Racism is a system of oppression, not a series of bloopers

Gary Younge in The Guardian

Gerry Adams was wrong to use the N-word. But to fetishise one off-colour comment over a life’s work is grotesque.

 

Gerry Adams: ‘a life’s work of internationalism and antiracist solidarity.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty


On the weekend in 2001 when Oldham went up in flames during a series o fracially charged disturbances, I was at a garden party at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival – when I, along with many others, heard Germaine Greer using the term “nigger in a woodpile”. I walked away, not particularly interested in her justification for using that offensive word. By the time the weekend was through I’d had several calls from newspaper diarists asking me to comment on the incident.

I refused. Irritated as I had been, I saw no need to dignify the moment with more importance than it was due. On the weekend when working-class youth in one of Britain’s poorest cities took to the streets in protest, the fact that I had found a comment at a cocktail party from a fellow columnist racially offensive defied any decent sense of priority or proportion.

Make no mistake, I was offended and had every right to be. Words have consequences, and micro-aggressions matter. Often they are emblematic of broader issues; often they have an exclusory effect. This is a word that I’m not comfortable being around, even when black people use it. (Its use by the comedian Larry Wilmore to refer to Barack Obama at this weekend’s White House correspondents’ dinner set tongues wagging.) But being offended is not a political position. Not every display of ignorance is necessarily a slight; not every slight is worth escalating into an incident; not every provocation need be indulged.

Striking that balance is tricky. But it is no less important for that. There is a level of moralising sanctimony that increasingly comes with such moments, a gleeful righteousness – now urged on by social media – that amplifies the outrage and intensifies the shaming.

It is now the turn of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader, to be in the crosshairs. While watching the film Django Unchained, which tells the story of a freed slave who sets out to rescue his wife from a vicious Mississippi plantation owner with the help of a German bounty hunter, he tweeted: “Watching Django Unchained – A Ballymurphy Nigger”. He shouldn’t have done that. He was wrong. But his attempt to explain it in the context of the nationalist community’s treatment in Northern Ireland makes sense.

It’s a similar formulation to that used by Roddy Doyle in The Commitments. “The Irish are the niggers of Europe,” Jimmy Rabbitte Jr tells his fledgling band. “An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin.” But The Commitments is 144 pages long; a tweet is just 140 characters. Context is important, and a tweet (soon deleted) stands alone.

After an initial hamfisted non-apology – blaming people for “misunderstanding the context in which [the word] was used” – Adams quickly graduated to a less grudging response, stating: “I apologise for any offence caused.” That should be the end of it.

To judge Adams, who has a life’s work of internationalism and antiracist solidarity, by a single tweet borders on the grotesque. People should be assessed on the body of their work, not just on a single off-colour statement. That doesn’t mean the statement should be ignored. But to fetishise it above a person’s record does a disservice not just to the person but to the issue.

As someone who, as an adult, has been stupid enough to ask gay men about their girlfriends and Jews how they enjoyed Christmas, I believe everyone has the right to misspeak, be set right, apologise and then carry on about their business. If that whole process is conducted in a spirit of generosity, then who knows? We might even learn something.

But if it’s not, all we have is an almighty game of gotcha with considerable collateral damage. This is not a new problem. In 2004 the football pundit Ron Atkinson was heard, when he thought the mic was off, referring to the Chelsea player Marcel Desailly thus: “He’s what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger.” It was a reprehensible thing to say. He apologised, offered his resignation to ITV, which was accepted, and left his column in this newspaper by mutual agreement.

That’s as it should be. It is also the case that when it mattered he was one of the few coaches in British football who nurtured black talent, bringing on the likes of Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham – both going on to play for England – and Brendon Batson. That excuses nothing that he said; but it makes a difference to how one chooses to describe, deride or disparage him in the wake of his awful comments.

Last year it was the turn of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who referred to how much things would have to improve before “coloured actors” could get the work they deserved in Britain. In the process of pointing out racism he came out with a word not used to identify black people for almost 40 years.

Racism is a system of oppression. It should not be reduced to series of gaffes. It not only cheapens the charge but essentially redefines it. Racism becomes not the subjugation of a people that has its roots in history, economics and power, but a series of bloopers in which the unfortunate are caught out. A matter of politics becomes an issue of politeness. The institutional is relegated to an indiscretion.
With the help of diversity consultants and a cautious manner, the careful can carry on doing bad things so long as they don’t say the wrong thing. That won’t get rid of racism. It’ll just give us some of the best-mannered racists in the world.

A CV of failure shows not every venture has a happy ending – and that’s OK

Julian Baggini in The Guardian


 

‘JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a rags to riches fairy story.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian


In my memory box I have a fine collection of rejection letters from editors and agents unimpressed with my first attempt at a book. Unsurprisingly, these mementoes of failure are the odd ones out in a collection that generally catalogues the highs rather than the lows of my life. We do not generally keep pictures of ex-partners from disastrous relationships on our mantelpieces, or photos of our sullen selves trapped inside a rain-swept, half-built motel.

But according to Princeton psychology professor Johannes Haushofer, we should do more to remember our failures. He has tweeted a CV of his setbacks, including lists of degree programmes he did not get into; papers that were rejected by journals; and academic positions, research funding and fellowships he did not get. Ironically, this little stunt has been a huge hit. “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention that my entire body of academic work,” he said. Expect a TED talk and book to follow.

CV of failures: Princeton professor publishes résumé of his career lows


But the irony runs deeper. Haushofer probably would not have paraded his failures in the first place if he were not now a high-flying Princeton professor. Admitting to past defeats is easy if ultimately you have emerged the victor.

Haushofer’s confession has been praised as a breath of fresh air, a brave display of honesty. But sharing our past trials and tribulations is mainstream, not radical. No success story is complete without the chapter about overcoming adversity. Indeed, I often suspect that many people exaggerate their earlier problems in order to fit this standard narrative and if they don’t, others will do it for them. JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a “rags to riches” fairy story. She has explicitly denied that she ever wrote in cafes to escape from an unheated flat, a story that never made much sense, given the price of a cappuccino in Edinburgh.

It is much harder to, if not celebrate, at least embrace failures when they are more than temporary setbacks. Would Hausfhofer have shared his list of rejections had they not been followed by acceptances? If so, he is braver and more honest than most. Increasingly our culture peddles the myth that with enough belief, determination, and perhaps even hard work, you can achieve anything you want. So if you do terminally fail, that can only mean that you have not tried, believed, or worked enough.

This is pernicious nonsense. The harder truth to accept is that success is never guaranteed. Luck plays its part, but there is also the simple fact that we do not know what we can achieve until we try. Success requires a happy coincidence of talent, effort and fortune, so if you try to do anything of any ambition, the possibility of failure is ever present. When our plans fail, there is no reason to think that necessarily reveals a deep failure in ourselves.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I saved all those rejection letters. At the time, I didn’t know whether they would record mere setbacks or a thwarted ambition. But either way, they would have served a purpose. Had I not go on to have a writing career, they would have reminded me that I did at least try and that the reason I did not succeed was not for want of effort. That reminder would be sobering and humbling, which is why it would have been so valuable. If we are to go to our graves at peace with ourselves, we must be able to accept our disappointments and limitations as well as our successes.

Since I have gone on to earn my living by writing, I could wrongly take them to be proof of how my refusal to take no for an answer ensured that my talents were eventually recognised. The more honest way to see them is as evidence of how fortunate I was that eventually someone chose to take a punt on me.

In Hollywood, every failure simply serves to make the eventual success more inevitable. In real life, every past failure should be a reminder that a happy outcome was never guaranteed. Our failed relationships, terrible jobs and bad holidays reflect our characters and the reality of our lives at least as much as the good times, which often hang on a thread. Thinking more about our failures might just help us to be more grateful for the successes we enjoy and kinder to ourselves when, more often, they elude us.

Mindfulness Can Improve Strategy

Justin Talbot-Zorn and Frieda Edgette in Harvard Business Review


Over the course of a couple of decades, meditation has migrated from Himalayan hilltops and Japanese Zendos to corporate boardrooms and corridors of power, including Google, Apple, Aetna, the Pentagon, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

On a personal level, leaders are taking note of empirical research documenting meditation’s potential for reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and improving emotional regulation. Mindfulness meditation — the practice of cultivating deliberate focused attention on the present moment – has caught on as a way to bring focus, authenticity, and intention to the practice of leadership. Harvard Business Review contributors Daniel Goleman and Bill George have described mindfulness as a means to listen more deeply and guide actions through clear intention rather than emotional whims or reactive patterns.

In an age in which corporations and public organizations are increasingly under attack for short-term thinking, a dearth of vision, and perfunctory reactions to quick stimuli, it’s worth posing the question: Can mindfulness help organizations — not just individual leaders — behave more intentionally? Practically speaking, can organizational leaders integrate mindfulness practices into strategic planning processes?

Seventy years ago, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who had just emerged from years as a prisoner at Auschwitz, shed some light on the question with a now-classic teaching. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote in 1946. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Mindfulness — the practice of watching one’s breath and noticing thoughts and sensations — is, at its core, a practice of cultivating this kind of space. It’s about becoming aware of how the diverse internal and external stimuli we face can provoke automatic, immediate, unthinking responses in our thoughts, emotions, and actions. As the University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson has argued, our brains are not equipped to handle the 11-plus million bits of information arriving at any given moment. For the sake of efficiency, we tend to make new decisions based upon old frames, memories, or associations. Through mindfulness practice, a person is able to notice how the mind reacts to thoughts, sensations, and information, seeing past the old storylines and habitual patterns that unconsciously guide behavior. This creates space to deliberately choose how to speak and act.

Organizations, like individuals, need this kind of space.

As UCLA’s Richard Rumelt, a leading expert on strategic planning, writes in his book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, one of the quintessential components of good strategy is the ability to take a step out of the internal storyline and shift viewpoints. “An insightful reframing of a competitive situation” he writes, “can create whole new patterns of advantage and weakness. The most powerful strategies arise from such game-changing insights.”

To craft strategy on the basis of what Harvard’s Richard Chait and other scholars have called generative thinking, it’s not only necessary to identify a coherent set of policies or actions in response to a problem or opportunity, it’s also necessary to elucidate the full range of values, assumptions, and external factors at play in a decision-making situation. It’s essential to step back and ask not only whether the team has identified the right plans or solutions but whether they have identified the right questions and problems in the first place. All this requires space between stimulus and response.
So how can organizations bring more space to strategic planning? Is the answer to simply recruit leaders and board members who engage in contemplative practices?

It can’t hurt. Steve Jobs, a regular meditator, made use of mindfulness practice to challenge operating assumptions at Apple and to enhance creative insight in planning. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Capital has likewise used mindfulness not only as a tool for increasing productivity but also enhancing situational awareness as a strategist.

But it’s also possible to build mindfulness directly into planning exercises.

One of us recently had the opportunity to test the concept of mindful strategy with a group of middle managers and senior executives from the legal, advertising, finance, and non-profit sectors in the Bay Area. The experience gave us a clearer practical understanding of what works when it comes to integrating mindfulness practice into strategy retreats.

Take mindful moments: One simple approach is to integrate straightforward mindfulness activities into meetings and retreats. By punctuating planning exercises with deliberate time for those present to simply connect with their breath and recognize unnecessary distractions, organizers can create the conditions for intuition to arise. As Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter wrote in HBR in March, it’s possible to integrate simple practices of focus and awareness throughout a workday. Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, has developed dozens of such workplace meditation modules that could fit neatly into planning retreats.

Explore alternative scenarios: It’s also possible to inject an element of mindfulness without meditating at all. Scenario planning exercises, for example, open decision-makers to numerous, plausible alternative “stories of the future” that inherently challenge assumptions and mindsets. Corporations including Shell and governments including Singapore have used such practices — first and foremost for their heuristic value — with considerable success for decades. Much like meditation, the practice of nonjudgmentally assessing different plausible futures is a practical way of shining light on old unexamined thought patterns and making room for new ideas.

Visualize positive outcomes: As Daniel Goleman argues, positivity is part and parcel of focused attention. “Pessimism narrows our focus,” he writes, “whereas positive emotions widen our attention and our receptiveness to the new and unexpected.” Organizational leaders can benefit from imagining organizational “end-states” during strategy sessions. This can be as simple as posing a variant of the question Goleman suggests— “if everything works out perfectly for our organization, what would we be doing in ten years?”—and taking time to contemplate.

Mindfulness practices like these can help leaders — and their organizations — identify which ideas and aspirations are important and which assumptions limit their growth. They’re useful not only for attaining enlightenment but also for making sense of a changing world.

TTIP leak could it spell the end of controversial trade deal?

Andrew Griffin in The Independent

Hundreds of leaked pages from the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) show that the deal could be about to collapse, according to campaigners.

The huge leak – which gives the first full insight into the negotiations – shows that the relationship between Europe and the US are weaker than had been thought and that major divisions remain on some of the agreement’s most central provisions.

The talks have been held almost entirely in secret, and most information that is known in public has come out from unofficial leaks. But the new pages, leaked by Greenpeace, represent the first major look at how the highly confidential talks are progressing.

They indicate that the US is looking strongly to change regulation in Europe to lessen the protections on the environment, consumer rights and other positions that the EU affords to its citizens. Representatives for each side appear to have found that they have run into “irreconcilable” differences that could undermine the signing of the landmark and highly controversial trade deal, campaigners say.

For instance, the papers show that the US is looking to weaken the EU’s “precautionary principle” that governs how potentially harmful products are sold, Greenpeace says. The US has much weaker regulation that aims to minimise rather than avoid risks, and that same less strict regime could come to the UK and Europe under the deal.

If the EU made further changes to similar regulations, it would have to inform the US and corporations based there, according to the documents. American companies would then be able to have the same input into EU regulation as European ones do.

There are also notable missing parts of the agreement. None of the texts includes any reference to the global effort to cut CO2 emissions agreed in Paris last year, according to Greenpeace, despite a commitment from the European Commission that it would make environmental sustainability a key part of any deal.

Those who support TTIP argue that it represents an important step that will allow the US and EU to work together more closely and that it will support business in both regions. But parts of the deal and the secrecy that surrounds it have led campaigners to argue that it could include dangerous changes to the consumer protections that are guaranteed by the EU.

UK Parliament 'would not be able to stop NHS sell-off under TTIP'

Poverty, environmental and other campaigners have claimed that the new leak could be enough to undermine those already controversial talks.

"The TTIP negotiations will never survive this leak,” said John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want. “The only way that the European Commission has managed to keep the negotiations going so far is through complete secrecy as to the actual details of the deal under negotiation. Now we can see the details for ourselves, and they are truly shocking. This is surely the beginning of the end for this much hated deal."

Other campaigners criticised the fact that the only public information that has emerged about TTIP has come from leaks.

“TTIP is being cooked up behind closed doors because when ordinary people find out about the threat it poses to democracy and consumer protections, they are of course opposed to it,” said Guy Taylor, trade campaigner at Global Justice Now. “It’s no secret that the negotiations have been on increasingly shaky ground. Millions of people across Europe have signed petitions against TTIP, and hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to call for an end to the negotiations. These leaks should be seen as another nail in the coffin of a toxic trade deal that corporate power is unsuccessfully trying to impose on ordinary people and our democracies.”

Do we want our children taught by humans or algorithms?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


 

Parents ‘have been galvanised by the … sight of their children in distress’ over the tests. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA



It is incredibly hard for a headteacher to shout “rubbish” in a crowded hall while an authority figure is speaking. It is like asking a lung specialist to smoke a cigarette. Yet that’s what happened when Nicky Morgan addressed the National Association of Head Teachers conference yesterday. They objected partly to her programme of turning all schools into academies by 2020 and partly to her luminously daft insistence that “testing”, “improving” and “educating” are interchangeable words. 

Her government “introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds, and 100,000 more young people are able to read better as a result,” she told the BBC when she first became education secretary, and she has been trotting out the same nonsense ever since. No amount of disagreement from professionals in the field dents her faith or alters her rhetoric. Indeed, since the Michael Gove era, teachers have been treated as recalcitrant by definition, motivated by sloth, their years of experience reframed not as wisdom but as burnout. When they object to a policy, that merely proves what a sorely needed challenge it poses to their cushy lives. When they shout “rubbish” in a conference hall, it is yet more evidence of what a dangerous bunch of trots they are.

On Tuesday, parents enter the fray, with a school boycott organised by Let Our Kids Be Kids, to protest against “unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding”. Some have been galvanised by the bizarre and unnecessary sight of their children in distress, others by solidarity with the teachers – who inconveniently continue to command a great deal of respect among people who actually meet with them – and others who can’t join in the boycott because of minor administrative details such as having to go to work, but have signed the petition. It is the beginning of a new activism – muscular, cooperative and agile because it has to be.

The boycott is in protest against ‘unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding’. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

If the only problem is that it causes anxiety to a load of pampered under-10s, shouldn’t they just suck it up? Isn’t that the best way to learn what the world is like? The framing of this debate is precisely wrong. No serious educationalist thinks that the way to drive up standards among children is to make tests more frequent and more exacting. Nor does anybody of any expertise really believe that teachers need to be incentivised by results. It is an incredibly tough, demanding, indifferently remunerated job, which nobody would do except as a vocation. It is not for the profession or the parents to explain what the tests are doing to the kids; it is for the education secretary to explain what these tests are for. 

By coincidence, at the end of last week, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was in London to hand in a petition to Pearson, the education company and provider of curriculums and test delivery. The petition protested against two perceived issues: concerns about over-testing in US schools and alleged profiteering in the global south. The trajectory in US education, from universal public provision with local accountability to mass outsourcing and centralised control, is strikingly similar to what has happened here. It begins with the creation of a failure narrative, “that both the Democrats and the Republican bought into, which is, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, Weingarten told me. That creates the rationale for testing, since, without data, you can’t tell whether you’re improving. Those tests are consequential: the results can be used to fire teachers, close down schools, hold pupils back a year. All the most profound decisions in education can suddenly be made by an algorithm, with no human judgment necessary.

Simultaneously, says Weingarten, Charter schools were introduced, originally – like academies – “as part of a bigger public school system where you could incubate ideas”, but very soon remodelled as a way to supplant rather than supplement the existing system. “And in between all of this, you started seeing the marketisation and the monetisation.” Until things can be counted, there isn’t much scope to create a market.

I was never fully convinced that academisation and hyper-testing were undertaken to create the market conditions for privatisation down the line; I thought it more plausible that the testing was merely a politician’s wheeze to create data out of humans that could then be stuffed into manifestos to persuade other humans that the policies were going in the right direction. Yet the parallels between the US and England are insistent – it has become impossible to ignore the idea that our government is mimicking theirs for a reason.

Whether all this is a prelude to privatisation or a PR stunt for a chaotic government doesn’t actually matter in the medium term: to put seven-year-olds under intolerable pressure for either of those ends would be equally abhorrent. In the long term, the mutation of schools into joyless exam factories won’t be halted by resistance alone, we also need to make a proper account of what education is for.

As Weingarten describes, “We have to help kids build relationships. We have to address their life skills, so they can negotiate the world. We have to help kids build resilience. We have to help kids learn how to problem-solve, how to think, how to engage. So tell me, how are any of these things tested on a standardised test?” That’s a test question for the tin-eared secretary of state herself.

Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.

Barack Obama Gives Speech At White House Correspondents' Dinner 2016