Acceptable. Or something.
Tag: race
The New York Times Helped a Vindictive Teen Destroy a Classmate Who Uttered a Racial Slur When She Was 15
Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture’s Count of Monte Cristo.
Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years’ old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” said Galligan.
The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner’s permit, saying “I can drive, [slur].” The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.
Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT’s cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.
This story is a powerful example of several social phenomena: the militant streak in social justice activism, the naivety of today’s teens and their not-actually-disappearing Snapchat messages, social media’s hunger for mob justice, and even the capacity for elaborate cruelty that has always existed among high schoolers. But the wildest thing about this incident is that most people will learn about it by reading The New York Times.
“A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning.” That’s the title of the Times‘s article on the subject, published the day after Christmas. Reporter Dan Levin tries to add considerable context by detailing a history of alleged unpleasantness at Heritage High School, which Groves and Galligan attended. It sits in a wealthy, predominantly white county where “slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds.”
“In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs,” notes Levin. “A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a ‘growing sense of despair’ among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students.”
Levin connects the outcry from aggrieved students to the broader Black Lives Matter movement and protests that occurred this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. But nowhere does his article reckon with a very basic fact: The New York Times has opted to assist a teenager’s desperate quest to ruin the life of a young woman who said something stupid when she was 15.
Everything is racist now…
Segregation is back, baby…
Real headline, folks: The Votes of Black Americans Should Count Twice
Black votes in this country are worth less than white votes. Joe Biden won the Electoral College because Black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia turned out in significant numbers. But even with overwhelming Black support—94 percent of Detroit voted for Biden!—the outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were worryingly close.
The Argument is a column where writers and thinkers propose a provocative idea that may not be politically realizable in the short term but that pushes one to think broader about a pressing issue of public importance.
One core problem is the Electoral College. Wyoming, which has just 580,000 residents and is 93 percent white, gets three electors because of its two senators and one representative in the House. By comparison, Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District—which includes Atlanta, has 710,000 residents, and is 58 percent Black—has no dedicated electors or senators and can only occasionally overcome the mostly white and conservative votes from elsewhere in the state. This devaluation of Black votes allows our political system to ignore Black lives, and the consequences are devastating. Unequal representation has led to unequal health care outcomes, which the Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened. Without sufficient voting power, Black communities receive substandard education, and politicians are free to appoint judges who sanction mass incarceration, abusive policing, and electoral disenfranchisement.
This is all by design. The Constitution’s framers set up the Electoral College to protect the interests of slave states. Along with the Senate, the Electoral College was critical in the endurance of slavery and its continuation by other means. Abolishing this system would mean that ballots cast by Black voters—or any voters, for that matter—would count the same.
But there’s another way to undo the damage of the Electoral College and other structurally racist political institutions: We can implement vote reparations by double-counting ballots cast by all Black residents. The poisonous legacy of slavery applies to Black people regardless of when we or our ancestors arrived in this country. Vote reparations should also extend to Native Americans. Slavery is rightly called America’s original sin, but so too was the United States’ genocidal seizure of land from its original inhabitants. Various legal forms of disenfranchisement have applied to them. It wasn’t until 1962 that all Native Americans were allowed to vote, and even then they faced—and still face—electoral obstacles. These are not the only examples of American oppression; we should include in vote reparations others who have suffered similar disenfranchisement.
Diversity!
Can’t make it up: Cornell University has a new vaccine mandate — and it only applies to white students!
Cornell University has a new flu shot mandate in order to try and keep flu cases down so healthcare resources stay open for Covid patients. But the mandate applies to white people only, because of course it does, because we live in a clown world that gets clownier by the day.
That’s right, at Cornell you can duck the mandatory flu shot by claiming your race as an exemption. Unless you’re white, obviously.
Cornell has a FAQ page “especially for people of color” that explains how victimized they’ve been by white people and thus how they can’t be expected to trust someone to require them to get vaccinated (or something?) and ends with an invitation for non-white people to send an email to the department for an exemption to the vaccine mandate.
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.
Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.
Facebook To End Race-Blind Hate Speech Moderation
Facebook is ending race-blind hate speech moderation and will begin policing hate speech directed at black Americans, Muslims, multi-racial Americans, Jewish people and LGBTQ people more aggressively than hate speech directed at white Americans, according to the Washington Post.
The “WoW Project” is aimed at automatically detecting hate speech that is “the worst of the worst,” internal documents about the project that were obtained by the Washington Post said. The project will re-engineer Facebook’s automated moderation system to try and get better at detecting hateful language aimed at minority groups.
New Jersey weighs ‘social equity’ tax on marijuana
New Jersey lawmakers may include a so-called social equity tax in the legislation establishing a legal market for recreational marijuana, according to reports.
Bills in the state Senate and Assembly would give cannabis regulators the authority to impose the “social equity excise fee,” which would help fund programs aimed at reducing racial disparities caused by drug laws.
The influential Legislative Black Caucus has lobbied for programs aimed at helping Black communities, which have been hard-hit by marijuana prohibition. Black residents are likelier to be arrested on marijuana charges than white residents, for example.
Hellbound and Down 
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