this frames her death as predetermined and fixed. Similarly, at the end of the film Sarah tells Dani she will help her to “prepare”, implicitly suggesting that the future cannot be prevented–further legitimizing the reading of the Skynet to Legion switch as an inability to meaningfully change the future. This brings us to the line used both in Judgement DayandDark Fate: “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. While this line seems to suggest that we have agency and can make choices that change the future, the inability to actually enact change might instead lead to a counter reading of the line: is it that we make fate, or that the fate we get is the one we “deserve”?
ii. Race (& Gender) Politics
There’s actually quite a bit to think about in terms of the racial politics of Terminator: Dark Fate. One the one hand, we can certainly think about the underlying savior discourse and the transition of this role from a white man to a Mexican woman. There is some fairly heavy handed Christian symbolism involved in John Connor as the white male hero—John’s initials parallel him to Jesus Christ, and Sarah comments “let her play Mother Mary for a while” when she thinks Dani has become the new target because a son Dani will someday give birth to will be the new savior of humanity. Sarah also comments that Dani isn’t the threat, it’s herwomb. I want to go two directions on this comment: first, while it of course turns out that Dani is the hero herself, the idea of Latinx wombs as a threat is intricately tied to U.S. immigration policies and histories of eugenics, with the imagined threat being to the preservation of the (white) nation, so to here articulate the idea of Latinx reproduction as a kind of weapon to protect humanity is to offer something very different from a discourse of salvation through white reproduction/motherhood. Second, this line offers a kind of meta commentary on the way the previous movies claimed John as the savior (despite Sarah’s own heroism) to convince viewers that Dark Fate is more politically aware than previous Terminator movies, since Dani is the one destined to save the world (which of course ties back into my previous discussion of the unresolved tension between fate and agency), not her son and not a white man.
Moving beyond the switch in hero, one of the main things I want us to consider in thinking about the racial politics of Dark Fate is the question of collateral damage: while it’s nothing unusual to see large amounts of collateral damage in the background of an action movie, here this damage seems to be located exclusively in the Global South (specifically Mexico). Most (but not all) of the destruction is disassociated from individual people–for example, in one scene the Rev-9 drives a bulldozer down the wrong side of a freeway, crushing or crashing into numerous cars which obviously have people inside, even though we do not see most of them. Scenes of damage or interactions between populations and the Rev-9 in the U.S. do not result in death the same way that they do in Mexico/along the border. When the Rev-9 is knocked off of a plane after take off and crashes into a backyard in Texas, for example, he picks himself up and apologizes to the white people barbecuing in the yard for destroying their shed before continuing on his way. Similarly, when he flies over a military base which is actively attacking him, he ignores them and continues his pursuit of Dani without fighting back. While in both of these cases, one might argue that this is connected to the Rev-9’s obsession with fulfilling his mission without needing to kill anyone who is not actually preventing him from reaching Dani, a) this is a work of fiction so someone decided that the Rev-9 could fulfill his mission with minimal collateral damage in some spaces but not others, and b) in the final fight at the dam, the workers simply disappear when the fighting begins, removing them from any risk of becoming collateral damage.
Although there are action scenes throughout the movie, the last scene to involve mass violence against background characters is in the detention center. Before I get into the discussion of collateral damage/background character death at the detention center, I want to start by discussing border crossing and the representation of the detention center more broadly. There are some ways in which Dark Fate does attempt to address the violence involved in detention centers and U.S. immigration policy, but overwhelmingly it falls short. One of the ways we see this is in the actual crossing of the border and the way that it’s not particularly difficult or dangerous for Dani, Grace, and Sarah to cross. Certain popularized images of border crossing are deployed in ways which might suggest this is an authentic look at what it means to cross borders without documents (Dani, Grace, and Sarah ride on the top of a train with other migrants, which I suspect draws from the documentary Which Way Home, and Dani’s uncle, a Coyote, helps them cross the desert and enter the U.S. through a tunnel under the border wall), however the way these images are used as a shorthand undermines the danger undertaken/violence experienced by real undocumented migrants as the result of U.S. border policy. Riding the freight trains, called El tren de la muerte or La Bestia (the Death Train or The Beast) in real life, is highly dangerous and many people are killed or suffer serious and long term injuries as a result, and although we are told that Dani’s uncle is a good Coyote who gets people across safely (and he is of course helping his own niece), crossing the desert is extremely dangerous and many people die. Representing this crossing in maybe 10 minutes of screen time makes it seem easy and safe, obscuring the very real dangers faced by migrants in real life. Similarly, in the detention center border patrol agents are represented as apathetic but not particularly violent/dangerous, and the depictions of the cages migrants are kept in do not come close to reflecting the overcrowding experienced by the people who are being imprisoned in detention centers in real life. Furthermore, the imprisoned migrants do not have speaking roles and become non-agentive; the real suffering of undocumented migrants becomes nothing more than a setting, offering no significant or useful critique of U.S. border policies/politics. This brings us back to that question of collateral damage in the detention center. After Grace breaks out of the medical room she was being held in, she unlocks all of the cages and detained migrants begin to flee; although I have seen this described in some places online as her “freeing” them, escaping migrants become a distraction which aids in Dani, Sarah, and Grace’s actual escape from the detention center and the Rev-9 which has caught up with them. While most of the violence is enacted on border patrol agents rather than migrants (which is good), the Rev-9 does kill/harm some of the migrants who block his path as they attempt to escape, and the only border patrol agent we can identify as a speaking character to be killed is the Black woman who was pointedly apathetic to Dani’s pleas for help during the intake process. Most, if not all, of the other border patrol agents with speaking lines at the detention center are white, and seem to be framed as almost more sympathetic; the medical personnel fixing Grace’s wounds, for example, notices the metal interlaid in her body and are horrified by “what’s been done to her,” viewing her as a victim to be sympathized with. While one of the guards insists “we call them detainees” when Grace escapes from her handcuffs and demands to know where the prisoners are being kept, which offers an attempted commentary on the linguistic obscuration of violence and white apathy, we again must come back to the fact that the white medical guard is left unharmed while the Black guard is very pointedly killed.
We might push back on this overall interpretation by thinking about the ways that in real life people of color can become complicit in systems of white supremacy which will ultimately harm them while continuing to overwhelmingly protect white citizens, as well as the way that the Global South so frequently is a site of collateral damage, and experiences the displaced violence of the Global North. However, what I want us to think about is that this kind of intervention is useless when it is left latent, and overall only feeds into the constant racialized violence which plays out in movies and television programming. Furthermore, I want us to think about James Cameron’s comment about Judgement Day when he said that the T-1000 looked like an LAPD officer because “the Terminator films are…about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are”. While some have argued that Dark Fate picks up this legacy by making border patrol the villains, and the Rev-9 does clearly represent a military/border patrol kind of threat, the Rev-9 is also always a person of color. The base appearance, played by Gabriel Luna, is a man of color, and every single person it transforms itself to look like (which we are told kills the person being copied) is also a person of color. Because of this, there is a way in which the critique of border patrol is divorced from white supremacy and people of color become part of what is imagined as the threat.
iii. Thinking About Humanity
Finally, this ties into the discussion of humanity and the idea of human exceptionalism and purity articulated throughout Dark Fate. As with much of what I have previously talked about, this is a frequently contradictory kind of discourse which simultaneously broadens and constrains the idea of what “humanity” is/means. One example of this is the way in which augments and terminators that grow a conscious queer the boundary between “human” and “machine.” When Sarah demands they shoot Carl in the face to see what he “really is,” Dani insists “I don’t really care what he is”; through this there seems to be, on some level, an articulation that there’s more to being “human” than literally being a human being. Furthermore, these characters are queer in multiple dimensions–Grace is a very butch, very queer feeling character, and while I don’t want to say that the reformed murderous robot said Ace Rights, Carl’s character doespush back against the heteronormative coital imperative by through his relationship to Elisa and his adopted son Mateo, which offers a model of meaningful romantic partnership and family commitment which does not involve biological reproduction or sexual intimacy. However, despite these queer potentials, we are constantly pushed back towards a privileging of “human” through frequent assertions that Grace is human (not a machine, just augmented), that augmentation is unstable (Grace’s frequent metabolic crashes and dependence on a cocktail of medication to keep herself going), and Carl only has the approximation of a conscious and cannot love the way humans do. Furthermore, Carl and Grace both die, suggesting that this queering of the human/machine boundary is untenable.
So what does “humanity” mean in Dark Fate? Ultimately, it seems to mean protecting the vulnerable and being willing to sacrifice yourself to do it. During the final confrontation between Dani, Sarah, Grace, and Carl, the Rev-9 says “I know she’s a stranger, why not let me have her”; Sarah responds: “Because we’re not machines you metal motherfucker”. While I obviously think the film offers a confused message on agency and that we need to be critical of the racial politics of the film, this ties into what I think (or what I would like to think) the movie hoped to say about border patrol and detention centers: we need to do better by refugees and undocumented migrants. It doesn’t matter whether we know someone, whether we imagine they are deserving or undeserving, what it might or might not cost us to do the right thing; we can choose, in this moment, whether or not we step up and fight against the detention of undocumented migrants, whether we resist ICE, whether we advocate for refugees. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
One of the problems with the “politically relevant” fantasy genre is that it frequently offers “representation” and “relevant” critiques of social problems in ways which favor the representation of the oppressions people face, rather than of the people themselves–meaning metaphors which parallel fantasy races to people of color while using a predominantly white cast. Often times this further reifies the unmarked categories of the cultural context the work is produced in (ie whiteness as the dominant & default category), further marginalizes and dehumanizes people of color, andpositions white folks as the victims of metaphorical white supremacy. Amazon’s new streaming original Carnival Row is an unfortunately clear example of this continued fetishization of white poverty/desperation/vulnerability at the expense of communities of color.
Spoilers below.
While one might rightly critique the “trauma porn” genre and the way that people of color are often brutalized on screen or depicted only as victims of violence in discussions of oppression, with the solidarity and resistance of communities of color erased from dominant narratives, substituting white bodies into these sequences of violence does not offer us a useful subversion. In her book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte talks about the historical and contemporary use of a particular image of white poverty. The focal example of Catte’s book is J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) where Vance consistently uses the image of the bad, dependent poor white to reify racist images of poverty and undermine the need for programs and systems to support poor folks–just one example of this is the way he insists that the “welfare queen” is real and implicitly argues that the use of this stereotype to undermine welfare programs is not racist because he has known white welfare queens. Outside of contemporary use, Catte also gives examples such as how in the 1960s “white poverty offered [white people uncomfortable with images of civil rights struggles] an escape–a window into a more recognizable world of suffering” (59), and the quotes Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams comments on the way that, in the displays of Appalachian poverty, “‘the nation took obvious relish in the white skins and blue eyes of the region’s hungry children’” (qtd Catte 82). This obsession with white poverty has little to do with addressing the actual problem; instead, it is a tool used to obscure oppression, resistance, and transformative solutions to these problems.
Carnival Row offers a discourse on colonialism, racism, and xenophobia intended to mirror the political climate of the real world, namely the violence experienced by refugees and undocumented immigrants. It also attempts to comment on the way that Global North/colonial nations often create or are implicit in the creation of catastrophes which cause Global South/colonized nations and regions to become unsafe and result in refugee migrations, as well as the subsequent way that many times when refugees end up immigrating to the very nations that played a role in the collapse of their homelands, they are met with violence on multiple levels and their traumas are ongoing. In this current moment, this kind of discourse/intervention is “relevant” (I use scare-quotes because while the treatment of refugees in many Global North nations is horrendous in this current moment, this is not a new problem the way it sometimes is imagined) and I’m even willing to concede that there are some things which I think are done well. However–and this is a big however–the choice to make a predominantly white non-human population the metaphorical stand in for real life people who are predominantly of color greatly undermines what the series is attempting to accomplish. The implicit message is that it is easier for general audiences to sympathize with and recognize the personhood in non-human white figures than it is to sympathize with and recognize the personhood in real life people of color who are actively experiencing the violence fictionalized in this series. Furthermore, even as the victims obscure the real role white supremacy plays in xenophobia and the violence experienced by migrants and refugees, it still is a form of trauma porn. The only real difference is that because of the dominant whiteness of the victims, this version of trauma porn allows for the voyeuristic participation in systems of violence wherein many who are passively complicit (or even actively responsible) in the very systems causing violence are able to relate to the victims and experience a sort of cathartic release which allows them to maintain their complicity, feeling “good” that they consumed “politically relevant” content which allowed them to “care” safely, without having to address the reality that they are part of the brutalizers not the brutalized.
One of the ways that the show attempts to somewhat skirt around this problematic of white victimhood is by giving many of the white refugees, namely the main character Vignette (played by British actor/model Cara Delevigne), Irish accents and setting it in a time period which ambiguously mirrors the time before (as Noel Ignatiev puts it) “the Irish became white”. Celtic whiteness is used both in Carnival Row and with the case of Appalachia, and seems to be a particular favorite flavor for the fetization of white poverty. My personal theory is that this is because, when used in this way, the British colonization of Celtic peoples works to simultaneously obscure the racialized realities of both poverty and colonialism–in this fashion, Celtic whiteness is Othered just enough to justify the creation of white victimhood as a fetish object, but still undeniably white enough to connect this victimhood to the universal construction of whiteness. While there is nothing inherently wrong with including Ireland (or Scotland or Wales) in discourses of colonialism/neocolonialism because Ireland and other Celtic lands were and are colonized by the British and this colonization has had a clear and lasting impact on these regions and these peoples, using it as part of the fetishization of white poverty does not further anti-colonial goals, and again is being used to displace and obscure the way racism and white supremacy are central to anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies, and popular practices.
During the first few episodes, I tentatively imagined myself commenting on the only semi-positive aspect I saw in the show’s use of whiteness: while obscuring metaphors for white-supremacist politics are deployed in many fantasy works, they often position people (humans) of color as being members of the human-supremacist groups which are meant to reflect real life white supremacy, further obscuring the real stakes of the topic being discussed. For the first four episodes, Carnival Row avoids this problematic and gives a representation of the metaphorical anti-immigrant/“pro-Brexit” crowd exclusively through white humans–and bonus points, they can be found in both the political elite and the working class/poor. While the whiteness of fantasy races means that the real life targets of white supremacist violence (people of color) are obscured, at least this allows us to remain clear on who is responsible. That, unfortunately, changes in episode five. One of the major places where we can see this change is in the introduction of Sophie, a woman of color, who takes over her (white) father’s seat in parliament after his death. Sophie gives a speech where she mobilizes her status as a woman of color to further fantasy-racism, stating that her mother had “desert blood” and experienced racism, but that the city overcoming racism and recognizing the value of racial diversity does not apply to the “Critch” because “our differences are more than skin-deep” (ep 5, 34:15). While this is predominantly intended to differentiate real racism (which I guess has been solved?) from Fantasy Racism™, it also serves to undermine the dehumanizing politics of racism which are continuously deployed. It reassures audiences that real life racism can be solved because race is just skin deep and we’re ultimately all pretty similar. This obscures the historical and contemporary claims about “race science” and “racial difference” which often explicitly and implicitly justify racism. While in this present moment “race science” has become a more latent belief–most people laugh at the idea of measuring skulls–everyone with a White™ Facebook friend who’s taken a 23-and-Me to prove they’re 0.005% African can speak to continuing beliefs in biological race theory.
Ultimately, like many other “politically relevant” fantasy works, Carnival Row’s use of a white washed Fantasy Racism™ as a metaphor for the systems of oppression that, in the real world, affect people of color remains highly problematic. In both our personal viewing practices and in our practices of creating and curating stories, we must think critically. Storytelling is a powerful tool in shaping how we perceive and consider reality, so when we choose to tell stories that represent marginalized communities exclusively by their oppressions, and especially when we choose metaphors that participate in the fetishization of white desperation and whitewash these communities we are doing real harm.
Here’s an excerpt from my interview on NPR’s Code Switch on moral panics about critical race theory.
ZULEYKA ZEVALLOS: Moral panics are hooking into something that seems new or novel or something that’s topical, but it’s hooking into old debates, an idea that this new thing that’s happening could spell the end to our society to the way in which we live…
GENE DEMBY: ….Moral panics are a sociological phenomenon. And it turns out there are quite a few academics who study them and how they work, like Zuleyka Zevallos. She’s a sociologist and a policy researcher in Sydney, Australia. And relevant to our interests here on CODE SWITCH, Zuleyka studies moral panics and what they have to do with race. And she told me that moral panics tend to have some broad things in common.
ZEVALLOS: So there are effectively three components to a moral panic. The first is that the threat is perceived as new, but it’s been linked to old notions of other things that society has been afraid of in the past…
DEMBY: The second component of a moral panic, Zuleyka told me, is that whatever the current thing that people are freaking out about is seen as both damaging by itself, right? But also, it is seen as a harbinger of some deeper, potentially more dangerous societal problem. So go back to video games again. Video games were thought to represent a new permissiveness around violence. You know, so many games focus on fighting and shooting and Mario Karting. People will blame video games for things like school shooting and rising violent crime. There was even a congressional hearing about the specific dangerous posed by video games in the 1990s.
ZEVALLOS: And then the third component is that it needs to be an issue that lots of people can see, but the threat seems difficult. It seems opaque.
DEMBY: So it has to be something that people can point to, like something that exists in the world, again, but that if you’re on the outside of it, you can’t quite make sense of it – at least not on your own.
ZEVALLOS: It means that the general public are relying on experts to explain what’s happening to them.
Correction: Rufo has stated explicitly that he knows damn well that what he’s saying is bullshit, and is just repeating it because it’s useful. The man is a pure ideologue with no motivations beyond his partisan interests.
This man has nothing of value to say on any topic, and isn’t a reliable source on anything. He makes Goebbels look like the Encyclopedia Britannica
Essence mag is “highlighting books from Black women historians to celebrate the annual holiday.”
“Despite the spate of book bans and calls to eliminate teaching certain subjects in public schools, Black authors are still putting in the work to keep us fully knowledgable of America’s true history. Here are five books to add to your library published by Black women historians.”
01 - All That She Carried, Tiya Alicia Miles
02 - South To America, Imani Perry
03 - Four Hundred Souls, co-edited by Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi
04 - Bound in Wedlock, Tera Hunter
05 - African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
* CFP: Folk Horror. CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2022.* Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.* The Future Is Black, Not Bleak: On Afrofuturist Poetry.
* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away.* Hustling…
“Teaching kids about racism and trans people is indoctrination.”
My brother in Christ, you supported the real indoctrination that has been happening in public schools for decades when you had nothing to say against having kids pledge to a piece of cloth or teaching them that cops are their friends.
“…I posit that the unexamined yet assumed whiteness of media fan spaces has allowed for successive theorizations about their workings to have now solidified into accepted histories. This positioning now forces any consideration of racial dynamics within those spaces to be considered as something additional to, rather than constitutive of, media fan identity. Because the activities of (white) women interested in reworking popular cultural texts have been the target of societal scorn (like Cath), the project for the reclamation of their practices has been constructed as a particular narrative around the ways in which fan communities engage with difference and how fan works engage with bodies and sexualities. In this theoretical construction, any discussion of race becomes an exception, an interruption, and a bringer of fandom drama.””
— PANDE, RUKMINI. “INTRODUCTION.” IN SQUEE FROM THE MARGINS: FANDOM AND RACE, 12. IOWA CITY: UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS, 2018.
So, of the attempts to respond legally to the “Critical Race Theory” foofarah, my non-lawyer I-might-have-missed-something rankings of what I’ve read so far:
Oklahoma: Harmless and possibly actually helpful
Texas: Harmless, goes out of its way to enumerate that several very important parts of the history of American race relations must be taught, which seems okay but it makes me laugh that they also included language about one specific book that they don’t like.
Tennessee: Harmful, overbroad language (It’s worth comparing to the Oklahoma statute) that seems vulnerable to a first amendment challenge because it says you can’t teach anything that would suggest people aren’t endowed by their rights by a “creator”.
Florida: Really fucking stupid.
Not going to dispute the non-lawyer takes here. Just going to add my two cents as an almost-lawyer (an attorney larva if you will) based on a quick reading. I’ll list my thoughts in short sentence form. I’m more than happy to elaborate if someone would like me to.
Just as a disclaimer, I am against this kind of law on principle as it is a limitation on freedom of speech and free expression that I think is unnecessary. Furthermore, I am especially against this kind of law if it is going to affect colleges and universities. The students at colleges and universities are adults, and if adults can’t handle critical theory applied to race, then we have other problems.
TL;DR
Oklahoma: Decent, but there’s some issues
Idaho: Surprisingly good, only a few issues
Iowa: Pretty bad. Too broad and vague. Over-inclusive.
Texas: Incredibly comprehensive in a negative way. Bad, but not necessarily vague (though some language is very broad).
Tennessee: Some bad language, but some mitigating factors. Also, I don’t see the creator language in the final product. Middling.
New Hampshire: An anti-Critical Race Theory law that I might fully agree with depending on the exceptions and their strength.
Florida: Not even a bill/law. Can’t find the text. What I can find looks like garbage.
I encourage everyone to read my more specific thoughts below (and the bills themselves which I’ve linked) if you’ve got the time.
Oklahoma: Decent law. The only issue is that it hits public higher education (AKA colleges and universities) and it forbids the teaching of unconscious racism/ racial biases which go against a lot of psychology (but is something that conservatives/ people generally against CRT also disagree with). Other than that, it’s fine. No major weird issues.
Idaho: Even better than Oklahoma. If there’s going to be an anti-CRT law, it should probably look like this one. Very limited and specific. Does not hit unconscious racial bias. My only issue is that it does hit public higher education in Idaho. Otherwise, solid. Good work from the Gem State.
Iowa: Not a great law. Hits things like implicit bias training which are really important in some fields as well as the idea of unconscious bias similarly to the Oklahoma law. Also attacks the idea that the United States is “systemically racist” which can prevent some discussion of areas like criminal justice, historical development of law, etc. Also there’s a catch-all for “any other use of race or sex scapegoating” that is going to give lawyers and teachers fits. It’s harder to interpret the limits of this law–especially if one is not versed in legal interpretation. Of course, this law also hits higher education in Iowa and is therefore also too broad. Chances are that this law is incredibly over-inclusive for the kind of material that the legislature was actually seeking to ban.
Texas: Tries to be very comprehensive. Does say that parts of race relations must be taught which is better than some of the doomsday predictions left-wing people are espousing. Some nebulous language that I don’t like at all and can see ways in which things could be twisted. Hits unconscious bias similarly to the Oklahoma and Iowa laws. Phraseology “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment wholly or partly because of the individual’s race” seems like it could be applied against things like affirmative action and other similar policies (because white applicants are being discriminated against, in part, because of their race) which I’m not a fan of. The specific point about American values is kind of weird considering that the founding American values were very narrow in their original application, but I don’t disagree with the idea that America was founded on liberty and equality. The mention of the 1619 project is jarring and seems rhetorical in scope. Oh, and it hits higher education of course. I don’t like this one.
Tennessee: Some really bad language in this one. Adds “privileged” to the “consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist” bit which is just… really bad for any sociological understanding of the term (or an sociology class). Although, I suppose this could depend on the definition of “inherently” as applied in the courts (although I wouldn’t bet on a particularly narrow interpretation given the clear intent in the bill itself). The meritocracy section includes a ban on teaching that a meritocracy is or was designed by a particular race or sex to oppress another race or sex. This could be fine if it’s applied in the abstract (e.g. the concept of meritocracy). However, it could be read to apply to specific examples of so-called meritocratic systems (e.g. meritocracy in the United States and the designing and purpose of meritocratic systems throughout US history) which is on dodgier grounds historically and potentially restricts important discussions. This might be mitigated by the section of the bill that allows for impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history. The section on promoting “division between” races and sexes is also a little odd, though I think a court will interpret it properly given context clues. I don’t see the section on rights endowed by a creator in the final copy that the Governor signed. I might be using the wrong copy, or it might have been taken out in a final edit. The “creator” text also does not appear in the summary of the final bill on the Tennessee Legislature Website.@morlock-holmes, you might want to take a look at this (though if that language was to have appeared I would entirely agree with the take Morlock made on it. That would be inexcusable).
New Hampshire (hidden in the budget. Starts at p. 144): Already more careful than many of the other bills to specifically NOT target universities and higher education in New Hampshire. Does hit unconscious bias (and the concept of unconscious oppression). “Solely or partly” language again seems like it could be used against explanations of affirmative action, though unlike the Texas law this does seem to cut against a commonsense interpretation of the bill. Broad exception granted to the discussion of the history of the banned subjects is nice. I can see that applying very broadly indeed. Overall, this one might be the best one up there with Idaho. Great job Granite State! Heck, I might even be totally okay with this one depending on the scope of the exceptions to higher education.
Florida (no law, just a rule specifying that critical race theory can’t be taught): I really can’t find the full text of this one basically anywhere. Not without more effort than I’m willing to put in. However, seeing as amendments comparing critical race theory and the 1619 Project to things like Holocaust denialism appear to have been passed, I’m going to say this is the worst one and I hate it.
Legislation Watch: The Right’s Attack on Critical Race Theory
GOP state lawmakers have introduced more than three dozen bills and resolutions that would ban critical race theory or other ‘divisive concepts’, and promote so-called 'patriotic education.’
Critical race theory, an academic framework for the analysis of the intersection of the legal system and systemic racism, is the latest right-wing rhetorical cudgel being used by Republican state lawmakers as a pretext for introducing legislative proposals that undermine the teaching of American history in public schools.
The attack on critical race theory is part of the Right’s backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial justice protests during the summer of 2020.
The Right rejects the premise that America was founded as a nation built on White Supremacy and racial subjugation. The Right also embraces the narrative that America has made significant progress at eliminating racism and racial inequality. America does not have a history of racism. Also, America has made significant progress ending racism.
These contradictory statements exemplify how the Right views racism: individual acts of prejudice, not institutionalized systems of oppression.
GOP state lawmakers have introduce at least 38 bills and resolutions in 18 states that would ban schools from teaching critical race theory, prohibit the inclusion of The New York Times’1619 Project in school curriculums, ban public funding of training that promotes “divisive concepts,” or promote so-called “patriotic education.”
There are 310 lawmakers who sponsored these bills, and 309 of those lawmakers are Republicans.
Four resolutions have been passed by state legislatures, four bills have been signed into law by governors, one bill became law without a governor’s signature, and one bill was vetoed by a governor.
A BLACK MAN CREATED RANCH DRESSING It’s sad that I’m still learning about the contributions of African-Americans this late in life… when ALL THIS SHIT Should be taught in American public schools. 
HIS NAME WAS STEVE HENSON
Definitely makes sense, Black people cultivated “Mainstream American cuisine”, American pop music & American pop culture. This whole w@ck @ss country runs off Black Creativity.
Caitlin Wood’s 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people’s perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is “a daring space,” designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there’s no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations.
The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.
Yesterday, a White Twitter friend asked me to give her my perspective on how White allies can help Black people without tone policing. I was surprised at first. Even though I speak/tweet candidly about racism, I don’t much talk about allyship. But she asked in earnest, so I gave her my honest opinions. In doing so, I realized I had much more to say about the idea of White allies. I’m going to…
