My beloved America is on fire
Some thoughts on a truly horrifying week across the country.
If you’ve asked these last few days why “they” don’t protest peacefully, please know that “they” have been protesting peacefully for years. Credit: Anonymous meme on the Internet. This newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@ZachPrague).
Scroll down for Read Something, Watch Something, Listen to Something, and my Sunday NYT Readalong today with Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, business leader Sunny Slaughter, Dr Mona Abaza. Links below.
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My beloved America is on fire. Our horrific week began with a white police officer in Minneapolis murdering an unarmed, handcuffed black man and ended with protests - peaceful and violent - that continue today.
What is there to say? The police officers who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis should all be charged with murder, and we need to pay close attention to what’s happening with all such cases.
As an overeducated Indian-American, I have benefited so much from this country and I will always be grateful for the opportunities it has given me and my family. But I need to acknowledge that this country was never fair to everyone and doesn’t give millions of citizens the same opportunities it gives someone like me.
I had two painful, public conversations on Saturday - conversations that I will never forget. One with Columbia Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (@sandylocks; host of #UnderTheBlacklight show from the African American Policy Forum), who coined the term “intersectionality,” on my weekly WBAI radio show (Saturdays, noon-2 pm ET on 99.5FM in NYC and WBAI.org worldwide) and the other on my daily, global Covid19 show.
Prof. Crenshaw discussed what’s happening right now in Minneapolis and across the country. We remembered victims of police violence. And we talked about the pain of this moment when we’re seeing that systemic racism remains entrenched and is digging in. It was a very emotional conversation, and this from Prof. Crenshaw really hit me:
At the same time that we are protesting - and risking our lives to do so - we are dying. There is nothing that has reversed the march of this horrific disease (Covid19) - particularly through the black community.
There are these moments where you think it can’t get any worse…And I worry whenever I say, ‘I think we’ve hit the bottom’ because something worse is going to happen. Almost anything one can imagine seems possible right now and that is what’s weighing so heavily on my mind.
This is what I’ve been struggling with. It just keeps getting worse. Each week under President Trump has been worst than the last, sometimes exponentially so, and it’s become impossible to imagine anything being impossible - and it’s terrifying.
I had Keisha Senter (@keishasenter), Sunny Slaughter (@Sunny_Slaughter), and Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) on my daily YouTube show to go through what was truly one of the worst weeks in recent American history. Watch it here:
Adam, a former Columbia J-school student from my time there, has written two of the best pieces on the Trump presidency so far.
“The Cruelty is the Point” was published in 2018, and perfectly-described what had then been just two years of white nationalist dog-whistling, racist immigration policies, and worse.
“The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying” was published at the beginning of May of 2020, and is really a follow-up to his Cruelty piece. In it, Adam takes Trump’s position (and that of most Republicans, really) to its logical conclusion - black lives simply do not matter to this president and his followers. When the data became clear that non-white people were being hit much harder than white people by Covid19, the “we must re-open now” march began apace.
Now, here we are. The president has called for the military to roll into Minneapolis and start killing people in a tweet that Twitter flagged as an incitement to violence - and I haven’t seen one of my Republican friends and relatives who loved him for the tax cuts speak out against it (those tax cuts failed to deliver, according to the WSJ!).
Of course, the narrative from the right is that the looting and sometimes violent protests are just a bridge too far. This is the playbook, and what the image at the top of this piece gets at.
No form of protest or resistance is “ok” for people of color in America in the eyes of the modern political right, and none ever will be.
- Sree
Read Something
📲 It should surprise absolutely no one that a ton of Facebook accounts that were pushing the Plandemic “documentary” (it’s a fraud, shocker) were fake and being run out of foreign troll farms. Ben Collins (@oneunderscore_) and Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) have been doing fantastic reporting on this beat for NBC for a while now. Highly recommend reading this and following both of them. Read it @ NBC.
✍🏽 Wikipedia has long been a source of remarkably reliable information. During the Covid19 crisis, it’s become invaluable. My BFF and business partner Andrew Lih (@fuzheado) has been on the Wikipedia/Wikimedia train basically forever, and it’s always been valuable to me. It’s great to see Wikimedia Foundation chief Katherine Maher (@krmaher) on CBS Sunday Morning showing the power of a caring online community. Read (and watch) it @ CBS.
A Note from Muck Rack
My friends Greg Galant (@Gregory) and Lee Semel (@semel) do cool things - founding Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards, eg. And we’ve done cool things together for more than a decade, including judging the Shorty Awards w/ MC Hammer and Alyssa Milano; revealing the most Twittery journalists as of 2012; interviewing DJ Khaled and then walking through Times Square w/ FB Live; interviewing Jerry Stiller (aka Frank Costanza) and his wife Anne Meara in 2011 (so sad to see both have now passed).
I am pleased to announce that I have joined Muck Rack as an adviser to help their mission of building better tools for all comms professionals. And one of the first things we are doing is meant to help thousands of folks around the world raise their social media skills: launching a FREE certification course in social media. My colleague Linda Bernstein (@wordwhacker) and I are prepping it now and launching in early June. But you can sign up now at mrack.co/sreesocial. Please share with your friends and family - all ages, professions, experience, etc, welcome. More than 3,000 folks have already signed up and we have room for plenty more. #MRAsocial
Watch Something
This is simply unreal. Minnesota State Police arrested CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez (@OmarJimenez) live on the air. He clearly identifies himself, is totally calm, repeatedly says he’ll move his crew wherever the police want them to move, and yet…they just arrest him. They were of course released, but what’s the difference?
This is Donald Trump’s America. Hey, Trump apologists: Come get your boy!
Listen to Something
This episode of The Post Reports Podcast leads with a great report on the fallout between the president and Twitter. Tech policy reporter Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) goes in depth into Twitter’s decision to (finally) do what is really the bare minimum - flag President Trump’s tweets as violations of Twitter policy, and add context when he tweets lies, conspiracy theories, and worse. I have to say, conservatives have probably gained more than any other group from the openness of social media platforms, and it’s really something to see where the chips are falling here. Listen here or on any major podcast platform.
Odds & Ends
🗞 My Sunday #NYTReadalong, executive produced by Neil Parekh (@neilparekh): Every Sunday I read the print edition of the NYT live. Every show is special. This one was even more so. We were joined by activist and consultant Sunny Slaughter (@Sunny_Slaughter); Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz (@JosephEStiglitz); and Mona Abaza MD, MS (@mmabaza), from the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Watch the full episode:
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The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack, Magic Bus USA and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@sree.net and neil@neilparekh.org.
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