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racism

Internet Interview Racism Society and Culture Technology

UN Special Rapporteur Tendayi Achiume on Racial Discrimination in Emerging Digital Technologies: Annabelle Werner and Elizabeth Onibokun

E. Tendayi Achiume is a Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at University of California, Los Angeles. She serves as the United Nations special rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

As we enter into the one year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned just how much of our society can be conducted in virtual landscapes. We keep up with our friends through endless scrolling on international social media platforms, we coordinate “zoom” calls with our colleagues across different time zones, and our children log into their classrooms from behind a screen: our virtual society is essentially intrinsic to our physical one. Yet, one could argue that the relationship between society and digital technology has always been heavily intertwined since the latter’s development, and in fact, the societal problems we see in our physical world are also manifested in and perpetuated by our online one.

In our interview with UN Special Rapeturer Tendayi Achiume, we were able to discuss such relationships between societal inequality and technology in covered in her 2020 thematic report on “Racial discrimination and emerging digital technologies: a human rights analysis”. Ultimately, we learned how different forms of racial discriminination appear “in the design and use of ‘‘ digital tools. In our brief interview, we not only gained an appreciation of the urgency and timeliness of Professor Achiume’s findings, but also began to understand the gravity of our virtual situation: not even our most advanced, “objective”, digital inventions can overcome historical legacies of social injustice.

Definitions and Examples of Techno-chauvinism and Technological Determinism

When discussing how societal problems are manifested in technology, Professor Achiume argues that we must be cognizant of the ills of techno-chauvinism. Techno-chauvinism is the idea that technology is the solution to everything, when in reality, some forms of digital technology can create more (or simply different) problems than before. If we make presumptions that technology will blanketly fix the issues that we cannot, Achiume claims that we will fail to critically investigate the ways that technology “reproduces human biases and perpetuates structural inequalities”. After all, the structures, designs, and functions of social media platforms and AI algorithms are shaped by the beliefs of those who create them.

The UN special rapporteur found that emerging digital technologies can directly perpetuate racial discrimintion. In the report, she discusses “digital redlining”, or “the creation and maintenance of technology practices that further entrench discriminatory practices against already marginalized groups’”. In Section III B 32, Achiume describes how Facebook used to have a function that would allow one to “narrow audiences” by providing the ability to filter Facebook users by “ethnic affinities” under a demographics category of its ad-targeting tool. Facebook by itself controls about a quarter of the market share for digital advertisements in the U.S., so this tool had a significant impact and resulted in the prevention of Black people from viewing housing advertisements. If we were to accept principles of techno-chauvinism and assume that technological tools will be ubiquitously advantageous, we would fail to see how problems of racial bias were created by this new tool. Techno-chauvinism shields digitals tools from critique and blinds us from seeing how racial discrimiantion can be ingrained in the structures of our social, political, and economic interactions online, including how these virtual inequalities can be actualized into very real harm in our physical lives.

It is also important to discuss the spaces in which these global networks are created. Digital technologies and social media platforms are mainly produced in a few, concentrated environments in the Global North, which directly or indirectly affect the product. Sillicon Valley, for example, is experiencing what has been called a “diversity crisis” and has had “a history of problems of discrimination, exclusion, and sexual harassment”. These findings prompt the question: Who is creating AI technology? And who is it being created for?

In an investigation of the effects of this lack of diversity, Achiume includes a 2019 study that reviewed 99 developers from around the world. It found that, “‘many of these algorithms were 10 to 100 times more likely to inaccurately identify a photograph of a black or East Asian face, compared with a white one. In searching a database to find a given face, most of them picked incorrect images among black women at significantly higher rates than they did among other demographics’”.

We can see how even the seemingly “neutral” AI systems are shaped by the lack of representation in the environments that they are created. The inequalities at various intersections of our social identities, such as race and gender, are then present in the technologies we produce. Thus, we cannot simply code away racial bias because technology can never be a completely “neutral” instrument: it is ultimately influenced by what it’s creators perceive, or rather, what they do not perceive. In fact, this problematic assumption that technology is objectively neutral, is codified in the term “technological determinism”.

Technological determinism, defined and discussed by Achiume, is the assumption that technology is somehow isolated and not influenced by social, political, or economic structures. This perspective is false. Our digital landscapes determine “everyday outcomes in employment, education, health care and criminal justice”, and will continue to facilitate harm unless we are able to isolate how society’s injustice manifests itself in our digital tools; a process that is only possible through the rejection of technological determinism.

Limitations of “Colorblindness”

The term “colorblind” is sprinkled liberally throughout texts, articles, and journals and while it traditionally had a positive connotation, Professor Achiume cautions against its use. She highlights the insidious effects of “colorblindness,” particularly when dealing with a world increasingly defined by technology and its perceived objectiveness. Achiume recognizes the fact that the idea of a colorblind world seems appealing. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where a person is not judged by something as inconsequential as skin color?

But, the sad fact is that, “we live in a society which has been constructed on a racial basis.” Approaching issues such as racial discrimination in technology and AI programs without acknowledging the inherit systemic obstacles in this world does no one any favors. Achiume brings up the current COVID-19 pandemic and how black and brown communities have been disproportionately affected, in part, due to factors such as exclusion from healthcare systems and the overrepresentation of people of color in the social services. By stating that “the colorblind approach is not enough” she is calling for approaches that examine the racial and ethnic impact of policymaking that appear to be neutral. She asserts that it should not be about a blindness to difference but rather an engagement with how differences makes certain communities more vulnerable to exploitation, discrimination, and exclusion. In fact, she insightfully states that we don’t yet live in a world where taking a colorblind approach can lead us to justice but that it often sustains systems of injustice.

Importance of Public Awareness

To further expand on this theme of objectivity, Achiume coined the brilliant term “the veneer of neutrality” and this applies especially to the current design and use of emerging digital technologies. There is the widely-held belief that technology is completely impartial but it is in everyone’s best interests to shed these notions. There are people behind the creation of these programs who, whether consciously or subconsciously, perpetuate harmful stereotypes or prejudices.

One of the most terrifying manifestations of this is predictive policing, a phenomena seen around the world and contributes directly to over-policing of black and brown communities. Achiume highlights the transnational nature of these programs and that is not an issue seen only in the United States. For example, in the United Kingdom there is a predictive policing database intended to create profiles of those most likely to commit crime. A staggering number of 78% of black youth is represented despite the fact that when looking at the actual rates of violence, black youth are implicated only 20% of the time. She insists that one of the most urgent courses of action is public awareness, especially in terms of surveillance and predictive policing that exists around the world.

Even in Los Angeles, where many of us call home, the extent to which police surveillance exists is incredibly high. Professor Achiume spotlights the coalition Stop LAPD Spying whose name perfectly reflects their mission statement. They work hard to release reports that reflect the high levels of racialized surveillance of the LA Police Department. The large gap of awareness in the public is a huge wall to climb and Achiume believes this is why the devastating murder of George Floyd ignited the world in the way it did. Public awareness is truly the first step towards seeing action and one of the goals of her report is to raise the all-important point that this issue needs to be on national agendas. In a perfectly worded conclusion she declares that “you don’t get change if you have societies that are unaware of the depth and the nature of a problem. These new forms of surveillance disproportionately affect black and brown communities, whom are more subject to over-policing and discrimination than their white counterparts which is reflected in the makeup of prison populations that unfairly represent minorities to an absurd degree. Relating back to Professor Achiume, the LAPD’s police surveillance tactics are said to be completely objective but as discussed with the aforementioned veneer of neutrality, technology can never be truly “neutral”. Hence the need for caution, awareness, and action.

Reflection

As the world continues to grow more globalized, criticizing the unintended consequences of emerging technology can lead to the implementation of systems that are actually effective and useful. We must recognize how the location of the center of development for digital technologies in the Global North has resulted in both direct and indirect perpetuations of racial bias on the design and use of the tools produced. Unabated trust in our new virtual world, with no caution to how it could reflect racial bias in our physical one, will simply perpetuate such harm.

Dismantling principles such as techno-chauvinism, technological determinism, and colorblindness will help us understand how these tools discriminate along racial and gendered lines, such as heightened surveillance of certain communities. The growth of technology can be a wonderful thing but it also has the potential to be incredibly dangerous. In an increasingly interconnected world, nothing is truly as isolated as it seems. An innovation in Silicon Valley can have reverberations throughout the world. It is best that with the knowledge provided we work hard to create digital technologies that don’t perpetuate the problems and prejudices we face in the real world.

March 11, 2021 0 comment

History Racism United States

Why Dismantling Monuments Does Not Always Constitute Erasing History

written by Zachary Durkee

This article is the first of five pieces from our summer series for 2020. The theme this summer is “Challenging Narratives.” In the coming days and weeks, The Generation will publish more articles where our writers challenge various notions to provide new and different perspectives on the debates and events shaping your world.

“Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.” Civil Rights leader and Member of Congress John Lewis, who passed away this past month after a long battle with cancer, wrote these words as he lay dying. It succinctly captures the global scale at which events this summer have played out.

Shaken by the raw footage of a man pressed to the pavement while pleading for his life, protests in response to George Floyd’s death have erupted in places as far as Scotland and Seoul. His murder at the hands of Minneapolis police this past May demonstrates the potency and prevalence of racism in the modern world. The outrage expressed on a global scale is not just confined to the incident itself, but has snowballed into broader demonstrations surrounding race relations in various countries.

An area where this growing debate has raged and dominated in recent years regards publicly displayed monuments of figures whose pasts’ are saturated with the perpetuation and extension of oppressing others. In mid-June alone, countries such as the United States, France, Belgium, Italy, England, and New Zealand witnessed widening public calls to reconsider dozens of historical monuments. Although no monument can be labelled the same, the contentious debates surrounding their placement in society often boils down to whether dismantling them erases history, or corrects it.

For those against the dismantling of specific monuments and statues, history is an indifferent subject matter that must be grounded in objective truth in order to preserve the identity of a nation, provide a lesson for the living, and impart wisdom on future generations. Statues, to them, constitute a vital aspect of this necessary outlook. Tearing them down not only transgresses this ethic, but it leads a society down a slippery slope where it runs into the danger of damaging national identity, subjectifying history, and tarnishing the lessons that the living must pass on to their posterity.

This notion may sound compelling, but it is not reflective of reality. On a fundamental level, history has never been a subject of objective truth. Though people should strive for painting the most authentic picture of history (and many respectable people do), the reality is that history is most often analyzed, written, and retold by individuals with inherent biases or motives. On a national level, it is often bent and caricatured for the purpose of constructing and stoking nationalism, for good or bad. It assists individuals, institutions, and organizations with cultivating legitimacy, galvanizing a group against an enemy, constructing a sense of group solidarity, and boosting collective pride in one’s people. In short, history is inextricably linked to the culture and pride of a political community. If history is looked at from this more critical angle, it becomes clear that it’s truth can often be undermined in favor of political expediency rather than progress or wisdom. In the noble pursuit of utilizing history for the opposition’s intended purpose, societies must recognize this fact and continually challenge the historical markers that have already been written or erected in the decades or centuries that have gone by. If history was distorted in the distant past, it runs the risk of becoming an unchallenged truth in the present.

With this said, current controversy surrounding the erection and dismantling of Confederate monuments throughout the American South largely reflects this dynamic at play. It is an issue that is often misconstrued, which polarizes and drives discourse in a divisive direction. Widely disseminated images of mobs of people bringing down statues does not facilitate productive dialogue regarding how history is remembered in a country historically plagued by racism. Many advocates of keeping the monuments displayed provide the same line of argument stated above: history is an objective subject matter that must contain the good, bad, and ugly, regardless of how it makes us feel. And even if it is appropriate to take down monuments of enemy combatants of the United States, doing so (especially with mobs), puts the country on a slippery slope where we may soon witness the broader destruction of our national heritage. Figures who had outsized roles in shaping our country, even while embodying characteristics intolerable by today’s standards, will be erased and destroyed by unruly, radical mobs that will invoke the transgressions of racism indiscriminately.

There are two main issues with this argument. For one, unruly mobs do not constitute the majority of Americans. There is insufficient evidence to support that, from an institutional and broader societal level, statues of figures such as George Washington are being slated for systematic destruction. In fact, only 52 percent of Americans even believe the country should lawfully remove Confederate statues. This number drastically decreases when statues are unlawfully toppled as well. Mobs desecrating and tearing down a statue in the midst of a riot is not a strong argument for justifying the long-term preservation of Confederate monuments. Subscribing to the slippery slope argument to this degree takes away from the deeper reasoning behind why a growing number of people are calling for the removal of Confederate statues in the first place.

This leads to the second issue with arguing for the preservation of Confederate monuments. The Confederate statues are not objective symbols of history. If anything, they were erected for the purpose of revising history. Three periods when there were clear spikes in their construction lie in the wake of Jim Crow Laws in the late 19th-century; the apex of Ku Klux Klan lynchings and the advent of the lost cause movement (which aimed to mythify and nobilify the cause of the Confederacy) in the early 20th-century; as well as the backlash in response to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. If it is authenticity people seek in their pursuit of constructing history, it is not found in the Confederate figures who line city squares throughout the South. In fact, their placement runs directly against what Americans are supposed to learn and gather from the Civil War: rampant injustice, inequality, and racism deeply conflict with the core ideals of the United States and that failing to confront such contradictions not only tore the nation apart, it also threatened to destroy the Union and divide it into two sovereign countries. The construction of them was ultimately intended to immortalize the very wounds that continue to harm the United States to this day.

History is not set in stone from the moment it is recorded. It is a rough sketch composed by fallible people, oftentimes with incomplete information at hand. Beyond that, history can often be bent, distorted, or reinvented to serve a specific agenda for a higher power. If all history is assumed to be sacred facts of life, weaving it into a powerful myth can transform history into a powerful force that helps shape the present. If people are to make history a more productive, authentic force for guiding the present and future, it becomes the duty of the living to challenge distorting narratives that prevent us from realizing the honest lessons we must gather from it. Combating discrimination and demanding respect for human dignity entails rooting out falsely constructed notions of history that aim to cement, misconstrue, and advance racism generationally. We should not bolster a sense of false pride of the infamous upon marble platforms that loom over the very descendants of the people they enslaved.

August 23, 2020 0 comment

Globalization Migration Print Article Racism White Nationalism

Young White Nationalism

written by Grayson Peters

This article originally appeared in The Generation Spring 2020 print edition. The theme for this edition is “Youth Voices.” A link to our online version of the print publication can be found here: https://www.flipsnack.com/thegen/the-generation-spring-2020.html

Americans generally assume that racism is dying a generational death, and that its last vestiges can be found in an older, more backwards demographic.¹ The youth, it is generally thought, are more tolerant than their elders and may even be the generation to achieve full racial harmony and equality in the United States. Indeed, recent research indicates that young people in the United States today are quantifiably less likely to hold racially prejudiced attitudes than those surveyed in prior years.²

However, since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, hate crimes targeting racial minorities have become substantially more frequent across the United States. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the FBI reported a sharp 17% spike in total hate crimes, including a 37% increase in crimes targeting Jews and a 16% increase in crimes targeting African-Amerians.³ This report came only two weeks after the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, in which 11 congregants were gunned down.

A January 2018 study by University of Alabama economist Griffin Sims Edwards and Loyola University law professor Stephen Rusher found strong empirical evidence that the election of Donald Trump increased the number of subsequent hate crimes motivated by white supremacy, validating what other commenters had referred to as the ‘Trump Effect.’⁴

Based on this information, one might reasonably draw the conclusion that recent perpetrators of ‘Trump Effect’ hate crimes skew older. Robert Bowers, the shooter who killed 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, was solidly middle-aged at 46 years old. (October 2018)

But that’s not the whole story.

Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man who live-streamed on Facebook Live as he murdered 51 and wounded 49 worshipping Muslims during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was only 28 years old.⁵ Tarrant had previously remarked that he viewed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”⁶ (March 2019)

John Timothy Earnest, who shot and killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye in Chabad of Poway on the last day of Passover 2019, was only 19 years old. Earnest was no fan of the Trump administration, calling the president as “Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, [and] traitorous,” echoing Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bower’s disdainful characterization of Trump as a Jewish puppet.⁷ (April 2019)

Patrick Crusius, who drove from 10 hours from Allen, Texas to El Paso in order to specifically target Hispanics and subsequently murdered 22 people in a Walmart, was only 22 years old.⁸ Though a Trump supporter, Crusius explicitly clarified in his manifesto that his prejudices predated Trump’s involvement in politics.⁹ (August 2019)

Stephan B., a 27 year old German, failed to gain entrance to a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and instead shot and killed a nearby woman and a man in a kebab shop.¹⁰ (October 2019)

Clearly, violent white supremacism is not the sole-province of over-30s. In fact, relatively young white men across the Western world seem to be picking up assault rifles and murdering ethnic and religious minorities with relative frequency. Although the shooters’ views on Trump vary wildly, with some portraying him as a savior of embattled American whites and others as a race traitor under the influence of a global Jewish cabal, there is much similarity between their worldviews and methods.

Bowers, Tarrant, Earnest, Crusius, and the as-yet anonymous Stephan B. were all clearly motivated by a virulent identification with whiteness and a belief that violence was necessary and justified to guard against an invasion of non-whites and Muslims orchestrated by Jews. Indeed, many of the later shooters intentionally referenced the manifestos and actions of their predecessors.

Earnest (Poway) cited Bowers (Pittsburgh) and Tarrant (Christchurch) as explicit inspirations for his own shooting. Tarrant (Christchurch) was the first to livestream his shooting to a live audience using Facebook Live, and was later imitated by Stephan B. (Halle) on gaming livestream platform Twitch. Crusius (El Paso) explicitly claimed inspiration from Tarrant’s (Christchurch) actions in a manifesto posted to controversial message board 8Chan.

By reading each manifesto, one can see the gradual evolution of a sort of white nationalist terrorist canon, with increasingly complex self-referential citations and behaviors. The sheer number of shooters, necessitating parentheticals to explain who murdered who and in which city, is incredibly disturbing. Even more concerning is the high likelihood that, eventually, another white man under the age of 30 will soon write a manifesto in which the above names are mentioned, copy certain elements of previous shootings (perhaps a third livestream), and in some way innovate on the established theme.

But if the phenomenon of white supremacist mass shootings is novel, the foundational references that they cite aren’t.

Collectively, the manifestos frequently allude to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, named after the 2011 book by French white nationalist Renaud Camus, which alleges a concerted effort by Jews to force immigration of non-whites into majority-white countries so as to effectuate a gradual “white genocide” by demographic change.¹¹

Camus, in turn has cited as inspiration British MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 “River of Blood” speech criticizing mass immigration and 1973 French dystopian fiction novel Le Camp des Saints [The Camp of the Saints], which depicts an apocalyptic flood of immigrants from the Global South into Europe and happens to be one of Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s favorite and most frequently referenced books.¹² Other allusions to 1930s British, fascist politician Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler, lone-wolf Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, and others underline both a pervasive European influence, especially that of Europe’s 20th century far-right, in the ideology of American white supremacism and the deep historical roots of the racial hatreds that post-2016 shooters proclaim.

So, if their ideas are decades old, why are young white nationalists killing now?

A growing network of self-described “identitarian” (read: neo-Nazi) organizations like Patriot Front, American Vanguard, and Identity Evropa, recently rebranded as the American Identity Movement, are actively recruiting young people, especially by distributing propaganda and recruitment information on university campuses.¹³ In fact, college campuses, despite their association with liberal and left-wing politics, have become targets for white nationalist organizations seeking new members. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 868 documented incidents of white nationalist flyering on American college campuses in 2018, and 672 incidents in the first five months of 2019.¹⁴ White supremacist flyering on campuses increased 77% from the 2016-2017 school year to 2017-2018, and 7% from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019. White supremacists have targeted California campuses including UC Davis¹⁵ and UC San Diego¹⁶ by posting flyers, disrupting lectures, and even threatening faculty.

At least one major white supremacist organization of the 2010s – the Traditionalist Worker’s Party – was born on a university campus: at Towson University in 2013. Initially formed as a “White Student Union”¹⁷ by student Matthew Heimbach, the TWP gained notoriety for its participation in the deadly “Unite the Right” Protest and was arguably a top-ten organization in the United States until Heimbach was arrested and disgraced for assaulting his wife and father-in-law, also his spokesman, after he was confronted for having slept with his mother-in-law.¹⁸

It is also important to not understate the radicalizing effects of YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing website, on young white men across the world.¹⁹ Until very recently, YouTube’s algorithm tended to suggest successive videos of increasing political extremism to continue to hold its viewers’ attention and maximize revenue made by showing them as many advertisements as possible.²⁰

For instance, consider the case of an average American teenage boy who mostly likes to watch Youtube videos of people playing and discussing video games that he enjoys. Suppose that he watches videos on the “Gamergate” controversy in 2014, which was an extremely toxic internet debate about the role of progressive social movements like feminism in the gaming community and attempts made on Youtube to critique popular video games from feminist or racial justice perspectives.²¹ He is told, over and over again, that liberals and feminists are threatening his harmless gaming hobby and, perhaps, American society and culture as a whole.

Very soon, this imagined teenage boy is watching videos made by self-described anti-feminists and laughing at compilations of overemotional ‘social justice warriors’ screaming at smug speakers on college campuses. From there, he is suggested videos by mainstream conservative YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and then videos by edgier commentators like Steven Crowder and Milo Yiannapolous, and then videos by Stefan Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and Laura Southern, all of whom promote white nationalist ideas.

It is very simple, in other words, for young people to innocently stumble into a “radicalization pipeline” of increasingly fringe and reactionary views just by watching Youtube’s suggested videos. The internet’s pervasive influence on the new generation of white supremacists is undeniable. Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, included in his manifesto ironic references to common internet memes and a call for readers to “subscribe to Pewdiepie,”²² an extremely popular YouTuber named Felix Kjellberg (best known for his video gaming videos), who has been accused of trafficking in racism for comedic purposes.²³

There are no easy solutions to this new epidemic of historically-minded but Internet-savvy millenials committing acts of terrorism in the name of white supremacy. YouTube has begun the process of removing some explicitly white nationalist videos, though a vast majority still remain.²⁴ While this may limit young people’s exposure to the most contemporary of racist media personalities, this will not erase the long history their movement draws from. As any brief visit to the YouTube comments section will demonstrate, there are still thousands of people who idealize Oswald Moseley and his British Union of Fascists, insist that Adolf Hitler was the wronged party in the Second World War, and gleefully celebrate physical violence against leftists, minorities, and women. Any effective effort to confront this newest iteration of a centuries-old tradition of bigotry must first confront misinformation and miseducation about the historical legacy it claims.

E N D N O T E S :

¹Leah Donella. “Will Racism End When Old Bigots Die.” NPR, January 14, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/14/505266448/will-racism-end-when-old-bigots-die.

² Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: I. Long-Term Change and Stability From 2007 to 2016.” Physiological Science, January 3, 2019. Accessed November 2017, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618813087.

³ Michael Balsamo. “FBI report shows 17 percent spike in hate crimes in 2017.” Associated Press, November 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/E5e7bb22f8474408becd2fcdc67f284e.

⁴ Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin. “The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes.” Social Science Research Network, January 18, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102652.

⁵“Police with the latest information on the mosque shootings.” Radio New Zealand, March 17, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/384896/police-with-the-latest-information-on-the-mosque-shootings.

⁶ Kristen Gelineau and John Gambrell. “New Zealand mosque shooter is a white nationalist who hates immigrants, documents and video reveal.” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-mosque-killer-white-supremacy-20190315-story.html.

⁷ Seth J. Frantzman. “Anti-Trump antisemitism: The link between Pittsburgh and Poway.” The Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/

Israel-News/Anti-Trump-antisemitism-The-link-between-Pittsburgh-and-Poway-588071.

⁸ Vanessa Romo. “El Paso Walmart Shooting Suspect Pleads Not Guilty.” National Public Radio, October 10, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/769013051/El-paso-walmart-shooting-suspect-pleads-not-guilty.

⁹ Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Katie Benner. “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online.” The New York Times, August 3, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/u s/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html.

¹⁰ Thomas Escritt and Stephan Schepers. “Gunman kills two in livestreamed attack at German synagogue.” Reuters, October 9, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-shooting/gunman-kills-two-in-livestreamed-attack-at-german-synagogue-idUSKBN1WO1AT.

¹¹ Lauretta Charltone. “What is the Great Replacement?” The New York Times, August 6, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/politics/grand-replacement-explainer.html.

¹² Nina Burleigh. “The Bannon Canon: Books Favored By The Trump Adviser.” Newsweek, March 23, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-canon-books-trump-adviser-572835.

¹³ Nate Heygi. “White Nationalist Groups Increase Recruiting and Propaganda Across the West.” National Public Radio, March 19, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/19/704586335/white-nationalist-groups-increase-recruiting-and-propaganda-across-the-west.

¹⁴ Kristin Lam. “Recruiting hate: White supremacist propaganda rises for third straight year on college campuses, ADL says.” USA Today, June 27, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/27/white-supremacist-recruiting-rise-college-campuses-report/1590886001/.

¹⁵ Colleen Shalby. “White supremacy group’s fliers plastered across UC Davis campus.” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-25/white-supremacy-group-fliers-uc-davis-campus.

¹⁶ Gabe Schneider. “White Supremacist UCSD Student Disrupts Lecture.” The Triton, January 29, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, http://triton.news/2018/01/white-supremacist-student-disrupts-lecture/.

¹⁷ “White Student Union.” VICE News, December 25, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/znqpye/white-student-union.

¹⁸ Kelly Weill.”Neo-Nazi Group Implodes Over Love Triangle Turned Trailer Brawl.” The Daily Beast, March 14, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl.

¹⁹ Kevin Roose. “The Making Of A Youtube Radical.” The New York Times, June 8, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.

²⁰ EJ Dickson. “Study Shows How ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Is a Gateway to the Far Right.” Rolling Stone, August 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-far-right-radicalization-study-877061/.

²¹ Jay Hathaway. “What is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks.” Gawker, October 10, 2014. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080.

²²Aja Romano. “How the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto used memes to spread hate.” Vox, March 16, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie.

²³ Aja Romano. “YouTube’s most popular user amplified anti-Semitic rhetoric. Again.” Vox, December 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/Pewdiepie-vs-tseries-links-to-white-supremacist-alt-right-redpill.

²⁴ Elizabeth Dwoskin. “YouTube will remove more white supremacist and hoax videos, a more aggressive stance on hate speech.” The Washington Post, June 5, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/05/youtube-will-remove-more-white-supremacist-hoax-videos-greater-hate-speech-effort/.

June 8, 2020 0 comment

Global Health Globalization Immigration Society and Culture UCLA and the World

Pandemic Fascism

written by Grayson Peters

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis. Governments worldwide are struggling to restrain the spread of the novel coronavirus, hoping to “flatten the curve” and avoid a surge of patients needing hospitalization which could overwhelm limited hospital beds and medical supplies. Faced with this challenge, many governments are reaching for greater authority over the movement of their citizens, imposing forced quarantines and border closures, activating emergency powers, and ramping up surveillance. While these measures may be effective as short-term countermeasures against the coronavirus, it is undeniable that, compared to only a few months ago, governments are exerting a far greater degree of control over the everyday lives of people.

Nationalists and xenophobes have taken to blaming the pandemic on foreigners, ethnic and religious minorities, and globalization. These reactionary sentiments have the potential to interact dangerously with governments that are increasingly comfortable with exercising authoritarian emergency powers. If the coronavirus is not successfully managed and millions fall sick and die, it has the potential to traumatize the world, radically reshape global politics, and transform the relationships between citizens and governments.

This worst-case scenario, which I call “pandemic fascism,” is the synthesis of medical authoritarianism, a reactionary fear of the foreign, and the collective trauma of a deadly global pandemic.

Unprecedented Border Closures

Countries across the globe are implementing travel restrictions, limiting the ability of their own citizens to move freely and some cutting off entirely from the outside world. These border closures and internal travel restrictions are on an unprecedented scale.

Canada, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Oman, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand have closed their borders to all foreign nationals.

Hundreds of other countries including the United States have put in place less draconian measures like requiring mandatory quarantine periods for foreign visitors and returning citizens. For example, China, Nepal, Madagascar, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Jamaica, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Uruguay, Chile, and Israel have all mandated that those entering the country from abroad remain in quarantine for 14 days.

Other nations have chosen instead to selectively bar travelers from other countries. Jordan, for instance, barred entry from neighboring Israel, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, before adding France, Germany, and Spain to the list.

Medical Surveillance

Although systems of national security surveillance already exist, states are rapidly expanding their abilities to monitor individuals in every waking moment, log their movements, and archive the most intimate details of their lives.

In China, an already pervasive surveillance system is growing to meet the threat of COVID-19. Police officers are donning ‘smart helmets’ equipped with cameras capable of facial recognition and measuring the body temperature of passers-by within a range of five meters. GPS tracking and ubiquitous facial recognition cameras log the movements of citizens, allowing for those who unwittingly come near confirmed coronavirus carriers to be automatically notified. Access to buildings can be restricted if a security camera observes that an entrant has a fever.

Israel implemented a controversial mass surveillance program operated by the Shin Bet security service to track the cell phone location and personal data of persons suspected to be infected and diagnosed with coronavirus, empowering the Health Ministry to send text messages notifying anybody who came into contact with them to self-quarantine. While both legal and arguably justified in the service of public health, this new system of medical surveillance received criticism from privacy advocates. Avner Pinchuk of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel argued that “the danger of COVID-19 is not only the virus itself, but the fear that as part of the efforts to overcome the danger, we will also lose our basic values as a free and democratic society.”

South Korea has used surveillance camera footage, smartphone location data, and even records of credit card purchases to backtrace the movements of coronavirus patients, determine who they were in contact with, and reconstruct chains of transmission.

People under total lockdown in Lombardy, Italy are under location surveillance by the provincial government to ensure that they obey the stay-at-home order and limit their time outside. Lombardy vice president Fabrizio Sala claimed on March 17th that phone location data provided by cell companies showed that 40% of Lombardians were still moving too much.

Blaming the Foreign

Government officials and private individuals are also taking part in the longstanding tradition of blaming foreigners and immigrants for disease. Instead of taking ownership of their crisis management (or lack thereof) leaders are dodging responsibility for failures of public health policy, advancing nationalist policies by using vulnerable groups as scapegoats.

President Donald Trump has taken to calling the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” amidst a spate of racist attacks on Asian-Americans, and tweeted that the global spread of the coronavirus would be prevented by the completion of his signature wall on the border with Mexico. Sheriff David Clarke, a frequent guest on Fox News, speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and high-profile Trump surrogate suggested that George Soros, a frequently-employed Jewish boogeyman for the far-right, was behind the spread of the coronavirus. Media and political figures in Turkey have claimed that coronavirus is a Zionist plot orchestrated by the state of Israel. Two spokesmen for the Chinese Foreign Ministry insinuated that the virus was brought to China by the United States military and did not, as scientists have concluded, originate in a wet market for wild animal meat in Wuhan.

In each case, blame for the pandemic is not directed towards the virus itself, insufficient public health policies, or overburdened health care systems, but towards alleged foreign threats and traditionally stigmatized groups.

Pandemic Fascism: America First Bruins

On March 25th this year, a new student organization at UCLA named America First Bruins made its social media debut with a joint resolution signed by the Bruin Republicans and five other College Republicans chapters. Alleging that the “Wuhan Virus” is spread by the “continued importation of refugees, guest workers, and foreign students,” the statement calls for President Trump to suspend refugee resettlement, the issuance of F-1 student visas, and the H-1B visa lottery while completing the southern border wall and deploying military assets to seal the northern border with Canada.

America First Bruins is an openly fascist club. I mean this in the truest sense of the word and without hyperbole. The header on its Twitter profile reads, in stylized vaporwave text, “Communists aren’t people.” The club cites Nicholas Fuentes, a holocaust denier, as inspiration. On the subject of ICE raids during the coronavirus pandemic, the club president tweeted “Can ICE just cough on illegals or something?” On the subject of Harvey Weinsein’s 23 year prison sentence for sex crimes, he tweeted “This is proof that women are literal children and should not have full rights.” Responding to the claim that accusing Ben Shapiro, an American Jew, of “dual loyalty” to Israel is antisemitic, he responded: “Jews have no loyalty to Israel? HAH!”

The fact that America First Bruins debuted and the Bruin Republicans openly embraced fascism for the first time amidst the coronavirus pandemic is not a coincidence. The emergency and the nationalist sentiments it produces are fertile ground for fascist organizing. This unprecedented shift in the political culture of the UCLA campus should be understood as a microcosm of an emerging far-right in the politics of American youth, emboldened by the cultural impact of COVID-19.

Fascism and Public Health

Broadly speaking, fascism is an ultranationalist and totalitarian political philosophy which imagines a mythic national rebirth from a state of degeneration, moral decay, and foreign subversion. In fascist rhetoric of the 20th century, foreigners and minorities were often characterized not just as undesirables or political subversives, but as parasites and vectors of disease infecting the body politic.

The German Nationalist Socialist Party, for example, often described Jews as parasites who both leeched off of German society and physically corrupted the German race through miscengination and moral degradation. In this way, previous fascists frequently conflated public health, the body politic, and an ideal of societal purity.

President Trump, importantly, has also used the rhetoric of public health as a way to attack immigrants and marginalized groups. As a candidate for president in 2015, he accused undocumented Mexican immigrants of bringing “tremendous infectious disease” across the border as justification for a border wall and widespread deportations.

The veneer of public health concerns allows fascists to pursue their policy goals of discrimination, exclusion, and genocide without openly admitting that hatred is their motivation. Border closures, travel bans, and immigration restrictions are far more politically viable if ostensibly justified by medical necessity. As a result, fascists like the America First Bruins capitalize eagerly on legitimate anxieties about disease transmission in order to demonize minority groups and expand the national government’s emergency powers.

Looking Forward

Now that we’ve laid out the theoretical elements of pandemic fascism — xenophobia and authoritarianism in the name of public health — it is necessary to ask whether or not this actually represents a serious threat. I believe it does.

In March, Politico reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had furtively requested that Congress grant it emergency powers, including the ability to petition a judge to detain someone indefinitely during a declared national emergency. More borders are shut, more emergency powers activated, and more people under tighter surveillance by governments than ever before. Historically, periods of crisis have enabled strongmen and demagogues to play on the public’s fears, seize unprecedented authority under the guise of responding to the emergency, and consolidate their power into permanent and oppressive regimes.

While the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates strong government responses, including restrictions on travel, immigration, and some proactive surveillance, these measures must be balanced with respect for privacy and a serious understanding that, once the outbreak is managed, governments will cede their emergency powers and the balance of power between citizen and state will return to relative normalcy. And, most importantly, people must continue to point out and shame those who weaponize fear of a virus into hatred of minoritized people. If fear is allowed to fester into hate, then the danger of pandemic fascism that lasts long after the spread of COVID-19 has ended may become a reality.

March 29, 2020 0 comment