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In the universe’s latest variation on the “they call themselves that, so why can’t I?” idiocy, Reuters journalist Matthew Keys offers this take on the Jeremy Lin ESPN scandal:
“So we’re all just going to ignore the fact that Jeremy Lin used the word “Chink” in his Xanga username in 2004, right?
Just wanted to be clear, since, you know, we’re firing ESPN headline writers for being insensitive and criticizing ESPN anchors for using the word during play-by-play.
At what point do we draw the line between “acceptable use” and “unacceptable use?” Do we further divide people by saying it’s okay for some people to use the word, while barring others?
Or can we all agree that nobody should use these sorts of words, in any context?”
Here’s the thing that burns me up most about this tired, absurd claim: nobody would ever make it in any other situation. The reclamation of slurs is the only circumstance in which this argument is ever raised.
I’ve been known to refer to myself as an idiot on occasion. Does that make it okay for journalists to refer to me as “Angus Johnston, historian, blogger, and idiot?” No.
If an Olympic soccer player used the email address sexxxykutie3914@hotmail.com in junior high, would that make it legitimate for ESPN to mention her sexiness every time she scored a goal? Of course not.
The New York Times doesn’t call Senator Rand Paul “Aqua Buddha.” It doesn’t casually refer to Beck as a loser, Thom Yorke as a creep, or Prince as a sexy motherfucker (though it totally should).
Why? Because the “if you ever use a word to describe yourself, it gives everyone else on the planet the right to use that word to describe you in every situation ever for the rest of your life and you don’t ever get to complain” rule is a rule that doesn’t exist.
It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a thing. Everybody knows that. Nobody thinks otherwise. Nobody even pretends otherwise unless they’re trying to come up with a reason why it’s okay for them to call someone a chink or a faggot or a bitch.
Today is the 70th anniversary of #EO9066, the FDR executive order that authorized Japanese deportation from the West Coast during WWII.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 19, 2012
I just posted a string of tweets, including the one above, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. EO 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the exclusion of Japanese Americans from large portions of the United States solely on the basis of their ethnicity. It led almost immediately to seizure of property, ethnic curfews, and — on May 3, 1942 — the authorization of the establishment of internment camps to house those who would be relocated from exclusion zones.
- 70 years ago today FDR #EO9066 created the Japanese-American internment policy. 120,000 people, 2/3 of them citizens, were imprisoned.
- The number of Japanese Americans interned without cause by FDR was greater than the population of Wichita, KS. #EO9066
- 62% of Japanese Americans interned by FDR were US citizens. (The rest were immigrants barred from naturalization due to their race.) #EO9066
- Americans with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry were interned, including orphan infants. #EO9066
- Internment order included Americans of Taiwanese and Korean descent, since Japan occupied those countries. #EO9066
- “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.” —LA Times editorial endorsing Japanese-American internment #EO9066
- Surviving #EO9066 internees received $20,000 compensation each in 1988. Families of internees who had died got nothing.
- I said a few minutes ago that Americans with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry were interned. I was wrong. The cutoff was 1/16th. #EO9066
- The 1944 Korematsu decision declared the Japanese-American internment constitutional. It has never been overturned. #EO9066
- “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism.” —Justice Frank Murphy dissenting in Korematsu. #EO9066
- Justice Murphy’s Korematsu dissent was the first Supreme Court opinion ever to use the word “racism.” #EO9066
- “military urgency…demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast.” —Korematsu, majority opinion. #EO9066
- “Korematsu…has been convicted…merely of being present in the state…where all his life he has lived.” –Korematsu dissent. #EO9066
- Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland, CA in 1919. He was arrested in San Leandro in 1942 for being Japanese-American. #EO9066
- In 1946 Fred Korematsu married Kathryn Pearson in Michigan. (Interracial marriage was illegal in California at the time.) #EO9066
- Fred and Kathryn Korematsu moved back to California in 1949, the year after interracial marriage was legalized in the state. #EO9066
- Fred Korematsu’s conviction was set aside in 1983. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. He died in 2005. #EO9066
- Two years before his death Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing for legal rights for Guantanamo detainees. #EO9066
- Survivors of the Japanese-American internment camps include George Takei, Norman Mineta, Isamu Noguchi, and Pat Morita. #EO9066
- Los Angeles internees were housed in stables at the Santa Anita racetrack while awaiting relocation. #EO9066
- George Takei’s first schooling was under the grandstands at Santa Anita while his family was interned in a stable. #EO9066
- “We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless.” –Harold Ickes. #EO9066
In September of last year the Associated Press revealed that the New York Police Department had, in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, spied on more than half a dozen of the city’s campus Muslim student groups. Today it reported that the NYPD’s surveillance went much further.
In a story published this afternoon, the AP described how the NYPD:
- Set up a “safe house” in New Brunswick, New Jersey, tasked with monitoring Muslim students at Rutgers.
- Sent an undercover officer along on a 2009 whitewater rafting trip attended by 18 Muslim students from City College.
- Used a student informant to keep tabs on Muslims at Syracuse University.
- Plotted surveillance of “Somali Professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo” in coordination with police in that city.
- Conducted daily reviews of “websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations” at sixteen campuses in four states.
According to the AP, Muslim student groups monitored by the NYPD included those at “Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson University; the Newark and New Brunswick campuses of Rutgers; and the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.”
The faculty of the University of California at Davis has condemned the use of police in response to non-violent student protests, but overwhelmingly rejected a resolution expressing no confidence in the chancellor whose deployment of police in such circumstances led to the use of pepper spray against campus activists last November.
About a thousand of the university’s 2,700 eligible faculty members voted online on three resolutions addressing the question of their confidence in Chancellor Linda Katehi’s leadership. They rejected a no-confidence resolution by a 697-312 margin, while approving two — one more critical than the other — that endorsed her continued leadership of the university.
The resolution which garnered the most votes among the faculty condemned “both the dispatch of police in response to non-violent protests and the use of excessive force that led to the deplorable pepper-spraying” and opposed “all violent police responses to non-violent protests on campus.” The deployment of police against student protesters, it said should only be “considered” after other “efforts to bridge differences” had been “exhausted,” and only in “direct consultation with the leadership of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.”
It went on, however, to say that Katehi’s decision to deploy the police under inappropriate circumstances did not “outweigh” her “impeccable performance of all her other duties.” That resolution was approved 635 to 343.
A second resolution of support for Katehi, less critical than the first, passed by a narrower 586 to 408 margin. That resolution withheld direct criticism of the chancellor’s actions in connection with the pepper spray incident, which it described obliquely as “the horrific events of November 18, 2011.” Sidestepping the widespread criticism of Katehi’s orders to the police and her initial public embrace of their actions, it praised her for moving “expeditiously to to replace the flawed communications in the two days following the events with a campus-wide dialogue.”
The rejected resolution declared that the faculty “lack[ed] confidence” in the chancellor
“In light of the events on the quadrangle of the UC Davis campus on the afternoon of Friday November 18, 2011, in light of Chancellor Linda Katehi’s email to faculty of November 18 in which she admitted that she had ordered the police to take action against the students who were demonstrating on the quadrangle and said that she had had “no option” but to proceed in this way, and in light of the failure of Chancellor Katehi to act effectively to resolve the resulting crisis in the intervening days.”
The main takeaway from these series of votes is, of course, Katehi’s support among the faculty — or at least among the 65% of the 37% of the eligible faculty who voted for the most popular resolution. But it’s also worth noting that the most popular idea among all of those put forward in the three resolutions was the proposition that police force should not be used to break up nonviolent student protests.
Such a policy, if implemented, would represent a dramatic and welcome change from UC practice both before and after the November 18 pepper spray incident, and sustained faculty pressure would go a long way toward making such a policy a reality. Let’s hope that these resolutions represent a first step toward a more engaged faculty commitment to civil liberties on campus, and to the well-being of their students.
April 2013 Update | A federal judge this week ordered the Obama administration to end its opposition to over-the-counter Plan B. In response, White House press secretary Jay Carney reiterated the administration’s position.
• • •
February 2012 | President Obama’s daughters are just thirteen and ten, but the guy just can’t stop talking about the possibility they’ll be romantically inclined someday, and about how much that fact freaks him out.
Just yesterday, when he was visiting the Master Lock factory in Wisconsin, Obama joked that the company’s industrial “super locks” might “come in handy” for him as “the father of two girls who are soon to be in high school.” For now, he added, he’s “counting on the fact that when they go to school there are men with guns with them.”
Gross.
And this isn’t the only time he’s made that kind of joke.
Two years ago, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he told the Jonas Brothers that his daughters were “huge fans.” He then warned the singing group not to “get any ideas” because he controls an arsenal of predator drones.
Last year, speaking at a Tennessee high school’s commencement, he noted that the school’s principal’s daughter had chosen to go to a different school because she “was worried that the boys would be afraid to talk to her if her mom was lurking in the hallways.” Because of this, he said, he’d decided to announce that his “next job will be principal at Sasha and Malia’s high school — and then I’ll be president of their college.”
A few months later a reporter, noting that he’d given the girls a puppy when he first won the presidency, asked what he’d get them if he won re-election. He replied that he’d “be getting them a continuation of Secret Service so that when boys want to start dating them, they are going to be surrounded by men with guns.”
These jokes are freaking creepy. Set aside the fact that Obama’s predator drones are estimated to have killed more than a hundred innocent children. Set aside the fact that Obama was joking about three men aged seventeen, twenty, and twenty-two “getting ideas” about girls who were then eight and eleven years old. Set aside the inappropriateness of a father meddling in the romantic decisions of his college age kids. (And set aside as well the casual, ugly assertion that his daughters will be interested in, and only interested in, “boys.”)
The biggest problem with all these jokes is that at their core they’re not really jokes.
When the Obama administration overruled the FDA’s scientists and policymakers on expanding morning-after pill access for teenagers last December, he said he endorsed the decision “as the father of two daughters,” and claimed that “most parents” would agree with him. Though he claimed that the decision was based on the possibility of “a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old” being able to “buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect … alongside bubble gum or batteries,” the fact is that drugstores are filled with over-the-counter medications far more dangerous than Plan B, any one of which any ten-year-old can buy without restriction.
What makes the morning-after pill different is that it allows teenage girls to take control of their own sexual decisions and those decisions’ consequences. The mentality that says that “most parents” would want to deprive their daughters of that agency is the mentality that assumes that most parents fantasize about being the gatekeeper of who their daughters talk to in high school and college. It’s a mentality that jokes about using violence and the threat of violence to keep your daughters from becoming sexually active.
These jokes aren’t benign. With them, the president is normalizing a patriarchal, sexist, adversarial take on parenthood — and on fathering daughters specifically. (It’s not an accident that Michelle Obama doesn’t make these jokes, or that she instead jokes approvingly about her daughters’ crushes on the Secret Service agents who protect them.)
If Obama’s children were sons, he wouldn’t be talking about using industrial super locks on them when they got to high school. He wouldn’t be musing about his plans to keep his kids from talking to girls when they got to college. He wouldn’t be threatening Selena Gomez with predator drones. He just wouldn’t.
Being the father of daughters is complicated. It can be difficult. But a father’s job is to help his daughter to develop a strong, healthy sense of her own desires and her own boundaries, and the confidence to express them. A father’s job is to teach his daughter that she can and should be brave, and fearless, and take risks. A father’s job is to let his daughter know that he’s got her back. A father’s job is to let her know that what she’s going through is normal, and appropriate, and isn’t going to be a barrier to him continuing to be there for her. His job is to make it clear that his desire to protect her and keep her safe doesn’t mean that she needs to sneak around behind his back, to make it clear that she doesn’t need to stay a child forever, that she can and should and must go out and explore the world for herself.
I suspect Obama is a pretty good dad. But his blind spot on this stuff is doing real harm to other people’s daughters, and quite possibly his own.
He should cut it the hell out.
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