Category Archives: human rights

Language As Weapon

history, human rights, rhetoric

On the morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington and nearly 700 United States soldiers attacked a village of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho Plains Native American tribes comprised primarily of elderly, women and children. They had been placed in the big bend of Sand Creek by the military as they waited to negotiate peace. Black Kettle, one of the leaders, was known to desire peace. He was shot down as he waved an American and a white flag. If you are not familiar with the massacre, the National Park’s website has a detailed history that includes links to recently discovered and horrifying first-person accounts from soldiers who refused to participate.

Colonel Chivington is infamous for his dehumanizing language towards the Native Americans and urging his men to scalp and kill them all even as some soldiers resisted. In her essay “Deprived of Humanity: From the Sand Creek Massacre to Today“, Nellis Kennedy-Howard of The Sierra Club and a member of the Navajo Nation reflects on her 2018 visit to the massacre site and the continued use of dehumanization towards the oppressed, calling it “one of the steps on the road to genocide.” She is correct, according to the United Nations.

Kennedy-Howard warns of not ignoring this use of language:

No human being is an animal, or an insect, or an infestation to be eliminated. When people with power use it to dehumanize others — watch out. Learn from the experiences of Native peoples and other persecuted groups. This isn’t just idle talk. It’s a warning sign that we have a duty to heed.

Dehumanizing language may be used by both sides in a conflict, but as Kennedy-Howard suggests, the more powerful opponent will often control the narrative and thus the definitions.

Boston University’s Dr. Elizabeth Coppock, a linguistics expert, discusses the use of language as a weapon in war. It is a quick read and I encourage you to take a look. Her responses to two of the interviewer’s questions stood out for me:

How do we talk to one another when one side’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter?”

I think we should focus on listening to each other.

The one substantive comment to the interview makes it clear that while this sounds simple, it is a lofty potentially unattainable ideal and certainly not part of our current climate. Oh we listen but often only to those with whom we agree, taking hard lines and claiming the moral high ground. The commenter is defending his group’s definitions of terrorist that arise out of their world view, exactly as Coppock describes in her other answers.

But it is Coppock’s response to the last question that broke my heart:

Is this time unusual, in that every single word seems to carry so much weight and to be subject to scrutiny that makes some people fall silent?

There is unspeakable sorrow and trauma all around right now.

Sigh.

I was thinking about ending with a poem, maybe Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver. But, instead, I found this…Walt Whitman’s list of synonyms for sorrow that he probably used as he wrote his elegy to Lincoln. Language used to express human emotion at its rawest and deepest, not a as a weapon but as a solace.

Whitman, Walt. “sorrow.” The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 06 June 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.

Here is the first section of Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d“:

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

A Child Died

Education, human rights

I first learned about Nex Benedict’s horrific story from V Spehar of Under the Desk News, one of my main source for news these days. If you haven’t heard the story, Nex, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School, who was following state law in Oklahoma and using the bathroom associated with their gender at birth, was assaulted on February 7 in the high school bathroom by three older girls. Early reports suggested Benedict could not walk on their own and was taken to the emergency room by the family. The next day, they were back in the ER, where they died on February 8. The story was reported by local news at the time.

The story has been covered by LGBTQ+ news outlets and organizations in the past couple days and is just now unfolding in the mainstream press (remember, they died February 8!); the police and school district have issued statements with the latter directly contradicting the stories about Benedict’s injuries. Public Radio Tulsa seems to have the most complete story so far and shows respect for Nex’s non-binary orientation, something their own family admits to struggling with as they come under fire for using her deadname as part of a Go Fund Me. The initial report of the detath described Nex as a teenage girl without naming them, but subsequent coverage has leaned towards using they/them pronouns with KJHR directly addressing the issue.

This story will continue to unfold, and there will be further investigations, allegations and denials. But, here’s the essence of the story as I see it:

A child died. That death was at least helped along by other children. And those children may have felt empowered in their actions by the hateful rhetoric of Oklahoma’s leaders. A child, trying to live their best life as they understood it, died, potentially because adults used their power to dehumanize and degrade them. A child died.

Erring on the Side of Inclusivity

Cultural Stereotypes, human rights, thinking out loud

I was able to spend time with my friend Jen Orr recently and enjoyed talking with her and her husband about books and life and the world in general. She has a new book out–We’re Gonna Keep on Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom–that will probably be banned in Florida so that means we must all read it. I suspect her and coauthor Matthew Kay’s ideas for leading racism discussions will be beneficial for all of us.

Jen has been my blogging inspiration and cheerleader. I have been working on this blog post related to transgender rights since I saw her and am determined to press publish today. Jen, this one’s for you:

When it comes to transgender issues, we live in a noisy, messy world where activists lob social media grenades at each other and finding unsensationalized reporting is challenging. I do understand that cis women of a certain age struggle with opening their hard-won spaces to trans women, especially in sports. I get it: I was 10 when Title IX, banning discrimination in sports, was passed. While not an athlete myself (I earned my varsity letter for marching band), I loved cheering on my girl friends as they raced around the track or scored a goal on the hockey field. We thought we had a clear understanding of the differences between boys and girls in my rural conservative, evangelical community where the slide decks for our segregated sex-ed classes were edited so severely that we were left to imagine how it all worked until we either got married or, in my case, could get our hands on The Joy of Sex or the Kama Sutra, both of which I purchased at Rizzoli’s in Merchant Square in Williamsburg after arriving at William and Mary in 1980.

But despite understanding the concerns around sports, if, in your zeal to take a stand, you attack young people who are discovering identities beyond the baked-in binary biases that controlled our lives, you need to spend some time learning and reflecting. I’m looking at you, Caitlyn Jenner. Jenner, arguably the most famous trans woman in the world, is anti-transgender when it comes to sports, suggesting that it is clear that these athletes have a built in advantage and claiming that transgender athletes are the pawns of radical activists, seemingly ignoring her own use of them as means to her ends. Recently, she turned her ire on a high school junior. We are all on journeys, informed by our biases and life experiences, and Jenner is welcome to share her ideas on this topic, of which as she points out, she has some knowledge. But, making a young woman feel less, and, even worse, opening her to the horrors of the social media crowd, is simply wrong.

What I have learned as part of my own reflections is that, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the jury on the supposed advantage of men over women is very much still out in terms of research, especially related to elite athletes. Yet, various governing bodies from state legislatures to international committees are rushing to severely limit or outright ban transgender athletes from competition. The federal government is updating Title IX in support of transgender inclusion in sports while allowing some wiggle room for schools to discriminate when appropriate, particularly if fairness is at stake.

The goal, then, is a balance between fairness and inclusivity, with the current trend of banning athletes described as supporting fairness as that concept aligns with what we’ve always been told about men and women. But, until there is some definitive research that supports these baked-in biases, I would lean towards inclusivity. After all, in the areas where trans athletes have competed, they have notably not swept the field. And, if all we do is create bans, we lose the opportunity to expand the research that will help support informed decisions. The New York Times, in an article related to swimming’s 2022 transgender ban that occured after a trans swimmer won one race (while losing several others in the same meet, something that was not part of the headlines), discusses the issues related to finding this balance, concluding that it will be impossible to make everyone happy. Compromise rarely does, in my experience, that’s what makes it a compromise.

Perhaps Jen and Matthew might consider a follow up volume that explores how to have meaningful discussion around gender in the elementary classroom. I know we grownups could certainly use it!

Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Want You to Watch This

documentary film, history, human rights,

Invisible History: Middle Florida’s Hidden History, produced by the Florida State University film school, focuses on middle Florida, the cotton growing counties in the panhandle where slavery was an essential part of the economy. It is everything people like Governor DeSantis want to eradicate: stories of black people enslaved, often tortured, for the sake of profit, with all sorts of apologists ready to say why it was acceptable.

Watch this now before the Florida legislature labels it pornography and forces its removal. You may need to make a donation to your PBS station in order to access Passport where it is streaming.* Here is the preview. Many of the commentators are black professors at Florida universities, and I wondered if they had come under attack for participating in this documentary, which was made in 2021.

*You may find it via your public library via the Hoopla app.

Tracking Death

history, human rights, Media,

The Washington Post has created a gruesome but necessary database that tracks those shot and killed by police. The database was begun in 2015 after the murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officers led to the discovery that many police killings were never recorded in the FBI database.

The data is clear: young, black men are killed more often than others.

Unfortunately, the database focuses on shootings so this morning’s news about the cousin of a Black Lives Matter co-founder who was killed by police with a taser may not be included. The young man from Washington, D.C. was visiting family in Los Angeles for the holidays. The video, released at the request of the family, shows his fear, driven by his sense that he was probably going to die like so many others. It will stay with me, alongside George Floyd calling for his mother. I won’t post it but encourage you to watch it. I think about Emmett Till’s mother who insisted the casket stay open so people were forced to confront the truth.