Cancelling Dr. Seuss

[jimbogumbo]

You seriously think calling the place a dumpster fire is grounds for being fired?

That's not fair.  It was a floating dumpster fire.

Like the Cuyahoga River?

"Burn on, big river, burn on"

[dismalist]

National Arts Centre's 1st 'Black Out' night sparks debate — and backlash

The website for the Canadian Stage theatre in Toronto states its May 2022 hosting of Is God Is was "an evening exclusive to the Afro/Black community," while the Black Out website says the New York theatre that kicked off the trend three years earlier had all 804 of its seats occupied by "Black-identifying" theatre-goers.

A Jan. 16 release about the NAC's "Black Out" night before the text was changed. (National Arts Centre website/Twitter)

A news release last month from the NAC initially used similar language, stating the Feb. 17 performance would welcome "an all-Black identifying audience." Ticketmaster's website said the night was "exclusively" for Black audience members.

Note:The National Arts Centre is a federal Crown corporation with a mandate under the National Arts Centre Act to develop the performing arts in the National Capital Region and to assist the Canada Council for the Arts in developing the performing arts elsewhere in Canada.

My question would be: Are they hurting anyone? I looked up the website for the play, and it claims they do not turn anyone away. So far, so good.

I'm trying to think of analogies. Some come to mind, but only from the past. Would I have gone into a black bar in Harlem? Yes, when I was young and not so risk averse. I never did, but someone older I know did ca. 1970. He was looked at funny, not too aggressively, but left in peace, presumably because he looked so vulnerable! He was not perceived as a threat. It was not too different in Irish bars, by the way. Anything local, really, this was pretty normal.

To look at a very different analogy: The Apollo Theater at 125th Street during the Harlem Renaissance! That declared itself open to black audiences in 1934 and presented what was thought to be desirable by the local black population. That's where black entertainment was created and found. However, whites were welcomed, and whites went uptown to the Apollo for entertainment. The declaration of integration and the finding and promoting of black artists was enabled and promoted by the lure of profits.

I have grave doubts that the play will produce another Harlem Renaissance no matter how it is financed. But segregation must not be mandated and paid for by governments. That's how the original segregation post-emancipation came to last so long.

[jimbogumbo]

Duval County concerned about bios on the Queen of Salsa, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente: https://abcnews.go.com/US/thousands-books-including-black-hispanic-historical-titles-review/story?id=97082518

[Wahoo Redux]

Duval County concerned about bios on the Queen of Salsa, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente: https://abcnews.go.com/US/thousands-books-including-black-hispanic-historical-titles-review/story?id=97082518

Yup.  Some posters have opined that our libraries should be hypersensitive to the caprices of hypersensitive individuals who have problems with books about people who, say, are not like them.

Well, here ya'go. 

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: In Austin, Alleged Threats for Criticizing DEI

[marshwiggle]

IHE: In Austin, Alleged Threats for Criticizing DEI

Lowery is also a senior fellow at the business school's Salem Center for Policy. In March, The Austin-American Statesman wrote that the Salem Center hosted Atlas.

At the event, Atlas, a former COVID-19 adviser to President Trump, "falsely told a small crowd that COVID-19 vaccines present serious safety concerns and advocated against inoculating children," the paper reported.

It's really unfortunate that covid became so politicized in the US compared to other places, so that anti-vax sentiment can be assumed to accompany any non-progressive views. In lots of other countries, anti-vaxxers represented a much smaller proportion of conservatives. It seems like Lowery's views on all kinds of other things can be dismissed as a consequence of that, even if they're unrelated (and would be in most parts of the world).

[Langue_doc]

A Left-Leaning College Didn't Want to Offend, So It Closed Down Her Art Show

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/opinion/censorship-iranian-artist-macalester.html

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The work of the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, "Taravat," incorporates Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled "Blasphemy X," depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, "Woman, Life, Freedom," the slogan of Iran's recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.

When "Taravat" opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus on internationalism, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing Talepasand's show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.

Those curtains astonished Talepasand, an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University. "To literally veil a 'Woman, Life, Freedom' exhibition?" she exclaimed to me.

The uproar over "Taravat" was directly connected to a recent controversy at Hamline University, a few minutes' drive away from Macalester, where an adjunct art history professor named Erika López Prater was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of Muhammad in an art history class. In late January, Macalester — where, as it happens, Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion between faculty and students, most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There, some students described being upset by "Taravat."

"I invited them to share what emotions they were holding in their bodies," one faculty member wrote in an email, part of which was shared with Talepasand. "They named 'undervalued, frustrated, surprised, disrespected, ignored, and it felt like hit after hit.'"

Ultimately, Macalester handled the student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired, and after being closed for a few days, "Taravat" reopened. But the administration's response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.

In a message to campus, the provost, Lisa Anderson-Levy, said that Macalester understands "that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community." The black curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper on the gallery's glass entrance and frosted glass panels on its mezzanine windows, protecting passers-by from "unintentional or nonconsensual viewing," in the words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door. Next to it, some students put up a yellow sign asking potential visitors to show solidarity with them by not going in.

"There's a lot of nuance and complexity in these kinds of situations," Anderson-Levy said in a statement when I reached out to talk. "We believe that taking time to slow down and listen carefully to the diverse perspectives across our campus community allowed us to create space for conversation and learning."

At least some students seemed to be learning to approach contentious art cautiously. A senior sociology major who'd visited the gallery with their sculpture class when Talepasand was still assembling the exhibition told me they were thinking of returning to see what had changed. But they worried that could be an act of entitlement, and felt the need to reflect "on my place as a white person" who is "not affected by the harms as much as others."

Some readers might object to dwelling on one instance of misguided sensitivity at one small college when the country is in the midst of a nationwide frenzy of right-wing book bans, public school speech restrictions, and wild attempts to curtail drag performances. But I think this moment, when we're facing down a wave of censorship inspired by religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right to be shielded from discomfiting art. If progressive ideas can be harnessed to censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those ideas bear rethinking.

In her excellent 2021 book "On Freedom," the poet and critic Maggie Nelson described how, in the 20th century, the avant-garde imagined its audience as numb, repressed and in need of being shocked awake. The 21st-century model, by contrast, "presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection."

There is value in this approach. Mary Gaitskill recently published a captivating essay about two writing classes that she taught 25 years apart. Each included a menacing male student obsessed with sadistic violence against women. In 1997, the guy was named Don, and Gaitskill was struck by how enthusiastically his female classmates seemed to respond to his imagined scenes of torture and murder. It is only toward the end of the semester, after another student's outburst, that the young women express their fear of Don. Until then, surrounded by a culture that valorized shock and darkness, they demonstrated a "seemingly bizarre forbearance" that blunted their authentic reactions.

"But these days that breed of forbearance is looking like an indulgence that we cannot afford," Gaitskill writes. "These days, niceness is looking pretty damn good; these days, the darkness is just too overwhelming." In her 2022 class, she writes, almost half the class had spent time in mental institutions. Relentless demands for safety can simply be a sign of how vulnerable people feel.

Still, to automatically give in to those demands is to suffocate the arts. This becomes especially clear when you see how easily the language of trauma and harm can serve reactionary ends. Just last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a school district in New Jersey that removed Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," a frequent target of conservative censorship, from the freshman honors curriculum. A parent had complained that exposure to the book's "graphic images of sexual violence" could be "emotionally traumatizing." This, said Talepasand, "is where the far left and the far right look very similar."

I'm not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work. Art need not defer to religion. If that's no longer obvious, we've gone astray.

[Wahoo Redux]

Like Hamline, this is going to create a beautiful Streisand Effect.  It already is. 

And censorship cuts both ways.

[jimbogumbo]

This is from last summer, but I want to highlight (again) what can happen with anti-CRT madness: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-parents

[jimbogumbo]

Double posting on this. dismalist, here is a look at Christopher Rufo from two summers ago. And yes, I don't like him.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

[dismalist]

Double posting on this. dismalist, here is a look at Christopher Rufo from two summers ago. And yes, I don't like him.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

As I said, I didn't know who he was. The article makes me agree with him. :-)

[marshwiggle]

Double posting on this. dismalist, here is a look at Christopher Rufo from two summers ago. And yes, I don't like him.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

As I said, I didn't know who he was. The article makes me agree with him. :-)

From the article:

As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that "the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society."

The writer automatically accepts claims as though they are incontrovertible facts. That illustrates the problem pretty well.

[ciao_yall]

Double posting on this. dismalist, here is a look at Christopher Rufo from two summers ago. And yes, I don't like him.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

As I said, I didn't know who he was. The article makes me agree with him. :-)

From the article:

As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that "the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society."

The writer automatically accepts claims as though they are incontrovertible facts. That illustrates the problem pretty well.

Do you have a better explanation?

[Wahoo Redux]

CNN: English professor in Florida says university is reviewing his employment following complaint over racial justice unit

Joeckel said he has been teaching a unit on racial justice in classes for many years without complaints until his provost and dean said Wednesday they needed to talk to him "privately" at the end of a class.

The two told him his contract renewal for next year would be on hold as they investigated the materials used in the racial justice unit, he said.

Joeckel was given a letter from the university, which he shared with CNN, informing him a decision about his employment would be made by March 15.

"The told me they had concerns that I was indoctrinating students. That was the exact word they used: indoctrinating," Joeckel said. "I had no idea this was coming."

Joeckel said his conversation with his employers indicated the investigation was prompted by a complaint from a parent.

<snip>

The institution does not offer tenure...

[Cheerful]

Joeckel was given a letter from the university, which he shared with CNN, informing him a decision about his employment would be made by March 15.

Some share with CNN, some share with FoxNews.  Once you have that info, you can predict the story.  Rinse, repeat.