tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/blacklivesmatter-31396/articles#BlackLivesMatter – The Conversation2022-08-22T18:19:08Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1870482022-08-22T18:19:08Z2022-08-22T18:19:08Z‘Digilantism,’ ‘hackbacks’ and mutual aid are used by online activists to fight trolls<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479424/original/file-20220816-12125-wpw8xu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C0%2C4179%2C2896&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag started by Black women in the United States, and grew into a global protest.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Aug. 5, 2022, digital trans activist <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/trans-twitch-star-arrested-at-gunpoint-fears-for-life-after-someone-sent-police-to-her-london-ont-home-1.6546015">Clara Sorrenti found herself arrested at gunpoint</a> at her home in London, Ont. <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9069338/london-police-swatting-twitch-streamer-clara-sorrenti-keffals/">Anti-trans trolls had falsely reported</a> she had killed her mother and was planning a shooting at city hall.</p>
<p>Sorrenti had been swatted.</p>
<p>Swatting involves calling 911 to falsely report a high-risk emergency at their victim’s home, triggering deployment of a SWAT team. In some swatting cases, victims have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/29/prankster-sentenced-years-fake-call-that-led-police-kill-an-innocent-man/">died at the hands of police</a>.</p>
<p>Sorrenti’s experience is consistent with my findings in <a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/transformative-media">long-term research with intersectional global media activists</a>. </p>
<p>She is a new type of intersectional digital activist. These activists work on intersectional issues, drawing connections between systems of oppression including race, gender, sexuality, and so on. And a great deal of their activism takes place online. </p>
<p>Digital campaigns such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have been successful partially because <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-9066.12021">young women</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112">Black people</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-018-0577-x">and LGBTQ+</a> are the power users of social media — they are online more often and particularly adept at using social networks.</p>
<p>But despite successes in social justice campaigns, intersectional activists are increasingly at risk — both online and off.</p>
<h2>The emotional tax</h2>
<p>The online trolling and offline swatting of Sorrenti illustrate how <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506818765318">intersectional activists face an emotional tax</a> — <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-violence-against-women-chapter-1-1/">emotional stress over and above everyday norms</a> — mostly from dealing with <a href="https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cjlt/vol19/iss2/2/s">violent attacks by online trolls</a>.</p>
<p>Intersectional activists are also doxxed at higher rates, meaning <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2019.1591952">personal information is dumped online</a>, such as their address, phone number or workplace. Sorrenti’s swatting is a textbook example — there are ongoing emotional impacts of her doxxing, including confronting transphobic police behaviours such as using her deadname (<a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/deadnaming">the name used before transitioning</a>) and incorrect gender.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Global News reports on the swatting of activist Clara Sorrenti, who was arrested at gunpoint.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Bias in the technology</h2>
<p>A deeper problem is that internet <a href="https://www.codedbias.com/">users are not all treated equally by the internet’s technical codes</a>.</p>
<p>Research has repeatedly demonstrated that <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/">algorithms — the computer codes that program the internet — are biased</a>. </p>
<p>Algorithms and the big data that drives them are often <a href="https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6182">racist</a>, <a href="https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/">gendered</a> or <a href="https://www.gaytascience.com/transphobic-algorithms/">transphobic</a>.</p>
<h2>Made invisible</h2>
<p>One type of algorithmic bias is shadowbanning, which happens when a platform <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.287">limits the visibility of specific users</a> without outright banning them. Activists have noted that social media content about intersectional issues is often shadowbanned. </p>
<p>For example, on May 5, 2021 — Red Dress Day in Canada — almost all posts on Instagram <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/instagram-stories-vanish-mmiwg-red-dress-day-1.6017113">related to missing and murdered Indigenous women disappeared </a>. Instagram claimed it was a “technical issue,” whereas users claimed it was a shadowbanning of intersectional female, Indigenous activist content. But <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221077174">shadowbanning is often difficult to prove</a>.</p>
<p>There is also evidence that the popular video-hosting platform TikTok has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54102575">shadowbanned intersectional LGBTQ+, disability, size activism and anti-racist content</a>.</p>
<p>Algorithmic bias and shadowbanning of marginalized users can make intersectional activists feel invisible, with their posts facing challenges to achieve the virality crucial to activist campaigns.</p>
<h2>Response strategies</h2>
<p>One tactic activists have used to address intersectionality online is to create a “breakaway hashtag.” The <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/7/2/21">#MeToo movement</a> is a powerful example of hashtag activism that drew global attention to sexual harassment and abuse. However, for <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374536657/headscarvesandhymens">Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy</a>, #MeToo did not feel like the right space for her as a Muslim woman. She created <a href="https://time.com/5170236/mona-eltahawy-mosquemetoo/">#MosqueMeToo to draw attention to sexual assault in the Muslim community</a>, focusing on the intersectional context of gender, Islamophobia and racism. </p>
<p>Breakaway hashtags like #MosqueMeToo add intersectional dimensions to the premise of a mainstream hashtag, both relying on the original hashtag’s virality and challenging its limitations.</p>
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<h2>Digilante justice</h2>
<p>Young feminist women who are trolled online use the tactic of “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117705996">digilante justice</a>,” or “digilantism,” which involves using digital means to fight for justice, in this case against trolls. They learn how to hack social media platforms to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506818765318">reveal the identities of trolls and confront them in real life</a>. Activists have also excluded trolls from their personal social networks through “hackback” tactics, which are hacker tactics used against hackers.</p>
<p>In another example, feminist game developer Randi Harper was intensely trolled by misogynists in an incident known as <a href="https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/the-gamergate-files/153208">GamerGate</a>. In response, Harper developed <a href="https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker">Good Game Auto Blocker (ggautoblocker)</a> that blocks users who follow misogynist Twitter accounts, the digital equivalent of walking out of a room when someone spews hateful speech.</p>
<h2>Digital solidarity</h2>
<p>Digital activists understand that social media platforms are designed for the capitalist exploitation of content and data produced by everyday users. Countering this, intersectional hacktivists (hacker activists) have <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043458/">designed technologies</a> for solidarity rather than exploitation. </p>
<p>For example, activists in Athens <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025490">designed an app to share text message costs</a> so media activists within a group would not have to foot the whole bill. The program itself was designed with sharing in mind, illustrating that technologies do not have to be exploitative.</p>
<p>Intersectional activists <a href="https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/15766/3424">aim to empower both givers and receivers</a> of support, acknowledging that all citizens play both roles, sometimes needing support and other times contributing it. This is sometimes called mutual aid.</p>
<p>Digital mutual aid can take place through <a href="https://www.interfacejournal.net/2018/12/interface-volume-10-issues-1-2-open-issue/">mentorship and skillshare workshops</a> that might teach new marginalized activists how to code computers, promote social media posts, produce radio shows or write media releases. Workshops are conducted by individuals sharing some aspect of their identities with participants to create a safer space through a shared experience of lived oppression.</p>
<p>Digital solidarity and mutual aid are important strategies of support and care that can work toward countering the negative emotional tax of being trolled, doxxed, shadowbanned or subjected to algorithmic bias.</p>
<h2>More work to be done</h2>
<p>Beyond intersectional digital activism, more work needs to be done by the tech industry, police services and broader social movements to eliminate the colonialism, racism, sexism and transphobia of online interactions and the devastating offline impacts they can have in people’s everyday lives. </p>
<p>This work is important to a well-functioning, inclusive and diverse democracy, as it aims to ensure that online participation is available equally — and safely — to all citizens.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187048/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra Jeppesen receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada</span></em></p>Digital activists are targeted for their work on intersectional issues. But they have developed strategies to deal with online and offline hate.Sandra Jeppesen, Professor of Media, Film, and Communications, Lakehead UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1745272022-01-20T14:15:41Z2022-01-20T14:15:41ZAnd just like that … #MeToo changed the nature of online communication<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/441407/original/file-20220118-21-85lk3i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3713%2C2818&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The male cast of 'And Just Like That' — Chris Noth on the far right — pose before the show's premiere in December 2021 in New York.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>And Just Like That …</em> was the <a href="https://deadline.com/2021/12/and-just-like-that-hbo-max-strongest-series-debut-the-sex-lives-of-college-girls-peaks-viewers-finale-1234889116/">most-watched series debut ever released on HBO Max</a>. It was almost predictable that this hotly anticipated follow-up to the iconic series <em>Sex and the City</em> would attract a large audience.</p>
<p>But what was perhaps even more predictable, especially given today’s increasingly incendiary internet, was a series-related scandal amplified by social media. </p>
<p>First, <a href="https://deadline.com/2021/12/peloton-shares-fall-and-just-like-that-sex-and-the-city-1234888712/">Peloton’s stock price went on a bumpy ride downwards</a> due its role in a pivotal plot point in this <em>Sex and the City</em> reboot. The popular home exercise bike was depicted as being involved in the death of series stalwart John James “Mr. Big” Preston, played by Chris Noth. </p>
<p>Then <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sex-and-the-city-peloton-ryan-reynolds-and-just-like-that/">there was a Ryan Reynolds-driven online video response</a> to the plot twist. He produced an ad entitled “He’s Alive!” This cheeky piece of crisis communications featured Mr. Big living his best life and still embracing his inner Lothario. The ad featured the actor with a romantic partner in front of a fireplace with a Peloton in view.</p>
<p>And finally, multiple sexual assault allegations were then levelled against Noth. This led to the pulling of Reynolds’ ad and <a href="https://tvline.com/2022/01/05/chris-noth-and-just-like-that-season-1-finale-big-carrie-paris/">the removal of Noth’s scenes from the season finale</a>, airing in early February 2022. And just like that, Noth was gone from the show.</p>
<p>These developments unfolded quickly. They show how <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/09/americans-think-social-media-can-help-build-movements-but-can-also-be-a-distraction/">social media can fuel important social movements</a> following acts of reprehensible behaviour like those alleged against Noth. They also speak to society’s long overdue reckoning with issues like sexual assault and harassment in concert with movements like #MeToo.</p>
<h2>#MeToo went viral due to celebrity advocacy</h2>
<p>Social media has an unparalleled ability to amplify messages <a href="https://www.ucanwest.ca/blog/media-communication/how-has-social-media-emerged-as-a-powerful-communication-medium">given today’s prevalence of digital media</a>. One of the best examples is #MeToo, which obviously is closely tied to the Noth scandal.</p>
<p>Contrary to popular conception, this movement wasn’t new when it went mainstream in 2017. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10/19/the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she-created-it-10-years-ago/">Tarana Burke started #MeToo in 2006</a>. That was well before it became a Hollywood-driven hashtag. </p>
<p>It went explosively viral more than a decade later, fuelled by posts from high-profile actresses like <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/alyssa-milano-metoo-sexual-assault-campaign">Alyssa Milano</a>, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/10/jennifer-lawrence-shares-story-of-sexual-assault-at-elle-women-in-hollywood">Jennifer Lawrence</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/24/uma-thurman-breaks-silence-harvey-weinstein-metoo">Uma Thurman</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"919659438700670976"}"></div></p>
<p><a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/11/how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/">As many as 19 million people</a> responded to a tweet from Milano suggesting women share their stories, and the hashtag was born. This iconic hashtag was followed and shared, tweeted and retweeted, by an incredible number of allies. Many people bravely shared their harrowing experiences with sexual assault and harassment. Others posted in solidarity, using the hashtag, not just on Twitter but on Instagram and Facebook. A movement had begun.</p>
<p>But how do social media movement hashtags like #MeToo actually become viral?</p>
<h2>The amplifying force of hashtags</h2>
<p>The #MeToo movement is indicative of broader changes in how we communicate. Social movements are now inextricably linked to their associated hashtag. Think of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Spring">#ArabSpring</a>, <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/">#BlackLivesMatter</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/12/occupy-wall-street-10-years-on">#OccupyWallStreet</a>. It is nearly impossible to think about sexual assault and harassment in 2022 without #MeToo.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A bright green Me Too sign is seen amid a crowd of protesters." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441414/original/file-20220118-21-l3cc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this January 2018 photo, protesters gather for a women’s march against sexual violence in Los Angeles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hashtags amplify messages regardless of the underlying content. Tweets with hashtags <a href="https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-science-behind-using-hashtags-number-type-and-more.html">earn twice as much engagement as those without</a>. Similarly, tweets with one or more hashtags are <a href="https://socialnewsdaily.com/17710/tweets-with-hashtags-are-55-more-likely-to-be-retweeted-study-finds/">55 per cent more likely to be retweeted</a>. </p>
<p>By distilling a complex movement down to its core, hashtags emphasize its essential elements. They also make them more shareable for social channels. Longer content can be ignored given the limits on how much information a person can consume in today’s hyper-competitive <a href="https://www.humanetech.com/youth/the-attention-economy">attention economy</a>.</p>
<p>Hashtags not only quicken a message’s speed, but also broaden its geographical reach.</p>
<h2>The global nature of hashtag activism</h2>
<p>We communicate most frequently and intensely with those who directly surround us. This tendency to communicate with those close by was so ingrained in our distant past that sending someone who lived far away a handwritten letter was once considered a <a href="https://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/2018/09/14/handwritten-letters-as-a-revolutionary-communication-tool/">revolutionary means of communication</a>. </p>
<p>But social media communication — <a href="https://loganix.com/local-social-media/">especially for business</a> — is often locally focused. Even politicians <a href="https://www.governing.com/now/how-social-media-is-elevating-engagement-for-local-government.html">also routinely use social platforms to communicate with constituents</a>. </p>
<p>But the advent of hashtag activism has allowed key social movements to transcend their local origins and become international. </p>
<p>This might be best demonstrated by <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/george-floyd-worldwide-protests.html">#BlackLivesMatter’s global reach in the aftermath of the tragic killing of George Floyd</a>. After this horrific incident, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/10/blacklivesmatter-surges-on-twitter-after-george-floyds-death/">daily use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag surpassed one million posts</a>. <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/07/metooglobalimpactinternationalwomens-day/">That was similar to #MeToo’s explosion a few years earlier as it became a global rallying cry for women</a>. Hashtag activism can create a viral local response, but also propel it to the furthest reaches of the globe.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman holds a sign that reads I Repent of my Racism #blacklivesmatter as she prays." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/441413/original/file-20220118-25-11jd820.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A nun prays with other members of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., after walking from the White House to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in June 2020 as part of Black Lives Matter protests.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The future of social media-driven movements</h2>
<p>Like other massively successful hashtags, #MeToo derives its power from <a href="https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-hashtags/">being concise and memorable</a>. It communicates a much deeper message than the hashtag itself. </p>
<p>It also embraces the zeitgeist. The fight for equality across gender, race and income lines has become increasingly prevalent. These issues continue to be shared via social media. Like the most powerful hashtags, #MeToo moves seamlessly between online and offline spaces, reinforcing one another.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to predict the characteristics that guarantee an online social movement will gain traction in the physical world and have staying power. But social media’s unparalleled powers of amplification across time and space will undoubtedly contribute to the next global social movement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dino Sossi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The popularity of hashtags like #MeToo speaks to society’s increasing embrace of important issues like sexual assault and harassmentDino Sossi, Instructional Assistant, Technology and Media, University of TorontoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1654922021-09-08T12:26:06Z2021-09-08T12:26:06ZBlack Lives Matter: How far has the movement come?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417873/original/file-20210825-15-hx1ykt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=88%2C29%2C4816%2C3245&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many grassroots Black Lives Matter activists are demanding more accountability and transparency from the movement's increasingly centralized and well-funded leadership.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/protesters-marched-on-streets-and-crossed-from-the-brooklyn-news-photo/1233109815?adppopup=true">Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Black Lives Matter has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html">called the largest civil movement</a> in U.S. history. Since 2013, local BLM chapters have formed nationwide to demand accountability for the killings of dozens of African Americans by police and others. Since the summer of 2020, when tens of millions in the U.S. and around the world marched under the “Black Lives Matter” slogan to protest a Minneapolis police officer’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html">murder of George Floyd</a>, the movement has risen to a new level of prominence, funding and scrutiny.</em></p>
<p><em>BLM has long been seen as a coordinated yet decentralized effort. Lately, the movement and its leading organizations have become <a href="https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/as-black-lives-matter-evolves-some-question-leadership-moves/">more traditional and hierarchical in structure</a>. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html">Public opinion</a> is also changing, as BLM chapters call on the movement’s leaders to be more accountable to its grassroots groups. We caught up with two scholars of worldwide African communities and cultures – <a href="https://www.colgate.edu/about/directory/kkonadu">Kwasi Konadu</a> and <a href="https://history.northwestern.edu/people/graduate-students/bright-gyamfi.html">Bright Gyamfi</a> – to discuss BLM as both a movement and an organization.</em></p>
<h2>What was the original structure of the Black Lives Matter movement?</h2>
<p><a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/">Black Lives Matter</a> started <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/">in 2013</a> as a messaging campaign. In response to the 2012 acquittal of George Zimmerman for shooting and killing Black teenager Trayvon Martin, three activists – Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors – protested the verdict on social media, along with many others. <a href="https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/BLM">Cullors came up with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter</a>, which gained widespread use on social media and in street protests. </p>
<p>Over the next several years – as Black Lives Matter flags, hashtags and signs became common features of local, national and even international protests in support of Black lives – this messaging campaign <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118807911">became a decentralized social movement</a> to demand accountability for police killings and other brutality against Black people. </p>
<p>The movement <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0016241/">remained decentralized</a>, although some significant, formal BLM-related organizations emerged during this time. For instance, in 2013 Cullors, Tometi and Garza <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53273381">formed the Black Lives Matter Network</a> to facilitate communication, support and shared resources among the dozens of locally organized and led Black Lives Matter chapters that were springing up around the United States. </p>
<p>In 2014, the <a href="https://m4bl.org/">Movement for Black Lives</a>, or M4BL, formed as a separate but related coalition of dozens of organizations of Black activist and others, including the Black Lives Matter Network.</p>
<p>In 2017, the Black Lives Matter Network transformed into the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, co-founded by Tometi and Cullors, who was the executive director until <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ca-state-wire-george-floyd-philanthropy-race-and-ethnicity-0a89ec240a702537a3d89d281789adcf">she stepped down in May 2021</a>. This group describes itself as “<a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/black-lives-matter-global-network-foundation-announces-leadership-transition/">a global foundation supporting Black led movements</a>.” </p>
<h2>What’s changed about BLM’s structure since then?</h2>
<p>While the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/">says it is decentralized</a>, over time it has followed a pattern similar to other social movements driven by individuals and organizations. It has become more of a conventional hierarchical organization, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/10/black-lives-matter-organization-biden-444097">centralizing its operations and leadership</a>. Its founders have <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article152232197.html">won awards</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/18/924701747/black-lives-matter-co-founder-on-her-new-book-the-purpose-of-power">book deals</a> and <a href="https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2020/5888228/black-lives-matter-founders/">notoriety</a>.</p>
<p>The BLM Global Network Foundation has not developed any publicly known independent source of funding, nor was a decision ever made to rely primarily on grassroots support or small individual donations. As a result, it is dependent on <a href="https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-lives-matter-foundation/">corporate and foundation money</a> to pay for its operations and programs. Amid the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, the BLM Global Network Foundation generated some <a href="https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-90-million-finances-8a80cad199f54c0c4b9e74283d27366f">US$90 million in donations or grants</a> from corporations and foundations. </p>
<p>The Movement for Black Lives, which calls itself decentralized and <a href="https://m4bl.org/about-us/">anti-capitalist</a>, also raised millions in 2020, including $100 million from <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/11/pers-o11.html">the Ford Foundation</a>. </p>
<p>All told, <a href="https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-lives-matter-corporate-america-has-pledged-1-678-billion-so-far/">corporations pledged</a> close to $2 billion to BLM-related causes in 2020, though less is known about pledges for 2021.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, many frontline Black Lives Matters chapters <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/12/18/948133246/black-lives-matter-movement-is-fracturing-as-it-grows-in-power">have struggled to stay afloat</a>. Some key chapters <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if_IAZpFm7w&t=2261s">have begun calling for</a> financial transparency and more democratic decison-making <a href="https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/">from national leaders</a> at the BLM Global Network Foundation, as well as a share of the funds the national groups have raised. </p>
<p>Others have <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/blm-chapters-demand-accountability-trio-cashed-movement">disavowed the Black Lives Matter Network and defected from it</a>, focusing on local community fundraising and organizing to support their work.</p>
<h2>How is public opinion about the BLM movement changing and why?</h2>
<p>Though the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/blm-signs-black-lives-matter/2021/06/13/e0aed736-bcdb-11eb-9bae-5a86187646fe_story.html">common sight</a>, the movement is losing public support. According to a new Civiqs survey of 244,622 registered voters, support <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html">for BLM</a> fell from <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/06/12/amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement/">two-thirds of voters</a> in June 2020 to 50% in June 2021.</p>
<p>Some of this shift may be due to growing public awareness of the movement’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/us/black-lives-matter.html">internal struggles</a>, such as competing visions and competition over scarce resources, as well as questions about whether <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/07/31/activist-shaun-king-lives-lavishly-in-lakefront-nj-home/">some BLM leaders</a> have used donations for personal benefit. </p>
<h2>Is this evolution of Black Lives Matters typical of social movements? Can you give other examples?</h2>
<p>Tensions and conflicts are part of the evolution of all social movements, including BLM.</p>
<p>Movements for peoples of African ancestry also face a distinct challenge: They often have to appeal for both <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-the-civil-rights-era-white-americans-failed-to-support-systemic-change-to-end-racism-will-they-now-141954">funding and action from</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/707490">the same white power structure</a> and corporate interests that participate in and benefit from the suffering of Black people.</p>
<p>For example, although President Lyndon B. Johnson is remembered for helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he routinely referred to the 1957 version of that act as the “<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism-msna305591">nigger bill</a>” in conversations with his Southern white supremacist colleagues.</p>
<p>Another example involves the McDonald’s Corp. In 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., McDonald’s partnered with U.S. civil rights organizations. The company claimed its <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2020/07/07/a-new-book-explores-the-effects-of-the-golden-arches-on-the-black-community/?sh=39a5aea07549">African American-owned franchises</a> were carrying on King’s civil rights agenda to empower the Black community. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/01/25/797143165/franchise-tracks-the-rise-and-role-of-fast-food-in-black-america">According to historian Marcia Chatelain</a>, however, instead of enabling economic freedom, McDonald’s has burdened the Black community with low wages, relatively few franchises and high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. McDonald’s has benefited from a devoted African American consumer base, more so because African Americans consume more fast food than any other race, <a href="https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/who-eats-fast-food-according-cdc">according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12384">Money shaping social movements</a>, such as the civil rights movement, is not new. The civil rights movement, including the summer of 1963’s March on Washington, was funded by <a href="https://resourcegeneration.org/50-years-after-the-civil-rights-act-the-four-key-foundations-who-funded-the-movement/">white liberal organizations and foundations</a>. In the summer of 2020, BLM protests also generated millions in similar funding. Indeed, the Ford Foundation and the <a href="https://borealisphilanthropy.org/project/black-led-movement-fund/">Borealis Philanthropy</a> recently formed the Black-Led Movement Fund, which raises money for the Movement for Black Lives.</p>
<p>Malcolm X, in his analysis of the 1963 March on Washington, brought attention to the <a href="https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxt31.html">influence white philanthropy and leadership</a> held over “black” social justice organizations, especially regarding funding that was controlled by the white power structure. Siding with Malcolm’s analysis, James Baldwin also observed, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Baldwin_s_Harlem/HVWEFPMdtygC?q=&gbpv=1#f=false">the March had already been co-opted</a>.”</p>
<h2>Is it at all clear what structure BLM will or should have in the future?</h2>
<p>Based on our research on <a href="https://dafricapress.com/A-View-from-the-East-p66464170">civil rights-Black power organizations</a> and on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55nmRNt_F_8&t=4s">Black internationalism</a>, BLM would benefit from a “starfish” <a href="https://medium.com/nature-s-way-of-communicating/5-starfish-principles-that-will-empower-your-business-305e461f18cd">organizational structure</a>. </p>
<p>Starfishlike organizations are decentralized networks with no head. Intelligence is spread throughout an open system that easily adapts to circumstances. If a leader is removed, new ones emerge, and the network remains intact.</p>
<p>In the U.S., BLM organizers work through various groups, yet all are tied to centralized hubs, like the Movement for Black Lives coalition. These organizational choices conform to a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298214/the-starfish-and-the-spider-by-ori-brafman-and-rod-a-beckstrom/">spider analogy</a>. Compared to the starfish structure, spiderlike organizations operate under the control of a central leader, and information and power are concentrated at the top. </p>
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<p>In the wake of the 2020 mass protests against racism after George Floyd’s murder, many Republican-led states proposed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/12/republicans-push-anti-protest-laws-blm-demonstrations">a new wave of draconian anti-protest laws</a> to stifle dissent. This suggests that BLM might be more resilient if it followed the starfish approach.</p>
<p>In their desire to appeal to a diverse public to end white supremacy, Black Lives Matter’s leaders fail to consider that pervasive anti-Black violence is “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631496141">the very engine that powers</a>” white supremacy and makes broad coalitions ineffective.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165492/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Like many social movements before it that began at the grassroots, Black Lives Matter is becoming a more conventional organization with top-down leadership.Kwasi Konadu, Professor in Africana & Latin American Studies, Colgate UniversityBright Gyamfi, Doctoral candidate in History, Northwestern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1638202021-07-03T22:57:32Z2021-07-03T22:57:32ZWith support for Bill Cosby, Phylicia Rashad becomes just one of several deans to tweet themselves into trouble<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409536/original/file-20210702-23-unqsqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C6%2C4082%2C3028&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students at Howard University are already calling for Phylicia Rashad's resignation as dean. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/phylicia-rashad-attends-david-makes-man-clips-and-news-photo/1124931798?adppopup=true">David Becker/Getty Images for The Blackhouse Foundation</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For acclaimed actor Phylicia Rashad, July 1, 2021 was the <a href="https://newsroom.howard.edu/newsroom/static/14391/howard-university-announces-legendary-actress-alumna-phylicia-rashad-dean">official first day</a> on the job as dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University. But some hoped it would also be her last.</p>
<p>The day before, Rashad had sent out a <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/howard-university-phylicia-rashads-cosby-tweet-lacked-sensitivity/">controversial Tweet</a> in support of her onetime “TV husband,” Bill Cosby, after a court <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/arts/television/bill-cosby-conviction-overturned-why.html">overturned his sexual assault conviction</a>. “FINALLY!!!!” Rashad wrote in the Tweet. “A terrible wrong is being righted — a miscarriage of justice is corrected!” This prompted <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/phylicia-rashad-bill-cosby-howard-university/">critics</a> and <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9748435/Howard-Students-call-Bill-Cosbys-former-star-Phylicia-Rashad-FIRED-supporting-him.html">Howard students</a> to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/phylicia-rashad-faces-calls-step-down-dean-after-bill-cosby-support-1605961">call for her resignation</a>.</p>
<p>Here, George Justice, an English professor and author of “<a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/how-be-dean">How to Be a Dean</a>,” offers insights on the controversy surrounding Rashad.</p>
<h2>Does Phylicia Rashad have the credentials to be a dean?</h2>
<p>Phylicia Rashad does not have the typical credentials of an academic dean. Most deans have served anywhere from 10 to 30 years as full-time faculty members. They also tend to have served as chair of their department or as an associate dean first.</p>
<p>But Rashad has a wealth of relevant professional experience, which can be as important as academic credentials for a school of fine arts.</p>
<p>Perhaps best known for her role on “The Cosby Show” as Clair Huxtable, Rashad’s Huxtable character was once <a href="https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2004/may/09/on-the-tube-she-was-the-mother-of-all-mothers/">voted in a poll</a> as “<a href="https://www.starnewsonline.com/article/NC/20040504/News/605090029/WM">TV mom closest to your own mom in spirit</a>.” Rashad is also <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/phylicia-rashad">no stranger to college campuses</a>. She has <a href="https://www.drama.cmu.edu/2015/02/20/phylicia-rashad-teaches-master-classes-school-drama/">taught master classes</a> at colleges and universities <a href="https://www.broadwayworld.com/people/Phylicia-Rashad/">throughout the country</a>. She also served as the <a href="https://news.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/denzel-washington-endows-fordham-theatre-chair-scholarship/">first Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre at Fordham University</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/dean-of-fine-arts-college-of-fine-arts-at-howard-university-2243951620">job description</a> for her current role as dean calls for 15 years of progressively responsible experience in management as well as “political adeptness” and “good judgement.” It also calls for “excellent oral and communication skills,” the ability to “relate well to the college’s diverse constituencies,” and the “inclination to be a visible spokesperson for the college.”</p>
<p>It’s hard to square that with the controversy in which she finds herself enveloped as dean of Howard’s <a href="https://newsroom.howard.edu/newsroom/static/14391/howard-university-announces-legendary-actress-alumna-phylicia-rashad-dean">recently re-established</a> College of Fine Arts. The college is to be <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/howard-university-names-fine-arts-college-after-chadwick-boseman-n1268666">named after Chadwick Boseman</a>, the late “Black Panther” star who is also an alumnus of the school. </p>
<h2>Does your book cover anything close to this controversy?</h2>
<p>My book opens with the famed <a href="https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/higher_education/racial-climate-at-mu-a-timeline-of-incidents-in-fall-2015/article_0c96f986-84c6-11e5-a38f-2bd0aab0bf74.html">2015 campus protests at the University of Missouri</a>, where I taught from 2002-2013 and served as graduate dean from 2011-2013. In that instance, the deans <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-missouris-deans-plotted-to-get-rid-of-their-chancellor/">teamed up</a> to help oust the campus chancellor and university system president for what was seen as their <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/09/the-incidents-that-led-to-the-university-of-missouri-presidents-resignation/">weak response to student protests</a> regarding racism on campus.</p>
<p>Since deans represent the academic aspirations – and integrity – of their faculty and students, they need to speak up on matters of grave importance to the colleges they oversee. Typically, when deans themselves create controversies, particularly those associated with race, gender, sexuality or religion, they resign or are fired.</p>
<p>For example, Sonya Duhe, the newly appointed journalism dean at my home institution – Arizona State University – was fired shortly after she accepted the position in 2020. Her undoing came after she <a href="https://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/new-asu-journalism-school-dean-under-fire-over-alleged-racist-incidents">Tweeted support for “the good police officers who keep us safe”</a> on “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/arts/music/what-blackout-tuesday.html">#BlackOutTuesday</a>” – a day of protest on June 2, 2020 that followed the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57618356">police murder of George Floyd</a>. The Tweet prompted scrutiny that led to revelations that she had been accused of <a href="https://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/new-asu-journalism-school-dean-under-fire-over-alleged-racist-incidents">demeaning students of color</a> at her previous institution. Specifically, it was alleged that she would tell them their hair was too curly or their complexion was too dark for them to be “camera ready.” Duhe is reportedly <a href="https://www.wdsu.com/article/former-director-of-loyola-universitys-communication-program-sues-school-paper-university/36468746">suing Loyola and its campus newspaper</a> for publishing a series of articles that portrayed her as racist.</p>
<p>In 2007, the University of California-Irvine withdrew an offer to have Erwin Chemerinsky serve as law dean. Chemerinsky wrote that the offer was rescinded after then-university chancellor Michael Drake told him he was “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/news/la-oe-chemerinsky14sep14-story.html">too politically controversial</a>” for an op-ed he wrote <a href="https://www.latimes.com/la-oe-chemerinsky16aug16-story.html">criticizing a federal regulation for death row inmates</a>.</p>
<p>And Ronald Sullivan, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/ronald-sullivan-was-fired-harvard-does-it-matter/589471/">first black faculty dean to preside over a dorm at Harvard</a>, was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/ronald-sullivan-was-fired-harvard-does-it-matter/589471/">fired as dean</a> over his work as a lawyer on behalf of disgraced filmmaker Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein is currently serving <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51840532">23 years in prison</a> for rape and sexual assault. Sullivan retains his position as a <a href="https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10870/Sullivan">tenured faculty member</a> in the Harvard Law School.</p>
<h2>Are there any other comparable cases?</h2>
<p>Two recent cases that made national news are those of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/05/18/yale-dean-placed-on-leave-after-writing-about-white-trash-and-other-insulting-comments/">Dean June Chu at Yale</a>, who was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/us/yale-dean-yelp-white-trash.html">suspended and never resumed her position</a> over writing Yelp reviews that suggested “white trash” would particularly like a certain restaurant. Dean Leslie Neal-Boylan of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired, allegedly for an email <a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2020/07/02/university-of-massachusetts-nursing-dean-fired-for-saying-everyones-life-matters/">stating “everyone’s life matters”</a> – a variation of a slogan meant as a <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-it-so-offensive-to-say-all-lives-matter-153188">critique of the Black Lives Matter mantra</a> – in the wake of the George Floyd murder.</p>
<h2>Do deans have to play by a different set of social media rules?</h2>
<p>Absolutely. Howard released a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CQxLAM-oBBh/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=3ebcb06f-09a0-422e-9dc1-f0edf93d5070">statement</a> after Rashad’s supportive tweet of Cosby saying that “personal positions of University leadership do not reflect Howard University’s policies.” In my experience, that is a highly unusual statement and indicates deference to Rashad that might not be shown to other high-level administrators by their employers. Research has shown that college presidents use social media <a href="https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/university-leaders-reach-out-through-social-media/">to bolster their institutions but are afraid of making mistakes</a>.</p>
<p>After backlash to her Tweet, Rashad sent out <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/howard-university-students-and-alumni-are-furious-with-phylicia-rashads-support-of-bill-cosby">another Tweet</a> that stated: “I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth.” Rashad also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/cosby-rashad-apology/2021/07/03/1181d1ec-dc0d-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html">issued an apology on July 2 for her initial Cosby Tweet</a>, but it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/cosby-rashad-apology/2021/07/03/1181d1ec-dc0d-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html">has not been enough to assuage some of her critics</a>.</p>
<p>Most deans and other university administrators that I follow have bland social media accounts. Their postings are mostly filled with praise for their institutions and self-praise for the great job they do with students, faculty and the community.</p>
<h2>How does Title IX come into play here?</h2>
<p><a href="https://sites.ed.gov/titleix/">Title IX</a> of the Educational Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination in American higher education. This includes sexual harassment and assault. Most universities, <a href="https://www2.howard.edu/title-ix/officers">including Howard</a>, employ Title IX administrators who advise campus leadership and conduct investigations on campus. <a href="https://dailynorthwestern.com/2020/05/10/sports/new-title-ix-regulations-no-longer-require-mandatory-reporting-in-colleges/">Until 2020</a>, federal law required leaders to be “mandatory reporters” who must pass along any information about possible incidents of harassment. Howard’s policy includes deans in the category of “<a href="http://dev.www2.howard.edu/title-ix/home">responsible employees</a>,” who are “expected” to report incidents to the Title IX office. Many of these incidents at universities relate to sexual matters among faculty and students, often with complicated power dynamics. As a “responsible employee,” and as leader of the School of Fine Arts, Rashad practically and symbolically represents the university’s compliance with Title IX. To her critics, her support of Cosby calls into question her ability to carry out that role.</p>
<p>This is a particularly important issue at Howard, where in 2016 students protested against the university’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/22/howard-u-students-protest-saying-victims-of-sexual-assault-deserve-better-treatment/">perceived inaction over sexual assault on campus</a>.</p>
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<h2>What factors will affect Rashad’s fate?</h2>
<p>As my book describes, her role as dean will involve hiring faculty, attracting students and working with the community. This includes raising funds to support the work of her school and the university at large. Prior to the Cosby controversy, Rashad may have been well-positioned to do these things based on her experiences and stature. But amid <a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/phylicia-rashad-draws-critics-and-dismissal-calls-for-defending-bill-cosby/3136773/?amp">calls for her ouster</a>, it remains to be seen whether the strengths she brings to the position will outweigh this controversy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163820/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>George Justice is Principal in Dever Justice LLC, a higher education consulting firm.</span></em></p>A single Tweet the day before she took over as dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University has led to calls for Phylicia Rashad’s ouster. A scholar on college deans weighs in on what’s next.George Justice, Professor of English, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1609172021-05-31T04:13:40Z2021-05-31T04:13:40Z‘I didn’t have a superhero that looked like me’: Marvel’s new female, culturally diverse and queer protagonists mirror our times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402802/original/file-20210526-21-1nkmgmb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=19%2C4%2C1657%2C1319&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Simu Liu plays the title character in the upcoming film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marvel/Disney</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week, the trailer dropped for what will be the 26th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise: Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao. Opening with a dreamy, misty shoreline, we hear Skeeter Davis’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSTHOqO6A7Q">The End of the World</a>. An ominous spaceship appears over the ocean, and the Eternals begin to prepare for the impending battle. </p>
<p>This year, Zhao was only the second woman (and first woman of colour) to win <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a36221619/chloe-zhao-best-director-oscars-win-history-first-woman-of-color/">Best Director at the Academy Awards</a>: a reminder of Hollywood’s entrenched gender and race biases. The cinematic world of Marvel, which began with Iron Man in 2008, has been similarly male and white.</p>
<p>Of the 23 Marvel films released so far, just one has been directed by a woman (Anna Boden, who co-directed Captain Marvel with Ryan Fleck) and two by people of colour (Ryan Coogler for Black Panther, and Taika Waititi for Thor: Ragnarok).</p>
<p>But things are changing.</p>
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<p>In July, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) — one of the original Avengers — will finally get her own film in Black Widow, directed by Australian Cate Shortland.</p>
<p>In September, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will showcase a predominantly Asian cast, where superhero Shang-Chi (Simu Liu in the character’s film debut) encounters the terrorist group Ten Rings.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/oscar-winners-how-the-pandemic-led-to-a-record-breaking-year-of-diversity-159102">Oscar winners: how the pandemic led to a record-breaking year of diversity</a>
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<p>Zhao’s Eternals, to be released in November, will see an immortal alien race forced out of hiding after thousands of years in a quest to save humanity. Starring a multicultural, ensemble cast including Gemma Chan, Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie, Eternals will feature Marvel’s first openly queer superhero — Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) — and deaf superhero — Makkari (Lauren Ridloff).</p>
<p>Asian American <a href="https://observer.com/2019/09/marvel-shang-chi-details-destin-daniel-cretton-tiff-interview/">Cretton has said</a>: </p>
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<p>Growing up, I didn’t have a superhero that looked like me and it’s really exciting to give a new generation something I did not have.</p>
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<p>Owned by Disney, Marvel Studios is an entertainment giant, which has grossed over <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/31/the-13-highest-grossing-film-franchises-at-the-box-office.html">US$22.5 billion</a> (A$29 billion) at the global box office. Its investment in more diverse stories, characters and directors is clever marketing. But it is also an indication of the dynamic relationship between one of the world’s biggest film franchises and its fan base, and how they both sit within the broader culture.</p>
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<p>Marvel, like all film studios, has found itself creating popular culture during a period of great social and political upheaval. Global movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate have been a clarion call for social justice. </p>
<p>These movements have exposed and challenged discrimination and violence against marginalised groups, including exclusion from representation on screen and behind the scenes. </p>
<p>Pressure from #MeToo activists has seen <a href="https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/has-metoo-changed-how-hollywood-hires">Hollywood hire more female filmmakers</a> since 2018. In the wake of #BlackLivesMatter’s growth in 2014 came #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, a movement which led to a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/movies/oscarssowhite-history.html">remarkable change</a> in the diversity of filmmakers — and the recognition they received.</p>
<h2>Knowing their audience</h2>
<p>2018’s <a href="https://time.com/black-panther/">Black Panther</a> broke new ground with its all Black lead cast and Coogler as the franchise’s first African American director. Making US$1.34 billion (A$1.72 billion) at the box office, it is the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2020/04/24/all-23-marvel-cinematic-universe-films-ranked-at-the-box-office-including-black-widow/?sh=23494e21494e">second highest grossing</a> Marvel film in the US.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-i-marvelled-at-black-panthers-reimagining-of-africa-91703">How I marvelled at Black Panther’s reimagining of Africa</a>
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<p>2019’s <a href="https://www.antithesisjournal.com.au/blog/2019/4/18/feminism-as-a-super-power-why-captain-marvel-is-the-ultimate-female-superhero">Captain Marvel</a>, the franchise’s first standalone female superhero film, with its first female director, made US$1.13 billion (A$1.45 billion) at the box office.</p>
<p>This year we had a <a href="https://tv.avclub.com/what-does-it-mean-for-a-black-man-to-be-captain-america-1846744340">Black Captain America</a> for the first time in the Disney+ spin-off series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Directed by Kari Skogland, the series was the streaming service’s <a href="https://screenrant.com/falcon-winter-soldier-series-premiere-views-disney-plus/">most watched premiere ever</a>.</p>
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<p>This casting, and the story the series told about race, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/falcon-and-the-winter-soldier-reckons-with-an-american-burden-4167996/">resonated with viewers</a> who were frustrated and angry at the criminalisation and disempowerment of Black men playing out time and again in the news media. </p>
<p>This is not to suggest Marvel is radically undoing the biases of society and the film industry, smashing stereotypes shored up by centuries of <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2019/04/avengers-endgame-female-representation-black-widow.html">patriarchal</a> or <a href="https://variety.com/2021/film/news/doctor-strange-whitewash-tilda-swinton-kevin-feige-1234977525/">colonial domination</a>. That would be an insurmountable challenge even for the Avengers. </p>
<p>Rather, Marvel’s increasingly liberal steps stem from an understanding of the power of the people. The franchise’s continued success depends on remaining culturally relevant and, crucially, not underestimating what its audiences want — and who its audiences are. </p>
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<p>Familiar tropes of Asian-ness will appear in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Shang-Chi’s powers are, of course, martial arts skills). But by handing over the keys to Cretton and his culturally diverse creative team, we can expect Marvel’s first standalone Asian superhero film to be a nuanced, multifaceted depiction of Asian cultures and identities not seen before in the genre.</p>
<p>As an immigrant female director and Marvel enthusiast, Zhao perhaps epitomises the future — and logical endpoint — of Marvel’s quest for inclusion and diversity. </p>
<p>“I’m not just making [Eternals] as a director,” <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/director-chloe-zhao-arrives-with-hot-oscar-contender-nomadland-and-next-years-eternals-4053382/">she said</a>. “I’m making the film as a fan.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christina Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Marvel Cinematic Universe is becoming increasingly diverse, on and off screen. The franchise’s continued success depends on remaining culturally relevant.Christina Lee, Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies, Curtin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1487512020-11-08T09:11:55Z2020-11-08T09:11:55ZUnderstanding violent protest in South Africa and the difficult choice facing leaders<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365540/original/file-20201026-19-uiops5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A police van lies in flames after white farmers went on a rampage in Senekal, South Africa. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tracy Lee Stark/The Citizen.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Protests and social mobilisation are the lifeblood of democracy. They enable the discontent of citizens to be communicated to political elites between elections, and when intra-institutional processes have lost their efficacy. But <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/24/protest-movement-failings-i-dont-believe-in-it-anymore">most protests never lead to sustainable change</a>. They peter out because of one or other reformist measure. Or they lose support because they tend to take on <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world">violent overtones</a>.</p>
<p>Most protesters and leaders engage in peaceful mobilisation. But there are always some leaders and activists who are intent on violence. This is because protests and social movements always involve heterogeneous communities with multiple expressions, political factions and leaders. </p>
<p>Some of these expressions and political factions believe in violent direct action and behave accordingly in the protests. Add to this the opportunism of criminals who use the protests as a cover to conduct criminal activity, and it is not hard to imagine why protests can turn violent.</p>
<p>Much of this is reflected in the contemporary protests and social mobilisation around the world. All of the movements - <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/educator-resources/lesson-plans/black-lives-matter-from-hashtag-to-movement">#BlackLivesMatter</a>, the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49317695">Hong Kong Democracy Movement</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/who-are-the-gilets-jaunes-and-what-do-they-want">Gilets Jaunes</a> in France, <a href="https://theconversation.com/feesmustfall-the-poster-child-for-new-forms-of-struggle-in-south-africa-68773">#FeesMustFall</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">#RhodesMustFall</a> in South Africa - were in the main peaceful. But they nevertheless manifested in violent direct action on occasion.</p>
<p>Protest leaders often expressed disquiet and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VLtWdilSKI">dissociated themselves from the violence</a>. But on many occasions, they also excused the violence, suggesting that it could not be compared to that experienced by protesters at the hands of police or by the victims of oppression and exploitation. This may be true in most cases. But it evades the strategic issue that violence can often undermine and erode the legitimacy of protests. It creates the opportunity for police and security forces to repress the social action itself.</p>
<p>Protest leaders also often blame the violence on criminals or on aggressive police action. Again much of this is true. Criminals use protests to conduct criminal activity including, among others, looting and theft when the opportunity arises. Moreover, aggressive policing and repressive actions by security services can often turn the tide of peaceful protests and prompt violent acts by some protesters. </p>
<p>But these explanations do not account for all forms of violence in protests.</p>
<h2>Why peaceful protests turn violent</h2>
<p>Perhaps the foremost scholar on social movements and political violence is political scientist <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=utI_trMAAAAJ&hl=en">Donatella Della Porta</a>. She holds that violence in protests is a product of two distinct developments: aggressive police action and <a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/sociology/pdf/EventfulProtest.pdf">political factionalisation</a>, in which distinct political groups try to dominate the leadership of social movements. The explanation of aggressive policing is uncontested by most progressive intellectuals. They often refer to it to explain the violence. But they often ignore the second explanation because it involves a collective self-reflection and a political confrontation with movement participants. </p>
<p>There is no doubt that in many of these movements, there are individual activists and political groupings who explicitly hold the view that <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2015-08-31-in-defence-of-black-violence/">violent action is legitimate</a>. They use the circumstances to actively drive such behaviour, as I explain in detail in Chapter 9 of my 2018 book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Rage-FeesMustFall-Adam-Habib-ebook/dp/B07P626QB4">Rebels and Rage</a></em>. </p>
<p>These proactive commitments from factions within these protest movements suggest that violence is as much internally driven from within the social movements as it is a response to the repressive actions of the police and security services.</p>
<p>This then necessitates a reflection on the strategic efficacy of violence as a means of sustainably achieving social justice outcomes. Of course, this reflection must be contextually grounded. It must be understood in the context of the democratic societies within which the protests occur. After all it is the democratic character of these societies, flawed as they may be, which establishes the parameters of legitimate political action and the consequences for the violations thereof.</p>
<h2>Rage versus violence</h2>
<p>Social mobilisation requires rage but not violence. When the two get confused, the cause of social justice itself may be delegitimised or defeated. Rage is important because it can inspire people, galvanise them, and as a result enable collective action against injustice. It also need not always lead to violence. Neither does it need to lead to emotionally driven acts of impulsiveness.</p>
<p>If there is a lesson to be learnt from the life of the late statesman <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>, it is that effective leadership of a social or political struggle requires an understanding of the political lay of the land. It also requires an assessment of the prevailing distribution of power among social forces, an acute grasp of the leverage available to political actors opposed to the social justice cause, and a plan for how to overcome these without compromising on the ultimate social outcome.</p>
<p>Much of the case of young activists for adopting violence as a strategic option is predicated on the presence of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/structural-violence">structural violence</a>. This refers to the prevailing economic and political conditions which produce not only deep social marginalisation within and across nations, but also the implicit racism that is codified in institutions and daily practices. </p>
<p>If there is such structural violence present, it is held, is there no legitimacy to acts of physical violence that are targeted to address the marginalisation and oppression? </p>
<h2>Social pact in a democracy</h2>
<p>The answer to this lies in the social pact that undergirds democratic society. Citizens <a href="https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190679545.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190679545-e-13">cede the authority of legitimate violence to the state</a> in exchange for security and rights. The alternative to this is that all bear the right to legitimate violence, thereby making society vulnerable to the rule of the strongest and the most forceful. The real victims of such an environment are the poorest and weakest in society.</p>
<p>Yet what does one do if political factions or individuals resort to violence in a peaceful protest? This after all is one of the major challenges that confront leaders of protests. Most of them are committed to peaceful social mobilisation, but are confronted with individuals or political factions who violate the peaceful character of the mobilisation – either proactively or as a response to aggressive police action. </p>
<p>The protest leaders have to then engage in a rearguard battle in which they have to explain why there is violence accompanying the protest, even though they have expressed a commitment to peaceful social mobilisation. Inevitably the leaders come off as unconvincing or duplicitous or as making excuses for the violence.</p>
<p>Of course those who are committed to violent direct action are aware of this reluctance by protest leaders to identify them. They realise that most protest leaders will not identify the perpetrators of violence because they would not want to be seen as abetting the authorities. </p>
<p>The perpetrators of violence can then behave in a manner that explicitly defies the collective underlying principles of the protest without having to fear any sanction. Essentially the political norms disable the incentive structure for political factions to abide by the strategic principle of peaceful social action.</p>
<p>The only way out of this dilemma is to change the rules. Leaders must either explicitly exclude political factions or individuals who are committed to violent social action. Or they must make explicitly clear that they will identify those who violate the principle of nonviolence that serves as the guiding philosophy of the protest. </p>
<p>Of course the political factions or individuals are unlikely to meekly accept this state of affairs. But leaders are going to have to explicitly manage this political challenge by openly debating the issue with movement participants, explaining why this is necessary for the success of the protest itself. Otherwise, such leaders will forever remain hostage to factions and small unaccountable political groups who serve as parasites on the progressive social cause.</p>
<p>This then is the challenge for protest leaders. </p>
<h2>Exercising leadership</h2>
<p>Political leadership sometimes requires difficult choices. Such difficult choices are not simply required from those leading institutions and governments. It is sometimes also demanded of leaders of social movements. This is particularly true when individual acts of violence can compromise the outcomes of the protest itself.</p>
<p>Protest leaders have a choice: either they allow acts of violence and, therefore, play to a political script not of their own making, or they act in a manner that keeps the social mobilisation on a path that they have explicitly chosen. This is especially important because the alternative path will not only erode the broader legitimacy of the cause. It will also provoke reactions that could undermine the protest and the sustainability of the social justice outcome. </p>
<p>This choice of enabling or containing political violence is, therefore, the central strategic challenge confronting the political leadership of contemporary protests both in South Africa and around the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148751/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Habib does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There are individual activists and political groupings who believe violent action is legitimate and use the circumstances to actively drive such behaviour.Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1457692020-09-14T15:06:26Z2020-09-14T15:06:26ZAmerica’s inflection point: four key things Africa must watch for<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357896/original/file-20200914-22-ihm118.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Jessica Koscielniak / pool</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>African scholars and policymakers face a tough challenge in analysing how the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53657174">US presidential election</a> on 3 November might affect Africa-US relations. </p>
<p>This is because of the extreme polarisation of politics that has been growing for decades in the US. Simultaneous national crises have made matters worse. These suddenly erupted over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, its impact on the economy, and fresh evidence of white racism towards black Americans. </p>
<p>In deeply divided America, four clusters of political political conflicts arise over issues of national identity, sustainable democracy, international relations and electoral integrity. Crises in public health, the economy and race relations are adding to these conflicts. </p>
<p>African countries struggle with similar political issues – though in very different local circumstances. They are also afflicted by the global COVID-19 pandemic and economic crises. </p>
<p>These four unresolved and contentious clusters of political issues have confronted the US since it declared independence from Britain <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Declaration-of-Independence">in 1776</a> and created a federal state in 1789. In 2020 many crucial issues have <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-02-05/new-americanism-nationalism-jill-lepore">yet to be resolved</a>. </p>
<p>Republican President Donald Trump and his deputy Mike Pence <a href="https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/08/24/rnc-sends-trump-pence-ticket-off-and-running/">campaign</a> for an ethnic nationalist identity. Their appeal is to white Christian racial supremacists. They also advocate a nationalist and unilateral foreign policy. They back Republican efforts to limit equal voting rights. And they <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/28/what-can-trump-do-to-eke-out-a-victory-in-the-electoral-college/">threaten other actions</a> to subvert electoral integrity.</p>
<p>Their Democratic challengers Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris have very different goals. They are <a href="https://apnews.com/1483c085980847a6a54957a4ed0399f4">campaigning</a> for an America that is more inclusive and equitable. A similar aspiration is enshrined in South Africa’s <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/SAConstitution-web-eng.pdf">constitution</a>: to become a country that belongs to all who live in it, united in its diversity. </p>
<h2>American inflection point</h2>
<p>Harris describes the 2020 election as an “inflection point”. She means a turning point in America’s long curve towards or <a href="https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/08/19/Kamala-Harris-says-US-at-inflection-point-Obama-rebukes-Trump/5251597870474/">away from democratic development</a>. It is a nod to an adage attributed to Martin Luther King, and <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/white-house-defends-king-quote-on-oval-office-rug/1877758/">popularised by former President Barack Obama</a>, that: </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-smith-obama-king_n_5a5903e0e4b04f3c55a252a4">The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This theme threads through the Democratic Platform, with <a href="https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf">specific promises</a>. Biden and Harris now appear <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-presidential-race-is-still-joe-bidens-to-lose">likely to be elected</a>. It’s therefore important to consider what their positions mean for Africa-US relations.</p>
<p>Trump, by contrast, repeats his promise of 2016 to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trump-rnc-speech-alone-fix-it/492557/">restore America’s “greatness”</a>. His Republican Party doesn’t even offer a new list of goals and programmes for the next four years. Instead, the party republished its 2016 platform with a covering memo praising the leadership of Donald Trump. This leaves voters and foreign governments with <a href="https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf">little new to analyse</a>.</p>
<p>For those trying to calculate the effects on African nations of an American inflection point, there are four areas to consider:</p>
<h2>National identity</h2>
<p>White supremacy has been the predominant national identity since America was colonised in the 17th century. Now, with ethnic diversity accelerating, exemplified by the election of a black president <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05campaign.html">in 2008</a>, Trump has stoked a backlash. Deprived of any claim to a strong economy as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, he is reduced to running again as an ethnic nationalist – akin to a “tribalist” in Africa.</p>
<p>In today’s America there are limits to blatant appeals to racial prejudice. </p>
<p>Trump absurdly claims to have done more for African-Americans than any president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/05/trumps-claim-that-hes-done-more-blacks-than-any-president-since-lincoln/">since Abraham Lincoln</a>. But there are also political limits to how far Biden can go in embracing progressive calls for more rapid and complete integration. </p>
<p>The structural racism cited by the <a href="https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1327&context=honorstheses">Black Lives Matter movement</a> persists among liberals. But it does so as an implicit <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/">“racial contract”</a> sustaining white privilege in access to housing, health care, education and employment. These are familiar issues in African countries, where a white tribal faction has historically dominated. </p>
<h2>Sustainable democracy</h2>
<p>In accepting the Democratic Party nomination, Biden focused on issues of <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/biden-dnc-speech-transcript/index.html">character and leadership</a>. He had Obama make the case for sustainable democracy and democratic inclusion. Obama pointedly referenced democracy 18 times in an address that reprised themes Africans heard in his <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/07/17/629862434/transcript-obamas-speech-at-the-2018-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture">2018 Mandela Lecture</a> in South Africa. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357897/original/file-20200914-22-1se33rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Presidential hopeful Joe Biden addresses the Democratic National Convention.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/DNCC</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trump, by contrast, did not reference democracy once in his unusually long 70-minute address accepting his party’s nomination for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/us/politics/trump-rnc-speech-transcript.html">a second term</a>.</p>
<p>Obama’s warnings to Americans that Trump threatens the integrity and sustainability of democratic institutions has a familiar ring. In his 2009 address to the Ghanaian parliament, he said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-ghanaian-parliament">Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Trump, along with his family, cronies and party enablers, appears to have achieved sufficient “state capture” to bring the US to a negative inflection point, as I <a href="https://www.eisa.org/pdf/sym2017papers.pdf">predicted in 2018</a> (Chapter 10).</p>
<h2>International relations</h2>
<p>Of more immediate and practical concern to African nations is whether Trump’s <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-11/present-disruption">nationalist unilateralism</a> will continue to dominate US foreign policy. Or will there be a turn towards the multilateralism that Biden pledges to pursue? This includes:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/pay-remaining-dues-trump-pulls-200902210814877.html">restoring US funding and engagement</a> in the World Health Organisation,</p></li>
<li><p>support for climate change mitigation, </p></li>
<li><p>immigration reform, and</p></li>
<li><p>support for collective security efforts to help Africans implement their commitments to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-african-union-has-failed-to-silence-the-guns-and-some-solutions-139567">ending armed conflicts</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>African scholars also <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-09-07-four-more-years-of-donald-trump-bodes-ill-for-the-future-of-africa/">warn</a> of a growing US-China “Cold War” under Trump. This would be detrimental to Africa.</p>
<p>Former US national security advisor and UN ambassador Susan Rice has called for an <a href="https://www.democratsabroad.org/susan_rice_call">early summit</a> with South Africa’s president and current African Union chair, Cyril Ramaphosa, should Biden be elected. Similarly, former US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/acsus/">envisions</a> a deepening of African-American partnerships under a Biden administration. </p>
<h2>Electoral integrity</h2>
<p>The threat to American democracy most familiar to Africans is an incumbent’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa-faces-a-new-threat-to-democracy-the-constitutional-coup-72011">subversion of electoral integrity</a>. Trump has repeatedly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/06/trumps-voter-suppression-effort-has-devolved-into-farce/">indicated his readiness to do</a> something similar.</p>
<p>African electoral violence specialist Michelle Small has noted the need to compare Trump’s responses to racial protests with efforts to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/witsacsus/photos/a.685933545195575/1075414576247468/?type=3">retain power by extra-constitutional means</a>. All members of the African Union, despite democratic setbacks, are still obliged to hold periodic national elections, accessible to <a href="https://eisa.org/pdf/eisa2016Stremlau.pdf">external observers</a>.</p>
<p>Well documented interference in the 2016 and 2020 US elections by the Russian government, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/">favouring Trump</a>, may also portend similar risks of foreign manipulation of [African elections]. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/russia-facebook-disinformation-africa.html)</p>
<h2>What to expect</h2>
<p>For African scholars and policymakers seeking to advance their national and regional interests in dealings with the US, the <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/inauguration-day">59th presidential inauguration</a> will also be an inflection point. </p>
<p>Should Trump prevail, there is unlikely to be any discernible change in his behaviour of the past four years. Occasional private disparagement of African <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946">nations</a> and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-nelson-mandela-leader-south-africa-judge/">leaders</a> will most likely continue. </p>
<p>There will be continued disengagement from initiatives of concern to Africans in public health, the environment, trade and other areas. His actions towards Africa, as in other areas, lack strategy. But as in 2016 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/how-trump-could-win?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_091120&utm_campaign=aud-">he could still win</a>.</p>
<p>Despite presidential neglect, programmes in public health, trade agriculture, health, education and young leaders launched by Trump’s predecessors would likely continue with <a href="https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/02/20/how-america-deals-with-africa-despite-donald-trump">bi-partisan Congressional support</a>. </p>
<p>A Biden win offers a much richer field for contingency planning, although resources will be very constrained and attention will be <a href="https://theconversation.com/africas-wish-list-of-what-might-change-under-a-biden-presidency-133253">overwhelmingly domestic</a>. </p>
<p>That said, Biden would enter office owing a huge political debt to the support of African Americans. His ticket indicates receptiveness to honouring it, including immigration and other reforms affecting the African diaspora as well as expanding US-Africa partnerships. Planning to take advantage of those contingencies should be a priority in Africa.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145769/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John J Stremlau is affiliated as board member of the Electoral Institute of International Affairs and is a member of Democrats Abroad.. </span></em></p>Many political issues in the 2020 US election are domestic. But black resistance to white supremacy has long had global repercussions.John J Stremlau, Honorary Professor of International Relations, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1425582020-07-14T20:00:45Z2020-07-14T20:00:45ZWhat Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods gets wrong about veterans returning to Vietnam<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347039/original/file-20200713-54-qxg4xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C0%2C4500%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Spike Lee’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9777644/">Da 5 Bloods</a>, out now on Netflix, tells the story of five Black US veterans who return to Vietnam to hunt for gold and recover the remains of their lost squad leader. </p>
<p>Beginning with the reunion of five old “<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Bloods_an_Oral_History_of_the_Vietnam_Wa.html?id=kwnHMcGmbL8C&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y">Bloods</a>”, and peppered with flashbacks to their combat days, the film quickly turns into an action-packed recovery mission.</p>
<p>Lee touches on important themes from veterans’ return journeys: reuniting with former girlfriends, reliving “Rest & Relaxation” in Vietnamese bars, engaging in NGO work to <a href="http://vvaveteran.org/37-1/37-1_projectrenew.html">atone</a> for the war and the role of war films in reimagining Vietnam as a tourist adventure. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D5RDTPfsLAI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But Lee depicts the Vietnamese as a hostile monolith, frozen in time with resentment toward American soldiers. In reducing the Vietnamese to angry victims, Lee fails to capture the reality of veterans’ return journeys.</p>
<h2>Open arms</h2>
<p>Since 1981, thousands of US veterans have returned to Vietnam. </p>
<p>In my doctoral research with returning US and Australian veterans, I found from the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/22/world/american-veterans-treated-warmly-in-a-threadbare-hanoi.html">very first return trip</a> these veterans were warmly welcomed back by the Vietnamese.</p>
<p>Over the decades, returnees’ stories of being welcomed back rippled through the US veteran community, inspiring others to embark on their own journeys to “<a href="https://vva.org/books-in-review/meeting-the-enemy-by-suel-d-jones/">meet the enemy</a>”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-battle-over-long-tans-memory-a-perspective-from-viet-nam-64121">The battle over Long Tan's memory – a perspective from Viet Nam</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Lee gestures towards this theme of reconciliation with a friendly toast from former enemy veterans in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/30/apocalypse-now-and-then/91656358-e782-46c6-a89f-a6839006bbd6/">nightclub Apocalypse Now</a>. But the moment is overshadowed by the broader theme of Vietnamese retribution, with repeated instances of Vietnamese beggars, vendors and gangsters yelling war-related grievances at the US veteran-tourists.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347040/original/file-20200713-26-5pwb7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At the nightclub Apocalypse Now, the veterans toast to the Vietnamese.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While Americans dwell on the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/10/why-americans-still-cant-move-past-vietnam/">national trauma</a> of Vietnam, the American War — as it is called in Vietnam — was only one of many fought for Vietnamese independence in the 20th century. And with a <a href="https://www.indexmundi.com/vietnam/demographics_profile.html">median age of 31</a>, most of Vietnam’s population were born well after this war ended. </p>
<p>The Vietnamese tend to view returning veterans as remorseful (and useful) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/22/world/hanoi-asks-us-veterans-for-talks.html">allies</a>. Many early returning veterans were radical anti-war activists, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-05-mn-136-story.html">searching for answers</a> and wanting to <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/reconciliation-at-my-lai">make amends</a>. </p>
<p>The Vietnamese government has consistently emphasised <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-04-27/news/9504270100_1_vietnamese-veteran-vietnam-war-family-altar">friendship</a> with returning veterans, American tourists and the United States for <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,969944,00.html">economic</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/world/asia/carl-vinson-vietnam.html">geopolitical</a> reasons. </p>
<p>Veterans told me both official representatives and ordinary Vietnamese welcomed them back, explaining “war is over” and “Vietnam is a country, not a war”.</p>
<h2>Ongoing traumas</h2>
<p>Early anti-war returnees reported experiencing Vietnam at peace was <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1110/uvet.html">profoundly healing</a>. By the 1990s, veterans were returning on “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/24/us/veterans-returning-to-vietnam-to-end-a-haunting.html?pagewanted=all">healing journeys</a>” aimed at relieving PTSD symptoms through redemption and reconciliation, often with months of therapeutic preparation in advance. </p>
<p>But even the most well-prepared veterans told me their first moments back “in country” were fraught with anxiety. Over time, veterans gradually relaxed as they came to terms with a peaceful Vietnam and realised they were no longer under threat. Yet Lee shows the Bloods immediately at ease in Ho Chi Minh City, with no indications of latent stress. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-shell-shock-to-ptsd-proof-of-wars-traumatic-history-37858">From shell shock to PTSD: proof of war's traumatic history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Where Lee does address veteran trauma, he makes angry Vietnamese the trigger: a resentful adolescent beggar throws firecrackers at the Bloods and mocks them when they duck for cover; a vendor attempts to force a live chicken on one of the Bloods before screaming “you killed my mother and father”, setting off a panic attack. </p>
<p>In my interviews, veterans described how seemingly minor experiences could spark a flashback: a backfiring truck, a glimpse of familiar landscape, the monsoon rains, the humid air as they left the aeroplane. Lee could have instead shown children playing with firecrackers or a vendor offering war-memorabilia to passersby — each utterly unaware of their effect on visiting veteran-tourists.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347041/original/file-20200713-34-19s5fee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The return to Vietnam is often anxious and fraught.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lee’s reductive treatment of the Vietnamese limits his portrayal of war legacies.</p>
<p>The Bloods’ two-day mission to recover their missing leader is remarkably short, considering <a href="http://www.salon.com/2000/04/26/mccain_111/">the decades-long struggle</a> to recover bodies of former soldiers on all sides. </p>
<p>The film also makes no mention of the more than 300,000 revolutionary Vietnamese soldiers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/vietnam-war-missing.html">still missing</a>, let alone the unknown thousands of missing South Vietnamese, who the Vietnamese government <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/24/world/a-war-story-s-missing-pages-vietnam-forgets-those-who-lost.html">do not count</a> among their dead. </p>
<p>Da 5 Bloods never acknowledges the sheer magnitude of Vietnamese loss and grief.</p>
<h2>Black resistance</h2>
<p>The movie is at its best in its exploration of anti-Black racism and Black resistance in American war and society. </p>
<p>Through the Bloods’ debate on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">reparations</a>, Lee draws together <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam">civil rights activism</a> of the Vietnam-era with today’s <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/">#BlackLivesMatter</a> movement. </p>
<p>But by positioning Black veterans and Vietnamese in opposition, Lee overlooks <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/movies/da-5-bloods-vietnam.html">the potential for solidarity</a> between the two.</p>
<p>One Black US veteran I interviewed reflected on the shared experience of being oppressed by, and fighting against, American white supremacy. </p>
<p>Upon return to Vietnam, he met with former enemy veterans in Hanoi: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I told them that when I went home and I talked to my father I said ‘Daddy, if I was a Vietnamese, I’d be a VC [<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/opinion/the-30-years-war-in-vietnam.html">Viet Cong</a>]’. When I said that, the VC, they got the biggest smiles on their faces. … It’s a blessing. All these years I’ve been wanting to get back, and I’ve come back, and look at this. Look at the way they’re treating me.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142558/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mia Martin Hobbs received funding for this research from the Alma Hansen and Norman Macgeorge bequests and Gilbert Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Historical Association-Copyright Agency's Early Career Researcher scheme. </span></em></p>Since 1981, thousands of US veterans on “healing journeys” have been warmly welcomed by the Vietnamese.Mia Martin Hobbs, Researcher, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1416932020-07-09T19:59:27Z2020-07-09T19:59:27ZFriday essay: Twitter and the way of the hashtag<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344689/original/file-20200630-103645-1wseu23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C306%2C2330%2C2572&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1513118172236-00b7cc57e1fa?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=375&q=80">Jon Tyson/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Perhaps no single character has been as iconic a symbol of Twitter as the now-ubiquitous hashtag. </p>
<p>The syntax of the hashtag has a few simple rules: it consists of the hash symbol (#) immediately followed by a string of alphanumeric characters, with no spaces or punctuation. </p>
<p>It is used routinely in social media communication across a number of platforms including Tumblr, Instagram, and even Facebook, but its most important point of emergence and polarisation has been in Twitter. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344680/original/file-20200630-155316-5ft136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nyupress.org/9781479811069/twitter/">NYU Press</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The hashtag remains most comfortable in Twitter, and it was Twitter that turned it into a highly significant, multi-functional feature. The hashtag has made its way off the internet, appearing regularly on television, in advertising, on products and on protest signs around the world. </p>
<p>From its beginnings as a geeky tool designed to help individual users deal with an increasingly fragmented information stream, Twitter made the hashtag a new and powerful part of the world’s cultural, social and political vocabulary. </p>
<p>The @ feature helped people organise into pairs and create conversational streams. The hashtag, which organises tweets into topics, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10606-016-9252-y">publics</a>, and communities, goes to the heart of a crucial question: how is the internet organised and for whom?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/anger-is-all-the-rage-on-twitter-when-its-cold-outside-and-on-mondays-141589">Anger is all the rage on Twitter when it's cold outside (and on Mondays)</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Adding value</h2>
<p>Although its use on Twitter was new, the # has a prehistory both as a punctuation mark and as part of internet communication. Imported from elsewhere, as was the @, the hashtag brought some of its prior conventional understandings with it. </p>
<p>Known as the “octothorpe” by typography experts, in early computer-mediated communication the hash or pound symbol was used to mark channels and roles in systems like <a href="https://www.techopedia.com/definition/403/internet-relay-chat-irc">Internet Relay Chat</a> (real-time, online text messaging used as early as 1988). It therefore worked to both categorise topics and group users.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344714/original/file-20200630-103668-cteg0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As the hashtag grew more common on Twitter, a clash of cultures emerged.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/infinite-hashtags-on-plane-original-3d-491172550">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The # also became closely tied to crowd-sourced content tagging systems. On the <a href="https://www.last.fm/tag/streaming">music-streaming site Last.fm</a>, users could tag artists and songs. The site used these tags as information to “learn” about music, fuelling recommendations and radio streams, and laying the groundwork for <a href="https://www.spotify.com/au/">Spotify</a> and other apps’ current recommendation algorithms. </p>
<p>User-contributed tags were important on the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a> photosharing website, where they helped direct people to images and to one another — a practice that was carried over to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/">Instagram</a>. Crucially, users could add as many tags to their Flickr photographs as they liked, creating a system that was less a taxonomy (an expertly ordered system based on exclusive, hierarchical categories) and more a “folksonomy” (a crowd-sourced one, based on inclusive tags and aggregation). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344716/original/file-20200630-103645-1faw0c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kiev-ukraine-may-16-2015-twitter-278574116">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Folksonomical ordering, in the mid-2000s, was <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221267149_HT06_tagging_paper_taxonomy_Flickr_academic_article_to_read">widely imagined</a> as a more efficient, organic way of ordering content than categories or directories, and it was this model that underpinned the popular social bookmarking service <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)">del.icio.us</a>. </p>
<p>The Flickr folksonomy of user-contributed tags was paradigmatic of the Web 2.0 ideology — marked by a shift from the web 1.0 idea that web development was about serving content to audiences to one where the goal was building architectures for participation of users (sometimes distinguished from passive website “visitors”) and the expectation that the user community’s activities would add further value.</p>
<p>Reddit’s systems for upvoting user-curated content, subreddits and modern Twitter’s aggregated trending topics are contemporary versions of this early tag-based co-curation model.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-just-blame-youtubes-algorithms-for-radicalisation-humans-also-play-a-part-125494">Don't just blame YouTube’s algorithms for ‘radicalisation’. Humans also play a part</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A #solution to a problem</h2>
<p>As far as we know, the hashtag’s use in Twitter was first proposed in mid-2007 by <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/09/how-chris-messina-got-twitter-to-use-the-hashtag.html">Chris Messina</a> in a series of blog posts. </p>
<p>In Messina’s view, the hashtag was a solution to a need. At this time, it was still possible to see a public feed of every single tweet from a public account. Topical conversations among people who did not follow one another were incoherent at best. </p>
<p>The users advocating for the hashtag were technically proficient (many of them also developers) with an active online presence, who positioned themselves as participants in a community of lead users. </p>
<p>While some users were experimenting with hashtags, Messina’s vision for them didn’t catch on widely until a particularly acute and sufficiently significant event — the <a href="https://xconomy.com/san-diego/2014/12/22/hashtag-this-how-the-twitter-hashtag-caught-fire-in-san-diego/2/">San Diego brushfires</a> in 2007. </p>
<p>With this event, Messina achieved wider take-up of the hashtag as a tool for coordinating crisis communication by actively lobbying other lead users and media organisations.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"356487862"}"></div></p>
<p>Although this rapidly unfolding disaster demonstrated a clear and legitimating use case, the broader meaning of the hashtag and its possible uses remained ambiguous. Despite this, Messina, as a tech-industry insider and lead user, continued to widely advocate for its use — even reportedly pitching it to the Twitter leadership. </p>
<p>Journalist <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Betrayal/dp/1591847087">Nick Bilton</a> relates an encounter between Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams and Messina, at the Twitter offices, as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘I really think you should do something with hashtags on Twitter,’ Chris told them. ‘Hashtags are for nerds,’ Biz replied. Ev added that they were ‘too harsh and no one is ever going to understand them.’</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Culture clash</h2>
<p>Twitter had begun wrestling with the problem (which still haunts it) of conflict between the cultures of expert users that made the platform work for them and the new users they alienated but whom the company badly needed to sustain its growth. The hashtag provoked contestation between Twitter’s different cultures as it was taken up both for the serious uses – such as disaster and professional discussion Messina had envisioned – and to create sociable rituals and play.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1277779929338220544"}"></div></p>
<p>From the beginning, there was debate around the right way to use hashtags. </p>
<p>As Messina’s historical documentation and that of others show, there were several competing models of how and why to coordinate Twitter activity as the flow of tweets started to grow beyond an easily manageable size. </p>
<p>Perhaps the # was a tag, designed to help organise collections of tweets on shared topics? Or was it a way to form channels, or groups of users interested in those topics? </p>
<p>Underlying these different models of what the hashtag could become were different models of Twitter: as an information network, a social networking site or online community, or a platform for discussion and the emergence of publics (organised communities).</p>
<p>Such ideas were still new and hotly contested at the time. Though the informational seems to have won out over the conversational model of Twitter, the hashtag remains, and is used for an astonishing array of social, cultural, and political purposes — some of them vitally useful, not all of them serious, and some of them downright toxic.</p>
<p>The website <a href="https://www.hashtags.org/">Hashtags.org</a> was launched in December 2007, and provided a real-time tracking and indexing of hashtags before Twitter implemented search. Participants at an event, for instance, could visit the website to see other tweets from the same event. </p>
<p>The hashtags in the earliest archived version of the Hashtags.org homepage, from April 2008, include a number of academic and tech conferences (#EconSM, #netc08, #interact2008) and sporting and entertainment events (#idol, #yankees, #REDSOX), and tweet categories (#haiku). Hashtags were used for coordinating discussion topics and finding like-minded users (#seriousgames, #punknews, #college, #PHX), brands and products (#gmail, #firefox), and even people (such as Wired journalist #ChrisAnderson). </p>
<p>Back then, the most tweeted hashtags were represented as amassing tweets numbering in the tens or at most hundreds, a reminder of the modest scale of Twitter at the time. Uses of hashtags, such as for humour, activism or second-screen television viewing, had yet to emerge.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9qBR_IIZw2o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Social media hashtags can have real political impact, as shown by TikTok teens and K-pop fans.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>More than chatter</h2>
<p>Ever since those early debates about whether Twitter needed “channels” (of topics) or “groups” (of users), hashtags have continued to play both structural and semantic roles: that is, they coordinate both communities and topics, helping users find each other and encounter a range of contributions to the discussion of issues and events. </p>
<p>The hashtag has fostered the rise of Twitter as a platform for news, information and professional promotion, yet the forces that allowed hashtags to become influential are deeply rooted in its conversational and sociable uses. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1275793571107549187"}"></div></p>
<p>The capacity of the hashtag to help people navigate real-time events such as disasters, protests and conferences, and to expand and solidify social connections and community, proved particularly ideal for social movements and activism. </p>
<p>Such uses have in many ways come to define both the hashtag and, increasingly, Twitter itself. Perhaps the most notable confluence of hashtags and bodies-in-the-street activism has come from #Blacklivesmatter. As US academics Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark <a href="https://cmsimpact.org/resource/beyond-hashtags-ferguson-blacklivesmatter-online-struggle-offline-justice/">document</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Twitter hashtag was created in July 2013 by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for second-degree murder of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin. </p>
<p>For more than a year, #Blacklivesmatter was only a hashtag, and not a very popular one: it was used in only 48 public tweets in June 2014 and in 398 tweets in July 2014. But by August 2014 that number had skyrocketed to 52,288, partly due to the slogan’s frequent use in the context of the Ferguson protests. Some time later, Garza, Cullors, Tometi, and others debuted Black Lives Matter as a chapter-based activist organization.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s easy to dismiss hashtag activism as a form of slacktivism rather than real political engagement. But the rise of #Blacklivesmatter and its ties to street protests and unjust policing serves as an important reminder of the embodiment and liveness of many events that might look merely like “data” or chatter when viewed as hashtags.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1277789201183002627"}"></div></p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479811069/twitter/">Twitter: A Biography</a> by Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, published by NYU Press.</em></p>
<p><em>Nancy K. Baym is Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research and Research Affiliate in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141693/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jean Burgess receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The authors received financial support for the research outlined in the article from Microsoft.</span></em></p>From its beginnings as a geeky tool to deal with a fragmented information stream, Twitter made the hashtag a new and powerful part of the world’s cultural, social and political vocabulary.Jean Burgess, Professor and Director, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1406782020-06-17T17:03:23Z2020-06-17T17:03:23ZCan you visit your dad safely on Father’s Day? A doctor gives you a checklist<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/341555/original/file-20200612-153808-vjq9t0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=203%2C5%2C3790%2C2221&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There's nothing quite like the joy of being with one's father -- and for dads being with their kids.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/father-and-daughter-news-photo/590653465?adppopup=true">eff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a physician, daughter and socially responsible human, I’m finding Father’s Day to be complicated for me this year, as it is for millions. Questions of whether and how to see my adult children and my own elderly father present medical and ethical quandaries. As an <a href="http://humanmedicine.msu.edu/FACULTY_STAFF/Faculty-Peer-Support-Program.htm">associate professor of family medicine </a> with a focus on wellness, I’d like to share with you my thinking about this using some tools to aid discernment as Father’s Day approaches.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be great if choosing time with parents or offspring were ever an easy decision to make? However, the answer is rarely that simple. This year, in the midst of a global pandemic and the need to <a href="https://q13fox.com/2020/04/27/social-distancing-will-continue-through-the-summer-dr-deborah-birx-says/">continue to practice social distancing</a> as states loosen stay-at-home guidelines, the decision is even more complex than usual.</p>
<p>I have come up with a matrix to help you decide how to safely celebrate in a fact-based and safe manner. This matrix weighs the many factors to consider, specifically related to the pandemic.</p>
<h2>Personal risk</h2>
<p>Assessing your personal risk is one aspect of the matrix. Are you or is your father in a high-risk group? Presence of chronic disease or age over 65 are two major risks. You can check this <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/groups-at-higher-risk.html">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chart</a> for more specific details.</p>
<p>Besides your specific personal risks, are either of you in repeated contact with the public through your job? Did you participate in the protests or spend time in other crowded public events? </p>
<p>Are you <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html">symptomatic</a>?</p>
<p>Have you been exposed to a carrier? Are young children, who can be asymptomatic carriers, in the picture?</p>
<p>If any of these questions is answered with a yes, it is certainly wise to forgo any thought of an in-person visit. If all are no, you can proceed to the next part of the matrix.</p>
<h2>Where you live matters</h2>
<p>Are you in a high-prevalence area for coronavirus or in a state with rising rates? If you are in a sparsely populated area with low regional prevalence, it makes more sense to consider an in-person visit than if you (or he) live in a place with a high number of cases or rising numbers of cases. Check your <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map">local prevalence here</a>.</p>
<p>If neither of you is at elevated risk and you are not in an extremely high-prevalence area, the next question is: Can you see each other in person without violating any orders? Consult <a href="https://web.csg.org/covid19/state-reopen-plans/">this link for reopening plans</a> affecting your state.</p>
<p>Remember that the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico also have restrictions, including a <a href="https://www.cicnews.com/2020/06/how-to-enter-canada-from-the-u-s-during-coronavirus-0614666.html#gs.81blcp">self-quarantine for 14 days after arriving in Canada</a>.
Obviously, any need to travel and ability to quarantine must enter the matrix calculation.</p>
<p>Finally, can your in-person visit follow social distancing recommendations? Can you be six feet apart – ideally, outdoors – wash hands frequently and avoid physical contact? Remember, it may be tough not to hug, especially if you do decide to bring children.</p>
<p>If so, finally, you need to examine your own and your father’s risk tolerance. If either of you is extremely anxious, stick to virtual connection.</p>
<p>Love and gratitude, while ideally communicated in person, can still be expressed virtually or by phone. You may overtly acknowledge that the greater act of love for each other, as well as your community, is to stay home.</p>
<p>These days we have been asked to reexamine what “normal” looks like in so many ways. Perhaps the increased opportunity for reflection afforded by the pandemic, as well as the restrictions imposed, will teach us to honor our loved ones in many small ways throughout the year. The gift of attention – by phone, email or snail mail – is always possible. </p>
<p>And remember that another holiday – July 4 – is just around the corner, and you will need to think about safety then, too.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s Note: This article is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-it-safe-to-visit-your-mother-on-mothers-day-a-doctor-offers-a-decision-checklist-138094">article published on May 5, 2020</a>.</em></p>
<p>[<em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140678/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claudia Finkelstein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Father’s Day is approaching, raising questions about the safety of visiting fathers and grandfathers. A doctor offers guidelines.Claudia Finkelstein, Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1196232019-07-22T19:39:44Z2019-07-22T19:39:44ZOur database of police officers who shoot citizens reveals who shot citizens<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283159/original/file-20190708-51284-1g80gce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A memorial display with a drawing of Antwon Rose II sits in front of the Allegheny County courthouse. Police officer Michael Rosfeld shot Rose three times as he fled a car after a traffic stop.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Pennsylvania-Police-Shooting/460143f8932b413a8d94fdf3f0803dee/78/0">AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the debate over fatal police shootings of minority citizens, one theme is persistent: White officers, rather than nonwhite officers, are primarily responsible for black Americans being shot by the police. </p>
<p>For example, look to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/24/we-dont-trust-you-after-fatal-police-shooting-black-residents-confront-buttigieg/">handling of the recent shooting of black resident Eric Logan</a> in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. This shooting has consistently been tied to the race of the officer, who was white. When Buttigieg was asked about the city’s attempts to increase diversity on the police force, he apologized that he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-debate-south-bend.html">“couldn’t get it done.”</a></p>
<p>Is it true, however, that a black person fatally shot was more likely to be shot by white officers?</p>
<p>To answer this question, we spent over 1,500 hours creating a national database of information about all officers involved in fatal police shootings in the U.S. in 2015. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116">Our paper based on this data</a>, published on July 22, reveals that white officers are not more likely to fatally shoot minority civilians compared to black or Hispanic officers.</p>
<h2>An answer, finally</h2>
<p>Until now, there have been no federal databases on the officers involved in fatal shootings. </p>
<p>Although organizations such as The Washington Post have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/">tracked fatal officer-involved shootings</a> in recent years, these databases have primarily focused on information about civilians. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12956">The few studies</a> that have looked at officer information have been able to obtain data for only a small number of shootings.</p>
<p>Our database includes 917 fatal shootings by on-duty police officers in 2015 from over 650 different police departments. </p>
<p><iframe id="oUtLw" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/oUtLw/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>The initial list was developed from lists of fatal shootings compiled by news organizations such as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/">The Washington Post</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database">The Guardian</a>. We then contacted all police departments listed in the original lists and asked them to report on the race of every officer involved in a shooting. If follow-up calls were unsuccessful, we searched news reports to uncover officer information.</p>
<p>The characteristics of police officers who shoot civilians closely reflect the pool of all police officers. Nationwide, 73% of all police officers are white, 12% are Hispanic and 12% are black. By comparison, 79% of officers involved in shootings in 2015 were white, 12% were Hispanic and 6% were black. </p>
<p>Of those civilians fatally shot, 55% were white, 27% were black and 19% were Hispanic.</p>
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<p>If fatal shootings of minority civilians are due to bias by white officers, we would expect that when white officers are involved in a fatal shooting, the person fatally shot would be more likely to be black or Hispanic. </p>
<p>This is not what we found. In contrast, when all the officers that fired at a civilian were black, a person was 2.0 times more likely to be black than when all the officers who fired were white. When all the officers that fired at a civilian were Hispanic, a person was 9.0 times more likely to be Hispanic than when all the officers who fired were white. </p>
<p>This finding, however, does not mean that black or Hispanic officers are biased in their shooting decisions. Cities with larger populations of nonwhite civilians also have a higher proportion of nonwhite officers. Once these factors were taken into account, black and Hispanic officers were no longer more likely to shoot black or Hispanic citizens.</p>
<p>Officer sex, experience and the total number of officers who fired also did not predict racial disparities in fatal shootings.</p>
<h2>Crime and shootings</h2>
<p>However, there was one factor that did predict the race of a citizen fatally shot: violent crime rates. </p>
<p>In counties where whites committed a higher percentage of homicides, a person fatally shot by the police was 3.5 times more likely to be white. In counties where blacks committed a higher percentage of violent crime, a person fatally shot by the police was 3.7 times more likely to be black. And in counties where Hispanics committed a higher percentage of violent crime, a person fatally shot by the police was 3.3 times more likely to be Hispanic. </p>
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<p>Once crime rates were taken into account, civilians fatally shot by the police were not more likely to be black or Hispanic than white. </p>
<p>This is consistent with <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550618775108">our earlier work</a>, which showed that black Americans have more contact with the police through greater involvement in violent crime, which at least partially explains why black Americans are shot by police at higher rates than their population representation in the U.S.</p>
<h2>Policy implications</h2>
<p>Our results have important implications for reducing racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings, by suggesting what will and what will not be an effective solution.</p>
<p>Since officer race did not relate to racial disparities in civilians fatally shot by the police, we believe that policies that promote hiring more diverse officers are unlikely to reduce racial disparities in fatal shootings. </p>
<p>However, they may still have merit by <a href="https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/diversity-in-law-enforcement/">increasing public trust in law enforcement</a>.</p>
<p>The best predictor of the race of a person fatally shot was the amount of violent crime committed by members of that racial group. This suggests that reducing fatal shootings of racial minorities by police will require policymakers, civic leaders and ordinary citizens to address factors that lead to racial differences in violent crime, such as racial disparities in <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/media/_media/working_papers/mckernan-et-al_less-than-equal.pdf">wealth</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240907400505">employment</a>, <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2003-05853-005">education</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134549">family structure</a>.</p>
<p>A more thorough understanding of this topic will require better records. In 2019, the FBI launched the <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-announces-the-official-launch-of-the-national-use-of-force-data-collection/layout_view">National Use-of-Force Data Collection</a>, which aims to provide comprehensive information about civilians, officers and circumstances surrounding shootings and other types of force. When this database is released, it will enable researchers like us to better understand police shootings in the U.S. today.</p>
<p><em>The headline and text of this story has been updated to reflect the fact that the study did not estimate the likelihood of officers making shooting decisions, but the data on those who were fatally shot.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119623/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Cesario has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new project looks at the race of on-duty police officers and civilians involved in 917 fatal shootings in 2015.David Johnson, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of MarylandJoseph Cesario, Associate Professor of Psychology, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1204802019-07-18T11:34:08Z2019-07-18T11:34:08ZWhy the federal government isn’t prosecuting the officer who choked Eric Garner<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284556/original/file-20190717-147299-18lnqhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gwen Carr, Eric Garner's mother, says the federal government should have filed charges.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Police-Chokehold-Death/8e51a7d7c1d94b9bb6ededf7bdc8b689/2/0">AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Justice Department won’t file federal charges against the New York City police officer who put <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/statement-united-states-attorney-richard-p-donoghue">Eric Garner</a> into <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/nyregion/eric-garner-death-daniel-pantaleo-chokehold.html">the chokehold that led to his death</a>. With the statute of limitations having run out, the case, legally, is closed.</p>
<p>The decision, announced almost exactly five years after Garner was pronounced dead following a confrontation with police officers in Staten Island on July 17, 2014, has sparked <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/07/17/742473964/5-years-after-eric-garners-death-activists-continue-fight-for-another-day-to-liv">renewed objections</a> from his relatives, activists and politicians.</p>
<p>Every officer involved has remained on the force, and no criminal charges have been filed. <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/judge-determine-future-nypd-cop-accused-killing-eric/story?id=63502832">Daniel Pantaleo</a>, the officer caught on video with his arm around Garner’s neck, was assigned to desk duty, but has stayed on the department’s payroll and even received an <a href="https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/09/officer-in-eric-garner-death-boosts-overtime-pay-105359">increase in his overtime pay</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/nyregion/eric-garner-death-daniel-pantaleo-chokehold.html">Garner’s death</a> was brutal, but as a former federal prosecutor and a <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=893598">criminal procedure professor</a> who studies how prosecutors handle police violence cases, the lack of federal charges doesn’t surprise me. </p>
<p>According to criminal justice professor <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rxOWsY4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Philip Stinson</a>, local prosecutors are often <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/us/police-involved-shooting-cases/index.html">reluctant to prosecute</a> the officers they work with to investigate cases. Reporting by the Marshall Project suggests they may not want to anger the police unions they often <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/05/23/prosecutor-elections-now-a-front-line-in-the-justice-wars">count on for political support</a>. And <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/386/">existing law</a> gives the police the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Based on <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-justice-system-fails-us-after-police-shootings-51978">my research</a>, it seems that this is just how the justice system works.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284554/original/file-20190717-147284-1u0ywqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo allegedly used a banned chokehold in the July 2014 death of Eric Garner.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Police-Chokehold-Death/6cae5301fcd04168826004a0b2969454/29/0">AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Obstacles to prosecution</h2>
<p>The case’s basic details are not contested. Pantaleo, who is white, was among a group of officers who approached Eric Garner, who was black, during a routine arrest for selling <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.09.016">untaxed, loose cigarettes</a>.</p>
<p>The encounter, which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWbwZz2L2Kg">a bystander shot using his phone</a> and the city’s medical examiner <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/08/01/337177619/nyc-man-s-chokehold-death-was-a-homicide-medical-examiner-says">ruled a homicide</a>, soon turned contentious. It culminated with Pantaleo taking Garner down to the pavement with his arm wrapped around his neck. Pantaleo is seen shortly afterward on the video pressing down on Garner’s head as other officers crowded around him.</p>
<p>A few months after Garner’s death, the Staten Island district attorney announced that he had presented the case to the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/12/03/368249828/reports-nyc-grand-jury-does-not-indict-officer-in-chokehold-case">grand jury</a>, but did not obtain an indictment. </p>
<p>A public <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-justice-system-fails-us-after-police-shootings-51978">outcry ensued</a>. Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1095796015620171">#BlackLivesMatter protests</a>.</p>
<p>But the fact is that it is extremely difficult to bring charges against on-duty cops for excessive force.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that in police use-of-force cases, allowance must be made “for the fact that police officers are <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/386/">often forced to make split-second judgments</a> – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” </p>
<p>Ever since, few juries have found police officers guilty of using excessive force. Since 2005, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/police-officers-convicted-fatal-shootings-are-exception-not-rule-n982741">only 35 officers have been found guilty</a> of charges related to killing civilians. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284559/original/file-20190717-147318-acpokt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A sign and plaque near where Eric Garner had a deadly encounter with the police in the Staten Island borough of New York City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Police-Chokehold-Death/bbc5132a3f9a4e0eb62056bdd8f1e837/4/0">AP Photo/Mark Lennihan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Federal civil rights</h2>
<p>Because of the Constitution’s protection against <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/double_jeopardy">double jeopardy</a>, which prevents anyone from being charged twice for the same crime, people aren’t usually prosecuted more than once for a single incident. But because U.S. law considers the states and the federal government to be <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-646_d18e.pdf">legally independent jurisdictions</a>, the Justice Department can indict an officer who has previously been charged under state law, even if he was acquitted. </p>
<p>When excessive force prosecutions against police officers don’t result in a conviction at the state level, the local U.S. attorney’s office may indict the officers for violating a person’s civil rights. This happened most notably in 1991 in the case of <a href="https://ktla.com/2019/07/08/barry-kowalski-who-won-convictions-in-rodney-king-civil-rights-case-dies-at-74/">Rodney King</a>, the black motorist who was beaten by Los Angeles police officers, and recently after the South Carolina mistrial of police officer Michael Slager, for shooting <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/walter-scott-shooting/walter-scott-shooting-michael-slager-ex-officer-sentenced-20-years-n825006">Walter Scott</a>, another unarmed black man, in the back. </p>
<p>But the type of proof needed to bring a federal civil rights case is much more demanding than for a state criminal case. While there are numerous state charges that might be brought against an <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938170/us-police-shootings-gun-violence-homicides">officer who causes the death of a civilian</a>, from murder to manslaughter to reckless endangerment to assault, there is only one route for a civil rights case. </p>
<p>In those cases, prosecutors must prove that officers used <a href="https://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/officer-safety/use-of-force/pages/welcome.aspx">excessive force</a> against a person, generally defined as force that was clearly unreasonable in the circumstances. In addition, they have to prove that the officer’s actions were “<a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/law-enforcement-misconduct">willful</a>.”</p>
<p>And willfulness is “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/eric-garner-william-barr-nypd-officer-daniel-pantaleo/index.html">the highest standard of intent</a> imposed by law,” as the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, Richard P. Donoghue, said in his public statement about Pantaleo. “An officer’s mistake, fear, misperception or even poor judgment does not constitute willful conduct under federal criminal civil rights law.” </p>
<h2>A narrow path</h2>
<p>Many news outlets reported that the decision to close the Garner case happened once U.S. Attorney General William Barr <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/07/16/ag-barr-made-decision-to-not-bring-charges-against-eric-garner-cop-official/">ordered the case dropped</a>, overruling the Civil Rights Division <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/eric-garner-william-barr-nypd-officer-daniel-pantaleo/index.html">in his own department</a>. </p>
<p>Activists have questioned Barr’s <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/william-barr-has-long-history-abusing-civil-rights-and-liberties-name">civil rights record</a>, noting that while serving as President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, Barr released a report titled “<a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/139583NCJRS.pdf">The Case for More Incarceration</a>.” Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/why-jeff-sessions-final-act-could-have-more-impact-than-expected">quashed the Justice Department’s attempts to reform policing</a>.</p>
<p>Still, I’m not sure the outcome would have been different with someone else in the White House. </p>
<p>In fact, disagreements on whether the case could be successfully prosecuted in federal court also snarled proceedings <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/nyregion/eric-garner-case-death-daniel-pantaleo.html">during the Obama administration</a>. And there was only ever a narrow path to prosecution.</p>
<p>When Donoghue gave a detailed explanation for his decision, he took an unusual step. Most of the time, when officers don’t get charged, the reasons are shrouded in secrecy. Instead, Donoghue gave a <a href="https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/07/16/eric-garner-federal-civil-rights-charges/">painstaking explanation of the ambiguities</a> in the video, the <a href="http://thechiefleader.com/news/news_of_the_week/city-medical-examiner-rebuts-pba-contention-about-garner-s-death/article_51d36d86-fa34-11e8-baae-eb6888c5f56e.html">conflicting medical expert reports</a>, and the reasons he believed the high standard of intent could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. </p>
<p>I once served in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which Donoghue now runs. I hate the fact that many people will never feel that justice was done in Eric Garner’s tragic and avoidable death.</p>
<p>Yet I’m not sure that I could have reached a different conclusion myself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caren Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The US legal system often gives the police the benefit of the doubt.Caren Morrison, Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1032982018-10-10T10:49:53Z2018-10-10T10:49:53ZResistance is a long game<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239812/original/file-20181008-72124-t3lu9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=52%2C778%2C4326%2C2440&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Being part of the resistance can be complicated.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/crowd-protesters-people-silhouettes-banners-raised-1059004964?src=RdapEdQNHnA22SC6p9UfSA-1-94">Yevgenij_D/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>What does resistance really look like?</p>
<p>In the United States, at least since November 2016, the idea of resistance seems to reflect a broadly imagined popular <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/trump-2017-resistance.html">opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump</a>. </p>
<p>At best that sentiment shows up in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/09/resistance-trump-blossoming-movement-la-kaufmann">thousands of grassroots organizations</a> that have taken to the streets or organized on behalf of local political candidates. At worst it functions as little more than the latest <a href="https://mashable.com/2017/05/06/the-resistance-has-been-hipsterifed/#GN2kErG_fkqu">lifestyle brand</a>.</p>
<p>Since The New York Times published an op-ed by an anonymous author declaring “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html">I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration</a>,” many commentators have weighed in about the extent to which the actions described in the piece rise to the level of “resistance.”</p>
<p>The anonymous op-ed writer, who claims membership in the resistance, projects an expectation, or perhaps a hope, that he will be able to claim, after the political “wars” over Trump have ended, a position of admirable rectitude.</p>
<p>Once the Trump administration comes to an end, this “quiet resistance” will no longer be necessary, since, as the op-ed writer asserts, these actions will have “preserved America’s democratic institutions.” Politics will be back to normal. Resistance, in this formulation, rights what is wrong.</p>
<p>As a historian of everyday life in 20th-century Germany, I approach the question of resistance with a rather different perspective, one that sees collaboration and resistance as <a href="https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/27/4/560/561567?redirectedFrom=fulltext">two sides of the same coin</a>. Even ardent anti-Nazis could act in ways that abetted the exercise of Nazi power.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239810/original/file-20181008-72110-2sbkia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times, Sept. 6, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Trump-New-York-Times/24006230ba544f43af4e2e44fa7063da/3/0">AP/Richard Drew</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Resistance or complicity – or both?</h2>
<p>The writer Sebastian Haffner, who fled Germany for England in 1938, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=HX2SK1g2VbkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Haffner+resisting+hitler+Kammergericht&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKmene4_DdAhVQhOAKHSKqBysQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&q&f=false">described</a> how Nazi stormtroopers confronted him in a Berlin library in March 1933. </p>
<p>When they asked him if he was an Aryan, Haffner answered, “Yes.” In retrospect, he believed his reply indirectly validated their question and thus facilitated Nazi efforts to eject Jews from the library.</p>
<p>Even if Haffner’s complicity was unintentional, his failure to speak out publicly on behalf of those whose humanity the Nazis denied helped that argument carry the day.</p>
<p>Nazi Germany was hardly a hotbed of resistance. Unlike Haffner, most Germans accommodated themselves to the Nazi regime and fought on its behalf until the bitter <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/reviews/187626/steege-stargardt-german-war-nation-under-arms-1939-1945">end of World War II</a>. </p>
<p>Ordinary people may have pushed back against the regime in small ways, whether by telling political jokes or surreptitiously listening to foreign radio broadcasts. But they only rarely challenged the legal and political structures on which <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_German_War.html?id=IThwCQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false">the regime’s genocidal violence depended</a>.</p>
<p>It is hard to distill people’s actions down to their moral or political essence, because those actions take place within a social, economic and political context of which these individual actors are also an integral part.</p>
<p>Was the <a href="http://stabikat.de/DB=1/SET=6/TTL=11/SHW?FRST=15">decision by a socialist politician in Berlin</a> to purchase a shop owned by a Jewish acquaintance an act of humanity that helped that person escape Nazi tyranny or an act of complicity that facilitated Nazi efforts to “Aryanize” the German economy? The fact that it was probably both helps to explain why it proved politically contentious in Berlin’s city assembly after World War II.</p>
<h2>Resistance as alibi</h2>
<p>Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, German politicians could point to examples of German resistance to <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520239104/war-stories">repudiate international assertions of German “collective guilt</a>.” It took the combined forces of the Soviet Red Army and the Western Allies to bring down the Nazi regime. But the existence of a few heroic resisters gave credence to the idea of another Germany, one that could safely play a role in postwar socioeconomic and political reconstruction.</p>
<p>Although the <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008294">July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler</a> has become the iconic example of heroic German resistance against the Nazi regime, it was not always a comfortable reference point. Well into the 1950s, many citizens of the new West German democracy still found these officers’ wartime <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2124976">repudiation of their oath to Hitler to have been an act of treason</a>.</p>
<p>Now, the <a href="https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/home/">German Resistance Memorial Center</a> is housed in the former offices of the Army High Command. In the building’s courtyard, a memorial statue and plaque mark the <a href="https://www.visitberlin.de/en/memorial-german-resistance">spot where Claus von Stauffenberg</a>, the officer who placed the bomb that failed to kill Hitler, was summarily executed.</p>
<p>Yet this resistance story is complicated, too. Many of the plotters were German nationalists, skeptical of democracy and <a href="https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/der-zweite-weltkrieg/widerstand-im-zweiten-weltkrieg/militaerischer-widerstand.html">initially enthusiastic about Germany’s military successes</a>.</p>
<h2>Musical echoes</h2>
<p>While in Berlin in the mid-1990s, I attended one of the annual commemorations of the failed 1944 assassination attempt. When a German military band played the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Deutschlandlied">German national anthem</a> in the courtyard where von Stauffenberg was shot, I couldn’t help but hear the text of the original (and now banned) first stanza: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” a 19th-century fantasy of national expansion that subsequently provided a soundtrack for Nazi imperial visions.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239926/original/file-20181009-72133-1pfc70z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Young Man With Hands Tied,’ a memorial to the military officers who died in an attempt to overthrow Hitler.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Richard_Scheibe,_Widerstand_1.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my mind’s ear, “Germany, Germany over everything” overwhelmed the replacement text celebrating unity, justice and freedom.</p>
<p>And that’s really the point. The modern German army, the Bundeswehr, may now celebrate the July 20 plotters who turned on Hitler. But that celebration nonetheless sounds the strains of military complicity that made that sort of resistance necessary in the first place.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the Nazi regime depended on Germans’ willingness to deny the humanity of those it deemed outside the German “national community.” </p>
<p>To the extent that people inside and outside of Germany openly acknowledged and defended that humanity – often at fatal cost to themselves – they resisted the Nazi state’s fundamental aims.</p>
<p>Those resisters nonetheless failed to bring down Hitler or halt his genocidal project. So those who long for a heroic resistance should remain cautious about the possibility that such a project will produce short term political transformation. But they did save individual lives, and the ongoing effort to <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674929777&content=toc">master the German past</a> has provided vital means to interrogate the present.</p>
<p>From my perspective as a historian, I believe a contemporary call to resist the long-running practices of dehumanization in American politics and society should strive to hold the Trump administration and its enablers accountable. </p>
<p>But, as the example of Nazi Germany suggests, it is also important to recognize that resistance is not about declaring victory following a return to political normalcy. Germany’s effort to wrestle with the sources and aftermath of the Nazi regime, including Germans’ role in abetting or resisting its crimes <a href="http://www.thehistoryinquestion.com/syllabus/interrogating-the-past/">has lasted more than 70 years</a>.</p>
<p>In the United States, too, resistance can define itself as an <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/244438">ongoing project</a>, not something that comes to an end with the Trump presidency. </p>
<p>Before the hashtag #Resist, the campaigns for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement">“Black Lives Matter”</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html">“Me Too”</a> bore public witness to what those movements recognized as the systematic inhumanity in American society. That’s a historical legacy that goes far beyond the Trump administration.</p>
<p>If would-be resisters confront the historical sources and contemporary legacies of American inequality and exploitation, they can create an enduring legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Steege does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The ‘resistance’ to the Trump administration has many forms, from grassroots organizing to making music. But a historian of 20th-century Germany asks whether opposing Trump is a real resistance.Paul Steege, Associate Professor of History, Villanova UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/960432018-07-17T11:36:11Z2018-07-17T11:36:11ZGoing viral: what social media activists need to know<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227414/original/file-20180712-27039-rcq2a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sign displaying the #metoo and #timesup message at the Women's March in San Francisco in January, 2018.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/january-20-2018-san-francisco-ca-1007583703?src=MDfcEqZAsapSH186CCu_Rg-1-3">Shutterstock/SundryPhotography</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Inspiring stories of social activism, such as the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/civil-rights-11321">Civil Rights movement</a> and the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-fight-for-climate-change-is-a-civil-rights-fight_us_58de5ef6e4b0fa4c0959884c">fight against climate change</a>, abound in history. And it is generally thought that the new social media era has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya">helped cases of activism</a> to succeed. But <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471772714000426">our research</a> has revealed some major threats, which activists need to understand if they are to be successful in getting their message across to the masses.</p>
<p>Social activism refers to a broad range of activities which are beneficial to society or particular interest groups. Social activists operate in groups to voice, educate and agitate for change, targeting global crises. </p>
<p>Take, for example, environmental groups such as <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/what-we-do/climate/">Greenpeace</a> which aim to curb climate change by targeting governments and major manufacturers with poor environmental records. Or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-sweatshop_movement">anti-sweatshop movement</a>, which started with a group of activists in the 19th century organising boycotts aimed at improving the conditions of workers in manufacturing places with low wages, poor working conditions and child labour.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1017309641363976192"}"></div></p>
<h2>Online social activism</h2>
<p>These days the voices of dissent have increasingly been carried via the evolving medium of the internet. From <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/voiceit/ct-hoy-from-metoo-to-timesup-how-undocumented-women-fit-in-the-women-s-movement-20180424-story.html">#Metoo, #TimesUp and #WeStrike</a> to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-43541179">#NeverAgain</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter">#BlackLivesMatter</a>, social activists wield the power of the internet to pressure powerful organisations.</p>
<p>The group <a href="https://350.org/about/">350.org</a>, for example, is made up of climate change activists. The group uses online campaigns and grassroots organising to oppose new coal, oil and gas projects. Its aim is to get society moving closer to clean energy solutions that work for all.</p>
<p>Online activism allows activists to organise events with high levels of engagement, focus and network strength. On the one hand, <a href="https://cas.uab.edu/humanrights/2016/12/07/age-online-activism/">researchers</a> suggest that the anonymity offered by online communication provides the possibility of expressing the views of marginalised minority groups that might otherwise be punished or sanctioned. Online activities reinforce collective identity by reducing attention to differences that exist within the group (such as education, social class, and ethnicity).</p>
<h2>The online threats</h2>
<p>But <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Save-Everything-Click-Here-Technological/dp/1610393708">other research</a> argues that while this modern form of activism may increase participation in online activities, it might merely create the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/mar/14/online-activism-social-media-engage">impression of activism</a>. Or it may even have negative consequences, such as creating social <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.1983">stereotypes</a> including those about feminists and environmentalists or <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20768205">getting social activists arrested</a> as is the case in authoritarian countries.</p>
<p>The aim of our research was to develop insights that would obtain better outcomes from online activism, targeting some of society’s most important issues. During our study, we collected data from three YouTube cases of online activism. Our findings suggest that online activism delivers a temporary shock to the organisational elites, help organise collective actions and amplify the conditions for movements to form. </p>
<h2>The elites fight back</h2>
<p>But these initial outcomes provoke the elites into action, resulting in counter measures – such as increased surveillance to track activists. For example, some governmental authorities intensified internet filtering, blocked access to several websites and decreased the speed of the internet connection to slow down social activism. These measures prompted self-censorship among activists and a loss of interest among the public in relation to the cause and contributed to the ultimate decline of social activism over time. </p>
<p>Our study challenged the <a href="https://theconversation.com/slacktivism-that-works-small-changes-matter-69271">optimistic hype</a> around online activism in enabling grassroots social movements by suggesting there is a complex relationship between activists and those groups they are targeting, which makes the outcomes very difficult to predict. As different parties with different interests intervene, they either encourage or inhibit activism. </p>
<p>While <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-metoo-is-an-impoverished-form-of-feminist-activism-unlikely-to-spark-social-change-86455">encouraging actions</a> can take the form of support (such as the thousands of women around the world who posted on social media sharing their stories under #metoo), <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-metoo-is-an-impoverished-form-of-feminist-activism-unlikely-to-spark-social-change-86455">inhibiting actions</a> may come in the form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry">information asymmetry</a> (strategies such as filtering and surveillance) from elites.</p>
<p>Inhibiting strategies are not limited to authoritarian organisations. Senior managers may also monitor email correspondence of staff, set up structures and hierarchies for access to organisational information, and use information provided by secretive companies to check the status of their employees (for example, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/16/blacklisted-workers-hotline">blacklisting workers perceived as trouble-makers</a>). </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"905119017207308288"}"></div></p>
<h2>Less emotion and more strategic patience</h2>
<p>Online activists should understand that the dynamics of reaching collective action might not necessarily be the result of critical thinking, lifelong learning or other dimensions of civic engagement. Journalist Nicholas Kristoff <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000924mag-sweatshops.html">has talked about</a> how the anti-sweatshop movement “risks harming the impoverished workers it is hoping to help” by causing mass job redundancies. Similarly, our main message is that online activism could prompt reactions that will result in unintended and long lasting consequences for the activists involved.</p>
<p>A common and frequently used approach that risks these types of consequences is to share emotive information through social media. While this is used to inform and capture people’s attention and mobilise as many people as possible, our study suggests that more thought should be put into the consequences of information sharing and what information is most appropriate to be shared.</p>
<p>Activists may need to spend more time and energy to create and share information that is less emotive and help people learn about the underlying causes of problem. For example, the activism videos we have researched and commonly see on the internet are essentially reactive and emotive.</p>
<p>Instead of focusing on the problem and the need for change, activists can share information that explains why and how the current situation has been created and what can be learned for the future. Online activism in such manner can gradually lead to the development of people who are capable of <a href="http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm">generating new knowledge and wisdom</a> to respond to changing social environments. However, that requires strategic patience and that is often a scarce resource among activists desperate for change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96043/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shahla Ghobadi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Social media is a great tool for activists campaigning for social justice. But if it is not used with caution it can end up working against them.Shahla Ghobadi, Assistant Professor, Software, Design, Social Activism, University of ManchesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/658472016-09-21T20:32:46Z2016-09-21T20:32:46ZPolice shootings and race in America: Five essential reads<p><em>Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of stories related to policing and the Black Lives Matter movement.</em></p>
<p>Police and protesters clashed last night in Charlotte after Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old African-American man, was <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/keith-lamont-scott-protests-erupt-police-killing-160921045737483.html">shot and killed</a> by a police officer.</p>
<p>Lamont’s death followed a shooting last week in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where another African-American man, Terrence Crutcher, 40, was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/us/oklahoma-tulsa-police-shooting/index.html">also killed</a> by a police officer.</p>
<p>Police brutality, and the response of groups such as Black Lives Matter, have drawn renewed national attention to issues of race and policing in America. Here are highlights of The Conversation’s coverage of these issues.</p>
<h2>Violence takes a toll</h2>
<p>Through social media, millions of Americans witness images of the death of African-Americans. For African-Americans, the repeated experience of watching these events can have profound impact on their well-being. As pediatrician <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nia-heard-garris-283549">Nea Heard-Garris</a>, researcher at the University of Michigan, writes about <a href="https://theconversation.com/protecting-our-children-after-the-wounds-of-racism-divide-us-even-more-62471">the impact on black children</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Children can be impacted by traumatic events if they identify with the victim regardless of geography. Think of how youth of color everywhere may identify with these events, based on the ages and races of the victims… we need to protect our children from being the indirect victims of these events as well.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Addressing the problem of anti-black police violence also requires taking into account <a href="https://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264">the traumatic and long-term deadly effects on the living,</a> who are often women. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/christen-a-smith-282479">Christen Smith</a>, professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We know from the stories of black mothers who have lost their children to state violence that the lingering anguish of living in the aftermath of police violence kills black women gradually. Depression, suicide, PTSD, heart attacks, strokes and other debilitating mental and physical illnesses are just some of the diseases black women develop as they try to put their lives back together after they lose a child.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nor are police immune from the effects of violence. A study by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/john-violanti-282415">John Violanti</a> of the University of Buffalo, State University of New York found that police have a 69 percent greater risk of committing suicide <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tragic-reminder-that-policing-takes-a-toll-on-officers-too-62256">than other working populations</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The top five most stressful events that police reported were, in this order: exposure to battered or dead children, killing someone in the line of duty, fellow officer killed in the line of duty, situations requiring the use of force and physical attack on one’s person.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Searching for solutions</h2>
<p>Those seeking solutions have scrutinized police departments for their training, practices and culture. Addressing the masculine, aggressive disposition promoted in many departments may be key to reducing police violence, <a href="https://theconversation.com/training-to-reduce-cop-macho-and-contempt-of-cop-could-reduce-police-violence-51983">according to research</a> from <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/frank-rudy-cooper-211706">Frank Roody Cooper</a>, a professor of law at Suffolk University.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“An awareness of the way cop macho leads to "contempt of cop” punishments will not prevent all police uses of force. Training machismo out of police officers’ habits would be worth the effort, though, because it would allow the deescalation of many potential police-civilian conflicts.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Police brutality against blacks in the civil rights era, as is the case today, is effective in <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-black-lives-matter-means-beyond-policing-reform-62332">galvanizing minorities around other core issues</a> facing their communities, writes <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/garrett-felber-282957">Garrett Felber</a>, a scholar of 20th-century African-American history and social movements at the University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The issue at stake, then, is how to take this opening and not only begin to secure justice for the lives lost to police violence, but also to expand on questions about what it means to value black life.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Protests erupted against the killing of black men by police in Tulsa and Charlotte. This roundup looks at research on racial violence and explains where there might be potential solutions.Danielle Douez, Associate Editor, Politics + SocietyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/657382016-09-21T19:00:23Z2016-09-21T19:00:23ZHow violence and racism are related, and why it all matters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138585/original/image-20160921-21720-1rvywmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students make their feelings known during a fees protest at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nic Bothma/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Racism is a form of both visible and invisible violence. Veteran peace researcher Johan Galtung has shown that violence is cultural, structural and <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/typologies-violence-and-peace">direct</a>. This triad was adapted in South Africa as interlinked symbolic, structural, psychological and <a href="https://www.academia.edu/22684176/Basic_guide_to_a_deeper_and_longer_analysis_of_violence">physical</a> violence against “otherness”.</p>
<p>This conceptual framework can be applied to direct and indirect experiences of racism, as well as to other forms of violence. The most recent manifestation of these has been the outcry over <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-08-30-pretoria-girls-high-a-protest-against-sacrificed-cultures-and-identities/#.V9kK01srLIU">black hair</a>. Some referred to it as a <a href="http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/08/30/Lesufi-suspends-Pretoria-school%E2%80%99s-hair-policy-%E2%80%93-and-%E2%80%98mini-war-on-campus%E2%80%99">hair war</a>. It revealed a cumulative visceral, tacit and explicit knowledge of racism as violence.</p>
<p>The hatred of the physicality, cultures and identities of “othered” groups is a global phenomenon. America’s “Black lives matter” movement arose out of the deaths of black people because blackness has effectively been <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/">criminalised</a>. The “animalisation” of blackness has its roots in <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2016-01-14-racism-is-so-much-more-than-words">slavery</a>.</p>
<p>States do not record the structural violence of racism as part of crime statistics. But this invisible violence has driven some people to self-harm. It has masked [forms of suicide](https://books.google.co.za/books?id=Qc-SAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&dq=masked+forms+of+suicide&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWp-3JjpTPAhXGIcAKHSvRAaoQ6AEIQDAF#v=onepage&q=masked%20forms%20of%20suicide&f=false](https://books.google.co.za/books?id=Qc-). It shortens lives and <a href="http://www.dpme.gov.za/publications/Reports%20and%20Other%20Information%20Products/Development%20Indicators%202010.pdf">kills babies</a>. </p>
<p>Internalised white superiority and internalised black inferiority remain resilient in South Africa. This is despite resistance to racism over centuries. It begs the question: after 22 years of democracy, what have most of colonialism and apartheid’s beneficiaries done to understand these evils? What have they done to delink from them, and to dismantle racism?</p>
<h2>A “post-conflict” society?</h2>
<p>The end of apartheid in <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/unit.php?id=65-24E-6">1994</a> only interrupted racism at a political level. It did not automatically turn South Africa into the <a href="https://soc.kuleuven.be/crpd/files/working-papers/wp01.pdf">“post-conflict society”</a> many claim it is.</p>
<p>In this sense, feminist writers <a href="http://www.jacana.co.za/book-categories/current-affairs-a-history/rape-a-south-african-nightmare-detail">Pumla Gqola</a> and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=qWvbjFU0H1kC&printsec=frontcover&dq=racism,+violence,+pumla+ngola&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidx7ehwI_PAhWJL8AKHUEFCMoQuwUITjAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false">Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela</a> help us to think differently about violence.</p>
<p>They look beyond visible manifestations of violence in their analyses of physical violence (rape, bodily harm and murder). They show violence also to be symbolic (othering), structural (patriarchy, economic inequality) and psychological (intimate partner abuse and trauma).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138475/original/image-20160920-11120-38kych.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pupils protest against racism at Collegiate Girls High School in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eugene Coetzee/The Herald</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is easy to suggest that black people are in charge of South Africa and must <a href="http://africasacountry.com/2015/09/achille-mbembe-on-the-state-of-south-african-politics/">“stop acting like victims”</a>. But this only shows a tragic disregard for the intersection of visible and invisible ways in which racism continues to afflict people. These experiences are routinely written off as <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-04-20-uct-students-get-stuck-into-race-debate/#.V9kjz1srLIU%5D">anecdotes</a>.</p>
<p>Jamaican psychiatrist Frederick Hickling <a href="http://www.mghglobalpsychiatry.org/downloads/AfricanDiasporaProceeding.pdf">argues</a> that even in countries</p>
<blockquote>
<p>where blacks are in the majority and are in political control of the society, the tangible elements of the racist delusional system still control the reality for black people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These elements link individual perpetrators and victims to a visible and invisible violent structure in four important ways.</p>
<h2>Racism as symbolic violence</h2>
<p>Symbolic violence is a form of “othering”, defined as</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the process of perceiving or portraying someone or something as fundamentally different or alien.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sociologist <a href="http://cges.umn.edu/docs/Bourdieu_and_Wacquant.Symbolic_Violence.pdf">Pierre Bourdieu</a> explains how this ascribes inferiority and superiority. The case of school <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-slavery-to-colonialism-and-school-rules-a-history-of-myths-about-black-hair-64676">rules about hair</a> is an example. Galtung argues that symbolic violence justifies and legitimises structural, psychological and physical violence.</p>
<p>Racism; the preference for Eurocentric knowledge and <a href="https://aboutabicycle.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/linda-tuhiwai-smith-decolonizing-methodologies-research-and-indigenous-peoples.pdf">methods of producing it</a> are key examples of symbolic violence. The second and third examples marginalise and silence indigenous voices. They lead to assimilation and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=Aq5PJWaSTzUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=I+write+what+I+like&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiyguPSjZTPAhWLI8AKHanzBUEQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=I%20write%20what%20I%20like&f=false">self-hatred</a>. Oppressed people internalise everything about the oppressor as superior.</p>
<h2>Racism as structural, psychological and physical violence</h2>
<p>Vusi Gumede seems to <a href="http://www.vusigumede.com/pages/acpapers_log/9.html">suggest</a> that structural violence is economically driven. “Othered” people around the world continue to be over-represented in society’s stigmatised institutions. This is especially true in its prisons.</p>
<p>This is a result of inequality, unemployment, poverty and exclusion. It is driven by criminalisation and constant surveillance. It could also be because of engagement in counter-violence defined as crime. Hickling points out that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>without control of the commanding heights of the economy, black people are destined to eke out an existence […] in a social reality that relegates them to an economic second class.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Racism produces inter-generationally transmitted trauma. This can persist for decades and even centuries after the <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10538183">original trauma</a>. It takes far more than talk therapy and the processing of emotions to address the internalised superiority and inferiority induced by racism.</p>
<p>No one is held criminally liable for the uninterrupted invisible violence of racism. Unless, of course, it manifests in some forms of psychological and interpersonal physical violence.</p>
<p>But black people are held legally accountable for visible counter-violence against racism.</p>
<p>The understanding of violence as both invisible and visible provides a framework within which “othered” people can understand that experiences of racism are socially patterned. And that it requires a holistic solution.</p>
<p>This might include our knowledge of dehumanisation, humiliation, silencing, alienation, exclusion, economic dispossession, shame, grief, trauma and other masked experiences. All represent multiple and simultaneous effects of racism.</p>
<p>It can also counter the pervasive denial about the ways in which racism is kept in place culturally, socially, economically, psychologically and physically.</p>
<p>This framework can contribute to dislodging not only racism’s manifestations, but also its structure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65738/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr. Sarah Henkeman is affiliated with the Social Law Project, UWC. Centre of Criminology, UCT and Zakheni Arts Therapy Foundation.</span></em></p>States do not record the structural violence of racism as part of crime statistics. But this invisible violence has driven some people to self-harm. It has also masked forms of suicide.Sarah Malotane Henkeman, Currently Senior Staff Associate in the Faculty of Law, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.