White fragility, white fear: the crisis of racial identity

Marcus Woolombi Waters in The Guardian

With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.

Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.

Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.

Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.

White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.

Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.

In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.

Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.

Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.

Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.

Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.

As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.

It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.

As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.

Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.

The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”

In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.

'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians



And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.

As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”

They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.

As a judge, I can see the racism embedded in the system

Peter Herbert in The Guardian

Britain often claims to possess the finest justice system in the world, with a “colour blind” approach to the law. Unfortunately, this isn’t true: justice is neither colour blind, nor is it equal.

Historically, the justice system has been used to legitimise slavery, and then colonialism, from Elizabethan England onwards. In Kenya, between 1951 and 1954, during the Mau Mau uprising, more than 1,090 Kenyans were executed by the British colonial judiciary, backed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This appalling figure represents the most liberal use of the death penalty in British legal history and is double the number of those executed by the French during the war of liberation in Algeria 10 years later.

In more recent times, judges have enforced the unjust “sus” laws (the informal name used for stop-and-search laws which still disproportionately affect BME people). It can be argued that racism is embedded in the DNA of the British judiciary and that it has proved uniquely resilient to education or training.

But to what extent is racism present in the system today? A study headed by David Lammy MP, published last week, makes for very disturbing reading.

In 1991, statistics regarding how differently BME and white suspects were dealt with in the criminal justice system helped to trigger race training for all full-time judges over a five-year period. Those statistics have not improved. If you are an African-Caribbean man you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white; you are also likely to obtain a custodial sentence of 24 months compared to your white counterpart’s 17 months. This is not because African-Caribbean men commit more serious offences than their white counterparts – these are punishments handed down for the same or similar offences. African-Caribbean men are also subject to receiving immediate custodial sentences with fewer previous convictions than their white counterparts. Our perceptions have become the reality that means 41% of all young people in detention are now from BME communities.


If you are African-Caribbean you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white

What is critical is that the report highlights, yet again, the fundamental racist disparities in the dispensation, administration and dissemination of justice. There is a crisis of both trust and confidence in the British judicial system among black communities. Their concerns are that it remains arbitrary, inconsistent and discriminatory. This interim report proves them right – despite its diplomatic language.

Of course, poverty, homelessness and drug addiction all play their part, as does the disproportionate influence of an institutionally racist police culture, which means black defendants are stopped and searched seven times more often than their white counterparts. This is despite falling stop-and-search figures, and falling crime generally.

A significant responsibility for this disparity of treatment still lies with an overwhelmingly white, middle class and male magistracy and judiciary, resistant to ethnic monitoring, which hides behind the fallacy that justice is “colour blind and impartial”.

We cannot expect to have a diverse judiciary and magistracy, and to recruit police officers, probation officers, prison officers and lawyers who look like us and are knowledgeable of our communities, if we are forced to operate in a system that is itself unwilling or unable to deliver justice equally to all. As Martin Luther King said, “It is not possible to be in favour of justice for some people and not to be in favour of justice for all people.”

At present, out of 161 members of the high court judiciary, there is not a single African-Caribbean judge, while only two are of Asian origin. Less than 2.5% of Oxford and Cambridge graduates (from whom 86% of high court judges are drawn) are of African-Caribbean origin. The legal pipeline and the outcome are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race training introduced in 1991, was only introduced on the basis that high court judges were exempt, as they simply did not require it. That rather arrogant intellectual exception must now be addressed.

Lord Neuberger’s comments last night suggest that he knows judicial diversity needs tackling. I am currently suing the Ministry of Justice for race discrimination and victimisation arising out of short speech on judicial racism and human rights I gave. It was at a meeting to protest at the decision of an electoral deputy high court judge to ban the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, from holding public office for five years. The allegation was that I indirectly criticised a fellow judge, the first time any judge has ever faced disciplinary action for this charge.

Several months later, in November 2015, there was an attempt to suspend me, approved by several high court judges, and the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, who threatened me with a formal suspension. This was at the same time that a fellow immigration judge of African origin had her complaint of sex and race discrimination ignored while the three white judges accused were never faced with suspension. A fellow Asian district judge still faces disciplinary sanctions for a minor complaint that at most was a competence issue, and three other BME judges are currently suing the Ministry of Justice. The treatment of BME judges by our white colleagues demonstrates a culture in which we are not accepted as equals with a fundamental right to challenge discrimination. Little wonder then that BME defendants and litigants face race discrimination in all jurisdictions.




Ethnic minorities more likely to be jailed for some crimes, report finds


Even if one achieves a “critical mass” of BME judges and magistrates, the injustice is unlikely to be eradicated if the culture of who is perceived to be the likely recidivist or the most “dangerous” offender persists. The only solution is the one resisted by the Ministry of Justice, and by most senior judges – that is monitoring each crown court and magistrates centre so that there can be proper scrutiny of individual courts to identify where the problem lies.

Allied to this must be a full acknowledgement by the Sentencing Council that sentencing and bail guidance must set out clearly the levels of disparity for each offence. Simply pretending the problem does not exist is a recipe for unconscious but appalling levels of racial bias to continue unchecked.

The training on race from 1991 to 1995 worked, as it forced judges to engage with BME mentors who challenged subconscious bias and racism as equals in a secure setting. The race awareness training practised in the 20 years since has been discredited as wholly ineffective. It is too polite, conducted infrequently and by fellow judges who themselves are part of the problem.

The judiciary is a pillar of our democracy with a historical responsibility for the racism that affects our fundamental freedoms and rights. If that is to change, it must work hard to eradicate disproportionate sentences and bail that remove the freedom and rights of people of colour. Justice cannot be the prerogative of a narrow, white middle-class elite, who believe that racism is a problem for other lesser mortals to confront.

Demonetisation Explained

War on Black Money : An Interview with S.Gurumurthy

Brexit and Trump have exposed the left’s crucial flaw: playing by the rules

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon


Join me in a little thought experiment. Imagine, if you would, that the Brexit referendum had gone the other way, 48% voting to leave and 52% to remain. What do you think Nigel Farage would have said? Would he have nodded ruefully and declared: “The British people have spoken and this issue is now settled. Our side lost and we have to get over it. It’s time to move on.”

Or would he have said: “We’ve given the establishment the fright of their lives! Despite everything they threw at us, they could only win by the skin of their teeth. It’s clear now that British support for the European project is dead: nearly half the people of this country want rid of it. Our fight goes on.”

I know which I’d bet on. Next, imagine what would have happened if, as a result of that narrow win for remain, a gaping hole in the public finances had opened up as the economy reeled, and even leading remainers admitted the machinery of state could barely cope. Farage and the rest would have denounced the chaos, boasting that this proved they had been right all along, that the voters had been misled and therefore must be given another say.

As we all know, reality did not work out this way. Next week the chancellor will deliver an autumn statement anchored in the admission that, as the Financial Times put it, “the UK faces a £100bn bill for Brexit within five years”. Thanks to the 23 June vote, the forecast is for “slower growth and lower-than-expected investment”.

Meanwhile, the government will reportedly have to hire an extra 30,000 civil servants to implement Brexit – that’s 6,000 more than the total staff employed by the European Union. In other words, in order to escape a vast, hulking bureaucracy we’re going to have to build a vast, hulking bureaucracy. (But these bureaucrats will speak English and have blue, hard-cover passports, so it’ll be OK.) Even the leavers don’t deny the scale of the undertaking they have dumped in our collective lap. Dominic Cummings, the zealot who masterminded the Vote Leave campaign, this week tweeted a description of Brexit as “hardest job since beating Nazis”. Sadly, there was no room for that pithy phrase on Vote Leave posters back in the spring.


The government will reportedly have to hire an extra 30,000 civil servants for Brexit – 6,000 more than the EU's total

And yet you do not hear remainers howling – as the leavers would if the roles were reversed – that this is an outrage so appalling it surely voids the referendum result. “We never voted for this,” they’d be bellowing, through the megaphone provided to them by most of the national papers, as they read that Brussels is likely to demand Britain cough up €60bn (£51bn) in alimony following our divorce.

Instead, the 48% exchange ironic, world-weary tweets, the electronic equivalent of a sigh, each time they read of some new hypocrisy or deception by the forces of leave. The single market is a perfect example. As a few, admirable voices have been noting, during the campaign the loudest Brexiteers were at pains to stress that leaving the EU did not mean leaving the single market. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market,” said Daniel Hannan. “Only a madman would actually leave the market,” said Owen Patterson. In the spring, Farage constantly urged us to be like Norway – which in fact pays through the nose and accepts free movement of people in order to remain in the single market. Yet now we are told that the vote to leave the EU was a clear mandate to leave the single market, and we’ve got to get on with it.

The correct response to this should be fury, along with a stubborn commitment to use every democratic tool at our disposal to stop it happening. We know that’s what the other side would do, if the boot were on the other foot. But just look at the state of the official opposition. Labour’s Keir Starmer is struggling valiantly to oppose the government on Brexit without appearing to defy the will of the people. He’s arguing for a bespoke arrangement, one that would give Britain full, tariff-free access to the single market, as well as highlighting the risks of leaving the customs union – and, above all making the case that saving the economy matters more than reducing immigration. (Theresa May clearly thinks it’s the other way around.)

I’d prefer an even simpler message: the people voted to leave the EU, not the single market, and Labour should fight for Britain’s place in the latter. But at least Starmer’s message is coherent. The trouble is, it’s undermined from the very top. This week the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, far from opposing Brexit, urged Labour to “embrace the enormous opportunities to reshape our country that Brexit has opened for us”.

That’s not resistance. It’s surrender. And there has been similar weakness on the question of triggering article 50. MPs should withhold their vote until they know exactly what kind of Brexit the government intends. Yes, the government has the right to implement the people’s will. But the people voted to head for the exit; they were given no say over the destination once we’ve gone. Parliament can legitimately use its leverage to flush out some answers.

The point is, none of this is any more than the right would do. And this nods to a wider weakness, one that afflicts the centre-left, broadly defined, on both sides of the Atlantic. Too often, we play nice, sticking to the Queensberry rules – while the right takes the gloves off.

A prime example is unfolding right now. The final tallies of the election show that Hillary Clinton won at least a million more votes than Donald Trump. Oh well, shrug most Democrats: the electoral college is the system we have and, under those rules, we lost. True. But just imagine if Trump had won the popular vote by a seven-figure margin, only to be denied the presidency in the electoral college. Do we think he would have been a good sport and accepted it?

Happily, we don’t have to imagine. We can look at the tweets he posted in 2012, when he briefly thought Mitt Romney had garnered more votes than Barack Obama. “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” he said. He called for people to take to the streets and stage a “revolution”. As he put it, “phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one [sic]!”

We can laugh at the inconsistency, but the contrast is striking. Democrats grumble but abide by the rules; Republicans immediately dial up the rhetoric and denounce their opponents as illegitimate, eventually paralysing their ability to act. That was the admitted strategy of congressional Republicans in the first Obama term: a determined effort to prevent him governing at all.

Democrats don’t play that game. Obama constantly strove to be “bipartisan”, even appointing Republicans to key jobs. (The FBI director, James Comey, was a Republican appointee, yet Obama renewed his term – with fateful consequences. A Republican president would not have hesitated to install his own man.)

Again and again, one side bows to the rules and to what’s fair – while the other focuses on the ruthless exercise of power. We’re seeing it now, as Trump stacks his team with a bunch of bigots. I know which approach is the more high-minded and public spirited. But the result is that today, in both Britain and America, the right has power and next to nothing standing in its way. No one wants the left to behave like the right – but it’s time we fought just as hard.

The Big Short: is the next financial crisis on its way?

Patrick Collinson in The Guardian

In the Oscar-winning The Big Short, Steve Carell plays the angry Wall Street outsider who predicts (and hugely profits from) the great financial crash of 2007-08. He sees sub-prime mortgages rated triple-A but which, in reality, are junk – and bets billions against the banks holding them. In real life he is Steve Eisman, he is still on Wall Street, and he is still shorting stocks he thinks are going to plummet. And while he’s tight-lipped about which ones (unless you have $1m to spare for him to manage) it is evident he has one major target in mind: continental Europe’s banks – and Italy’s are probably the worst.

Why Italy? Because, he says, the banks there are stuffed with “non-performing loans” (NPLs). That’s jargon for loans handed out to companies and households where the borrower has fallen behind with repayments, or is barely paying at all. But the Italian banks have not written off these loans as duds, he says. Instead, billions upon billions are still on the books, written down as worth about 45% to 50% of their original value.

The big problem, says Eisman, is that they are not worth anywhere near that much. In The Big Short, Eisman’s staff head to Florida to speak to the owners of newly built homes bundled up in “mortgage-backed securities” rated as AAA by the investment banks. What they find are strippers with loans against multiple homes but almost no income, the mortgages arranged by sharp-suited brokers who know they won’t be repaid, and don’t care. Visiting the housing estates that these triple-A mortgages are secured against, they find foreclosures and dereliction.


What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of sovereign bonds are that country’s banks


In a mix of moral outrage at the banks – and investing acumen – Eisman and his colleagues bought as many “swaps” as possible to profit from the inevitable collapse of the mortgage-backed securities, making a $1bn profit along the way.

This time around, Eisman is not padding around the plains of Lombardy because he says the evidence is in plain sight. When financiers look to buy the NPLs off the Italian banks, they value the loans at what they are really worth – in other words, how many of the holders are really able to repay, and how much money will be recovered. What they find is that the NPLs should be valued at just 20% of their original price. Trouble is, if the Italian banks recognise their loans at their true value, it wipes out their capital, and they go bust overnight.

“Europe is screwed. You guys are still screwed,” says Eisman. “In the Italian system, the banks say they are worth 45-50 cents in the dollar. But the bid price is 20 cents. If they were to mark them down, they would be insolvent.”

Eisman is careful not to name any specific Italian bank. But fears about the solvency of the system – weighed down by an estimated €360bn in bad debts – are not new. In official “stress tests” of 51 major European banks in July by the European Banking Authority, Italy’s third largest bank, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, emerged as the weakest. It triggered a rescue package – and soothing words from Italy’s finance minister, who said there was no generalised crisis in the banking system. But MPPS’s share price remains at just 25 cents, down more than 90% from two years ago.

How worried should British bank account (and shareholders) be? “I’m not really worried about England’s banks,” says Eisman. “They are in better shape than most in Europe.” When it comes to the US, Eisman’s outrage, so central to the plot of The Big Short, has melted away (just don’t start him on Household Finance Corporation, the HSBC-owned lender at the heart of sub-prime crisis). “I think the regulators did a horrendous, just horrendous job pre-crisis. But under the Fed, the banks have been enormously deleveraged and de-risked. There are no sub-prime mortgages any more... the European regulators have been much more lenient than the US regulators.”

Eisman was of the view that US banks were rather boring as an investment – although Donald Trump’s victory has changed that. “I have a feeling there could be a softening in the Department of Labor rules (an Obama-led crackdown on how banks sell financial products) and the regulatory environment has now changed in favour of the banks.”

 Steve Eisman: ‘I’m not really worried about England’s banks. They are in better shape than most in Europe.’ Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trump’s victory has sent the bond markets into disarray, with the yield on government bonds rising steeply. While this sounds good for savers – interest rates could rise – it is bad news for the holders of government bonds, which fall in value when the yield rises. Eisman sees that as another woe for Europe’s banks, who hold vast amounts of “sovereign bonds”.

“What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of that country’s sovereign bonds are that country’s banks,” he says. As the bonds decline in value, then the capital base of the banks deteriorates.

He doesn’t share the optimism around Deutsche Bank since Trump’s victory. The troubled German bank, facing a $14bn fine in the US for mortgage bond mis-selling, was for a long time one of the biggest lenders to the Trump business empire. In the three days after Trump’s victory, shares in Deutsche Bank, regarded as Europe’s most systemically important bank, jumped by a fifth from €12.90 to €15.30 as traders bet on Trump-inspired leniency over the fine.

But Eisman doesn’t buy it. By his reckoning, Deutsche Bank was less fundamentally profitable than its rivals, and relied more on leverage to boost earnings. His analysis suggests it will struggle to return to its former profitability.

Critics will point out that shorting the likes of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena or Deutsche Bank sounds fine – except that the share price of both have already fallen so dramatically the bad news is already in the price. But we don’t know for sure if they are Eisman’s precise targets – because he’s not willing to say unless you give him at least $1m to manage in one of his “personal accounts”.

Eisman now effectively runs his own “boutique” operation within a bigger Wall Street firm, Neuberger Berman. His “Eisman Long/Short SMA” account has opened to wealthy investors, and in January he will be in London drumming up interest among investors.

But not everything Eisman touches turns to gold. He declines to say how much he made during the financial crash, when he was manager of funds at FrontPoint Financial Services, though it was reportedly as much as $1bn. But in 2010 FrontPoint ran into trouble after one of its manager pleaded guilty to insider trading and was given a five-year prison sentence.

Eisman later set up a hedge fund, Emrys Partners, gathering nearly $200m from investors, but its returns were relatively humdrum compared to the drama of the great crash, making 3.6% in 2012 and 10.8% in 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Did he think the film accurately portrayed what went on? He visited the set, and gave Carell and the other actors (Brad Pitt and Christian Bale also starred) advice and notes.

“When I saw the film, I thought it was great and that Steve Carell was wonderful. But I thought, hey, I wasn’t that angry. After the crash I was interviewed by the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission, and I saw a transcription later on. After reading it, I realised that ‘yes’, I really was that angry... but the Fed has done a very good job since.”

Susan Smith complains after judges ordered her four-year-old to stop wearing girls’ clothes

Ashifa Kassam in The Guardian

A Canadian mother has called for lawyers and judges to receive better training on gender identity after two judges in the province of Alberta ordered her four-year-old child to stop wearing girls’ clothing in public.

The order was first issued last year by a family court judge in Medicine Hat, a small city of 63,000. Some three months later, the clothing restriction was upheld by a second judge.

Susan Smith said her child was born male but began identifying as a girl soon after turning two years old. “First I thought it was really cute. It was like ‘oh no no honey, you’re a boy,” said Smith, whose name has been changed in order to protect the child.

But her child only became increasingly insistent. Smith, who is separated from the child’s father but shares custody, struggled with how to respond. “I was kind of questioning, is my kid doing this for attention? What is going on?”

Then one evening, after her child surprised her by asking when their penis would fall off, Smith sat the child down. “I told them sweetheart, you were born with a penis, so you’re a boy. You will always have your penis, therefore you’ll always be a boy.”

A few nights later her child woke her up, visibly upset. “It was along the lines of mom, I don’t want to be a boy,” said Smith. “And then it went to almost shouting. I’m going to cut my penis off, I want my penis off.”

Trans children allowed to express identity 'have good mental health'


Concerned for the safety of the child, she sought professional help and began researching gender dysphoria, a condition that causes a person to experience extreme distress because of a disconnect between their birth sex and gender identity.

Soon after, Smith decided she would acknowledge the child’s choice of gender identity. “I was going to do whatever I could to validate and support them and to be that one person they could go to,” Smith said.

After conferring with the staff and children at her child’s preschool and daycare, she began offering her child the option of wearing either male, female or gender neutral clothing. Her child consistently chose stereotypically female clothing and opted to go by a female name, she said.

According to Smith, her child’s confidence bloomed, while the yelling, screaming and unhappiness disappeared. “Everything was perfect,” she said.

Throughout the process, Smith had kept the father informed. But about one month after she began allowing her child to choose their clothing, Smith was served court documents. The father – who Smith said blamed her for the child’s anxiety and confusion around gender – was seeking full custody of the child.

The first interim order, issued in December 2015, said Smith could continue as the primary caregiver. But the judge said the child would not be permitted to wear clearly female clothing in public. The child could choose to do so in private, the order said.

The ruling came as a shock to Smith. “I’m the person that knows this kid more than anybody in this world,” she said. “It’s like telling your kid who has a huge thing for being Spiderman – and that was allowed to have a Spiderman backpack, a Spiderman shirt, a Spiderman pencil and a Spiderman cup – and all of a sudden you come along and you take all of that away. And you give them a Batman cup.”

In February, a second judge upheld the ruling, and also granted the father primary custody of the child, with Smith allowed limited access.

In September, a third provincial judge overturned the clothing restriction after consulting with a parenting expert. The child, said the judge, must now be provided with male and female clothing options and then can choose from these options.

Smith said the consecutive orders – all issued within a nine-month span – have taken a toll on the child, who is now five. “When my child was removed and placed with Dad, they internalised it and took it like they did something wrong. They were being bad because the judge doesn’t like them to be a girl.”

She plans to file a judicial complaint with the province, demanding that all legal representatives in Alberta – from judges to lawyers – be better trained on gender identity. “If they were properly educated and aware of the severe consequences and the turmoil this has had on my child, they could not ethically say it’s in the best interests of the child.”

Ron Hewitt, the executive director of Alberta’s provincial court system, said judges study and refer to a number of sources of information to keep current on the law and other matters that apply to their role as judges. “Our court carries on extensive professional development for the judges of the court in all areas as appropriate,” he said.

Transgender children: the parents and doctors on the frontline

While Alberta’s justice minister, Kathleen Ganley, could not comment on the specifics of the case, she pointed to an amendment made last autumn to the province’s Human Rights Act, which saw gender identity and gender expression added as prohibited grounds of discrimination. “This is now law, and we expect all Albertans to follow the law,” she said in a statement.

Smith said her complaint – and the remedy she’s demanding – will do little to help her in her ongoing court battle to regain custody of her child. But she hopes it will prevent other families from experiencing what she and her child have been through in the past year. “This has been so hard on my kid,” she said, her voice shaking as she fought back tears.

“My kid then started talking about dying. At four, they didn’t feel that the world wanted them to be a girl. That they were no good,” she said. “My kid was asking me, mom, does it hurt to die, how can I die, where would I go when I die? Mom now that you know, when I die, grow me in your belly but grow me as a girl, not with a penis. Because now you know.”

Empowerment - How Trump and Modi get their support

Irfan Husain in The Dawn

SO here we are again, scratching our heads over how everybody got the US elections so wrong, and pondering a future with a narcissistic joker like Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on the globe. My early reaction was: stop the world, I want to get off!

But on reflection, we’ve been here before. This is not the first time a rabble-rousing populist has clawed his way to the top. Remember Hitler? He, too, was elected because his message of anti-Semitism and nationalism resonated with Germans who were being squeezed by sanctions imposed by the victorious Allies after the First World War.

Closer to home, we have seen the rise of Altaf Hussain to utter dominion over a liberal, cosmopolitan city like Karachi. He may now be in decline, but for nearly three decades, he wielded more power than most politicians in Pakistan have. He could shut down the city with a word, and allegedly have opponents liquidated with a mere nod.

Many of us in Karachi wondered at this hold he had over his followers. Thousands sat on roads in the blazing sun while he regaled them with bizarre, scarcely comprehensible rants from London while clearly under the influence. For rational, sensible Pakistanis, the whole MQM phenomenon passed all understanding.

The wave of support for Imran Khan is another example of apparently irrational group-think. Why should thousands of educated people camp out in Islamabad for months over allegations of rigging that have been dismissed by the election commission as well as the courts? Why this blind faith in Imran Khan?

Why this blind faith in demagogues?

The reason for failing to comprehend this seemingly illogical behaviour is, I suspect, rooted in our inability to grasp that motives other than logic often drive people. In Trump’s case, he appealed to people not because they necessarily believe that he will bring jobs back, or rid America of Muslims and Mexicans. What resonates is the feeling of empowerment ordinary Americans think they have gained by kicking the liberal elites out of power.

Supercilious and superior, educated, well-heeled types made little attempt to tap into the rage and the angst felt by millions of insecure Americans who felt threatened in a number of ways: unemployment, a demographic shift that will soon reduce white Americans to a minority, and the increasing economic and political power of women. So while there might be nothing rational about a desire to take America back to the 1950s when wages rose and whites were unchallenged, many Trump supporters equated his campaign with a rosy, almost utopian vision of their country.

Similar sentiments were on display during the Brexit campaign in the UK. The Leave supporters insisted they wanted to ‘get control’ of their country. Whatever the economic arguments made by both sides, the driving force behind Brexit had little to do with the promise of prosperity, and more to do with returning the country to an era that had few foreigners.

The MQM phenomenon was about Mohajir identity and empowerment. While the prospect of government jobs was a powerful incentive, the movement was basically driven by a search for pride and dignity. We missed this because we were part of an entitled elite living in our own cocoon.

In our rationality and our complacency, we misread how important they really are to people who have little sense of self-worth. So when a demagogue comes around and channels these elements into a powerful movement that challenges the status quo, we are totally blindsided.

One thing these random examples have in common is that they are all part of a post-truth politics where a demagogue can tell any number of lies without being penalised by voters. The American media, including fact-checking websites, listed the semi-truths and outright lies Trump frequently deployed in his speeches and debates. But for true believers, they were irrelevant to the overall message of redemption and hope.

When truth loses relevance in political debate, it is next to impossible for rational liberals to win. If your opponent can make up whatever he likes to prove his point, either you descend to his level of dishonesty and lose credibility with your constituency, or stick to the truth and lose the argument.

This narrative composed of rumours and fabricated figures rules supreme on 24/7 TV chat shows and the internet. Panellists and bloggers can peddle the most outlandish conspiracy theories and accusations without being questioned. False stories can be planted with ease and go viral. Ill-informed and gullible voters are easily swayed by spin doctors.

So what does this mean for the future of democracy? Clearly, populism and demagoguery are on the march, and liberalism is in retreat. The politics of identity is in conflict with tolerance and inclusiveness. The important thing is to shed our sense of superiority, emerge from our bubbles, and try and understand what people like Trump and Imran Khan represent.