Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances, which need to include all kinds of people, from trans to working people to those taxi drivers that J. K. Rowling is worried about. Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.

Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world.

“Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception.

you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections.

The surrogates Trump assembled were able to appeal to the "frat bro or finance bro culture," says Janfaza, because "to them, many of these men who have built these companies, ecosystems and media platforms, show them a version of success to work toward." "The way that Trump was able to include many of these male figures in his cohort was very impactful," she added. "And while yes, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Beyonce also have massive, massive audiences, we have to understand that the way young people are consuming their media and entertainment just looks drastically different than it did for prior generations."

The claim that simpler gender recognition will lead to unsafe changing rooms and toilets is further undermined by a strange and ignominious chapter in North Carolina’s history where, in 2016, these exact concerns led to the introduction of a law demanding people only use toilets which correspond to the gender stated on their birth certificate. The new law not only caused a rise in transphobia, it also opened up the possibility of increased harassment of women in public restrooms who weren’t transgender but who didn’t dress or present in a ‘feminine’ way. It also meant that transgender men were being forced to use women’s toilets. In the end, a federal judge got rid of the dangerous and unworkable legislation in 2019.

“…often cite fear of safety and privacy violations in public restrooms if such laws are passed…No empirical evidence has been gathered to test such laws’ effects…This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces.

Men who prey on vulnerable women are a worldwide problem, but this has nothing whatever to do with trans people. On the contrary, trans people are generally far more worried about accessing toilets and changing rooms than cisgender women, because they fear being verbally abused or attacked by people who don’t think they should be there.

It would be useful to know of the evidence you have that trans rights are affecting education and/or safeguarding. Trans rights do not affect either, just as the right to equal marriage did not affect the rights of cisgender heterosexual people to marry

We do not consider it a crime for women to express concern. We do however consider it abusive and damaging when people conflate trans women with male sexual predators, impute sexual criminality to trans identities, suggest that support of a trans child is parental homophobia and misogyny, and share uncorroborated and inaccurate information which severely damages the lives of trans and non-binary people.

By creating a character who can’t be written off as another predictably problematic man, “Tár” draws our attention to how Lydia learned to become one. And, by following Lydia closely, the film relieves the audience of a neurotic cultural obsession with the artistic legacies of real-life powerful figures, focussing instead on their tools. In lieu of asking “Can you separate the art from the artist?” or “But what will happen to these poor, bad men?,” “Tár” asks, “What does power look like, feel like, not only within an institution but within an individual psyche?”

At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power.

I do not mean to suggest that art works can be divorced from social context, only that our reactions to them are not, in themselves, public statements, acts of harm, or good deeds.

Everyone can - and often does - have confident opinions about those questions. But you can't really answer them in any objective way unless we can agree on a definition of the word.There are basically two categories of definitions:The interpersonal definitions. Something like "Prejudice or antagonism directed against another person based on their membership in a racial group."The sociological definitions. Something like "A highly organized system of 'race'-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/'race' supremacy."

“Eliminated the idea of personal racism” is kinda an overstatement isn’t it? Like yeah, it exists, but interpersonal racism against white people just doesn’t do anything, or at least nothing worse than any other kind of insult like calling them an asshole. It maybe hurts white feelings a little and that’s it, but most white people don’t even seem offended by terms like “Mayo monkey” or “cracker” and I would guess it’s because those terms aren’t representative of white people being systemically oppressed for being white, since that’s never been a thing. There’s an important distinction in that things like N word or the propaganda trying to paint black and brown people as being criminals is literally tied to slavery

Basically, these kinds of disagreements boil down to there being two ways to define racism: a colloquial definition, where racism is just treating someone differently due to their race, and a more academic definition drawn from the social sciences and philosophy where racism is, to use the standard simplification "prejudice plus power."

You're using the first definition, on which you are correct that it appears to be possible to be racist against white people; and your sister is using the second, on which she is correct that it would seem impossible to be racist to white people, at least in the context of a society where whites are and have historically been in a position of power over other racial groups.

Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)