Open Letter to University of Iowa and the Iowa Board of Regents: Call to Action

The University of Iowa as an institution and the Iowa Board of Regents are not being responsible citizens–the campus and U community overlap with the community as a whole; the: City bus interchange is right next to a main center of campus! You endanger all, against our freedom, by not requiring masks indoors, as the CDC recommends, and vaccination just, like you require the flu and other vaccination.

I am a former student and employee; my family lives there in Iowa City, Iowa, including loved ones who have who have medical conditions, but who work or have business or medical appointments near or on campus, and/or must commute on public transit through the interchange that shares air with campus. The Cambus, University’s bus system, is open to the community. Even if these transit systems were not so distinctly campus and community integrated, University students and community come into contact with the entire community, via interacting with people and via location. Lack of any of these blatantly encourages disease spread, entirely unnecessarily–the only Big 10(14) school displaying such a dangerous lack of critical thinking and applications, in a global pandemic, to boot.

Regents and University leadership, you must mandate masks, require vaccination as people are able, and allow remote course instruction and work, as staff and faculty, who are put at most risk, require for health and safety, of themselves, their children and loved ones, and the entire community. Additionally, those paid the least, adjuncts and graduate student employees, face the most exposure–so you need to listen to them and heed their assessments and those of the researchers at the Iowa College of Public Health. Students, too, cannot do their best work nor bring achievement, prestige, glory, and ever-lauded money to the university when they have to navigate such huge pointless risk to health and impediment to balance of functional or family life and contact. The same goes for even athletes…and fans. No one can drink to the Hawkeyes or buy game tickets if they are grieving for their grandparents; season ticket holders can’t buy next season passes for their kids and grandkids when they are hospitalized or dead.

https://chng.it/yjpQVHVzYS

PLEASE SIGN. Thank you.

image from Concerned parents, students, educators, and staff Iowa’s petition on change.org

Why #FBBlackout just as #BlackLivesMatter movement picks up?

A blackout in the name of #BlackLivesMatter on the second anniversary of #TrayvonMartin’s senseless racist hate-crime murder is planned for tomorrow June 13th for an entire week away from Facebook.  But could it also be a way to divide and isolate the large network of connected people who are/care about Black lives, #BlackLivesMatter, and whose connection, consciousness of it, and simultaneity make a national movement?

The idea is Black people temporarily leaving Facebook en masse makes an impact on Facebook corporate advertisers with the sudden, collectively large cessation of ad viewership and revenue by African-Americans and allies. Did Facebook itself, Zuck and co., jump in with the #BLM banner on the building to get on the movement’s good side just in time? Not necessarily, but Zuck could have fired the racist employee. Could the Blackout cancel some of the power of the initiative that began on and in some ways relies on the social network, as do many collective conscious awakenings or improvements or movements? The point is to become involved IRL and connect in your/our own communities in face-to-face, physical, local or immediate presence. It is a way to counter the passivity of #Facebookactivism or #clicktivism of the #slacktivist.

Yet Alicia Garza and the #BlackLivesMatters founders used this social media to make the movement, to make change in their local communities and in national community, by getting people involved. Facebook is a tool for these achievements; online communication and connection has made possible or helped to make possible the power of individual connection, numbers, and solidarity since the early days of the internet for people who could access the internet, which has become more accessible–and actually accessed–even for disenfranchised people, though always less so than those better off socioeconomically, which of course means racially, by gender, cissex, ability, et al. So an #FBBlackout also allows people to put aside the digital divide.

Organizer Yefthak Dahn explains: Because Facebook Live was used for the first time in viral, immediate knowledge by the viewing of Diamond “Lavish” Reynold’s filming of fiance #PhilandoCastile getting shot by a white police officer at a short traffic pull over, Facebook and the police and possibly higher government should not have allowed a “technical glitch” to remove the post, nor left it unexplained except for the contradictory and vague information that the video of #Philando may have been taken down by human error or by decision because of its many flags as a violent post.  A blackout by Black people on/of Facebook by one of the richest and most powerful white men in the world demands a stronger position of inclusivity and support of Black people, especially in the face of this targeted fatal violence by leaders and the law that is one advocacy and allyship, since Facebook runs, and runs free, via advertisers. The cost is your information, privacy, exposure to brands and ads, networking and awareness according to Facebook and advertisers’ algorithms, and the value of your demographic and habits to marketers. The Blackout asks people to use other social media platforms.So get on Twitter; don’t sacrifice the momentum.

All people can show Facebook and the slew of companies and corporations advertising on it that #BlackLivesMatter and that we are all affected and are in community by joining. White allies should cause Hellman’s and Uggs and the CMAs to also become financially affected; that might help make a difference in the systemically racist ways our (corporatist) country is run. Make sure you have an alternative way to find out what is happening at protests around the country.  Be aware of the trackability or outside ease of access, besides the lag, of old-school networking communication. Be prepared to keep in contact, make contact more often, including in old-school ways of phone trees, and flash texting, while you are not part of the stream of information and network connecting that you are used to.

#FBBlackout also asks people to experience each other without screen mediation. Allies, especially white people, have a distinct responsibility to get in proximity to People of Color and specifically Black people as welcome and the problems people are facing to work on the racial disparity and end its violence, to work with people and community groups and efforts, to act in them for change in person, in concert, in community with Black people and #BlackLivesMatter.

What is your local criminal justice reform committee doing?  Proximity to and in-person work is necessary above all to stop systemic violence by holding people in the systems of power accountable and racially violent individuals accountable, including those who are upholding it (not just the physically murderous), examining yourself according to the minority voice, then very specifically putting into practice in your daily life changes to dismantle hegemonic white privilege, and by creating events and specifically, locally changing the status quo on opportunity and recognition in your community, in what you are good at and reaching to assist in new realms or work on the problems, where you are welcome, also even in spaces with just white people, and according to the minority voice, according to Black people personally affected.

So please only #FBBlackout to do these actions in person. Please stay networked, and only #FBBlackout if you already have your plans and solidarity down pat against racist pat-downs and stop-and-frisks of Black people, especially that become more violent and fatal, if you can find strength and feel assured personally, spiritually, politically by the knowledge beforehand that around the country people are gathering to make change. if people act, together, without Facebook during all of B/blackout time. Maintain your energy and action together, do not be dispelled and dispersed by lack of connection or communication on the social media site we all use and have relied on. #FBBlackout if you can be stronger without the tool than with it.

Bigender Multigender Gender expansive Nonbinary Genderqueer Neutral Androgynous

Bigender Multigender Gender expansive Nonbinary Genderqueer Neutral Neutrois Androgynous

http://www.npr.org/player/embed/384104070/384134300
http://www.npr.org/2015/02/06/384104070/paiges-story

African American Vernacular English and a lay brief history of dialect integrity!

As posted to the United Front-Civil Rights Organization:

posted by Lex Scott

 

When white people or teenagers in general use it, they are still using AAVE (African American Vernacular English). It’s not only used by African Americans anymore, since our culture is mixed, and (especially suburban teenage male) whites were sold Black culture in pop culture (namely hip hop in the late 80s), and people who are not Black/African American feel a right to co-opt it. Also, I think since AAVE is an American dialect, Americans in general (of all colors and creeds) might use it sometimes, in certain settings–whether an authentic way they learned to talk or not, a later adopted dialect. I agree it can make people “sound ‘uneducated,'” but that’s because of race (and class) hegemony pushing whiteness=rightness in education.

The responses to the original anonymous Tumblr post point out that there is a grammar system–I think it’s also called a pattern of syntax–at play in “You [delete to-be conjugation] + article + noun object-of-sentence” or “You [delete to-be conjugation] + adjective.” And that, in fact, it *matches* the grammatical system (or pattern of syntax?) of Standard American English (SAE), or “proper” English.

Of course in actual life, in reality, at a job interview or in a professional situation, yeah, it sounds uneducated or is considered unprofessional–but that’s because the Anglo dialect (SAE) is the one given clout…by the clout-givers, generally the traditionally dominant culture, aka the culture of the group that violently dominated historically and continues to by all that historical privilege and advantage in the professional realms. In this country and culture’s case, often only when the original inventors and speakers of AAVE hold power in those realms, have staked a claim to clout, do current African American, and Brown People of Color speakers of AAVE pass the gate-keeping official and unofficial tests, prescribed and informal interviews and networking interactions, and algorithms of professions and professional climbing.  It’s also why AAVE is termed a “vernacular,” language spoken in daily life, colloquially.

African American Vernacular dialect functions with the same if not more complexity as Standard American English.**

See, even though AAVE (and other dialects) actually have grammar or syntax patterns = rules…they’re devalued simply because they’re not the norm (SAE) that white Americans developed for English, by natural random language evolution and on purpose, especially for education and for professional speaking.

Ask yourself: How does it sound when someone speaks with a British cockney accent? Educated or uneducated?

If you are a person who’s not African American and/or did not learn to speak AAVE growing up, do you ever say phrases like, “Where you going?” or even “Where ya going?” These also omit the “are,” the to-be conjugation (though I don’t know if it is happening in the same way linguistically!).
And would you say this, would you speak like this in a job interview or in a professional setting? More importantly, especially if you are a white person in a position of hiring or recommending power, can you accept copula deletion just as you would copula contraction? ^^

**African American vernacular dialect functions with the same if not more complexity as Standard American English:

Because English is largely lacking in the subjunctive and other general or what-if verb tenses (cases? Linguists please help me out here!), or doesn’t have a different-sounding word or verb conjugation for the subjunctive or a certain verb tense, Africans who were brought here retained these tenses from their African languages. For instance, saying “She be…” + adjective or + -ing verb, using the infinitive auxiliary, or helping, verb is actually from Yoruba tribe language structure! And from some other African languages, if I remember right what I’ve learned. And it’s a structure **more complex** than that of English! It makes for an additional verb tense. English is missing this kind of verb tense and murky with others: for instance, describing a chronological spot on a timeline that’s distinctly in the present but also a lasting, though undefined, length or range–so when Africans from many different tribes were learning English, suddenly forcibly put into English-speaking American environments as slaves, people or a single person from one tribe mixed up with people from all different tribes who spoke different languages, and communicating, especially learning some English was a matter of life and death, these verb tenses / sentence structures stuck around! The African language infusions clarify the English or add to it.
(Linguists, please correct, if the infinitive in “pronoun + infinitive” structure is not an infinitive auxiliary!)

^^…What if in your job, and maybe in your life in all aspects, you never have to use “professional” speak…? When African Americans and other People of Color (and poor whites and light-skinned people, namely the Irish, before the category of “white” became so omnipresent as the norm) were kept out of “professional” jobs and business and life, there was no need to learn or adapt to “professional” English of the dominant educated class/race/group. In that sense, of course it is just as “professional” to use whatever dialect you speak–or even a different language, a “creole,” or what’s called a “pidgin” (mixture of two languages into a business/commerce dialect).   If you *were* a business person of the year 18-something-or-other or the early 1900s, say, a butcher and maybe even owner of a butcher shop, and you, say, talk to a German to get lamb and to a Jewish Rabbi who speaks Hebrew to get Kosher meat and to first-generation Italian immigrants and Irish immigrants, etc., would you speak perfect King’s English or Standard American English of the time ? If you were an African American who until segregation mostly interacted for business only with other African American people, except maybe sometimes with other usually ghetto-ized People of Color and/or a few poor white people, often immigrant light-skinned people…wouldn’t the dialect would serve you just fine, including in your profession?

Urgent Recommendation: Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN

CITIZEN: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Not racist? Hear, listen, and grasp social and race issues with the renowned author, playwright, and poet. “I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions that indicate the lack of recognition of the black body as a body to the creation and enforcement of laws.” Claudia Rankine said last fall in BOMB.
Wait, what’s a “microaggression”?? These words matter.
CITIZEN: An American Lyric divulges and dissects day-to-day, often sub-surface racism and its effects beyond the moment. Her fifth poetry book, it made history, nominated for two National Book Critics Circle Awards, for Criticism and for Poetry; it won the latter, along with the NAACP Image Award, PEN Open Book Award, and others, and is the only New York Times nonfiction bestseller of its lyric kind.
CITIZEN calls out in solidarity if you’ve ever been run into by an armored tank of racial marginalization or been caught in a nasty traffic jam of intersectionality. Rankine calls you to action if you give a hoot or are susceptible to participating in systemic racism. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described in the BOMB interview, “Citizenship involves metabolizing in the language of your flesh what you call the ‘ordinary’ injury of racist encounter.” Rankine’s prose details scene by the millisecond, along with internal reaction, piling on inevitable, immediate, smacking social resonance in fell swoop after fell swoop. Each scene rounds out with that “metabolizing” as it happens, or as its consequence plays out within black bodies and minds constrained by white hegemony and apathy.
Los Angeles’ Fountain Theater produced an adaptation in August, spotlighting the versatility of CITIZEN and Rankine’s multi-form and -genre work. Her dialogue and descriptions came to life on stage particularly smoothly: The ensemble cast rove among different characters, black actors facing white actors, playing out scenes of surprise verbal, contextual complicity or attack and slow-motion, time-stopped response, outburst, or restraint. Sitting, watching in your red theater seat became complacency; cringing and squirming in it were not enough.
In interactions of daily and professional life, how can white people stop colluding to enact racism, even if unintentionally? How can all people not commit and not accept racial microaggression? Recognition of such words and acts is a start.

Gender neutral/queer They

Cisgender people identifying as non-binary and insisting on being called “they”.
None of my business.
—posted 6/3/2015

Do you think there is a difference between I (intersex) and Q (queer), as in that queer can include non-binary gender but does not indicate that a person is born what is known to be genitally or endocrinologically or chromosomally intersexed? Or that “non-binary” can include queer gender expression, bi-gender/multi-gender, gender-fluid, genderqueer expression or identity? Do you think there’s such a thing as queer gender?

 

Divide and Conquer; Divide and Conflate; Inflate the Power

“Not only is [there] an imbalanced concentration of power,
but cops aren’t actually experts at what the laws actually are.” —Jarien Sky

     So very, very much so–the goons don’t know the laws that they are gooning for, except in the moment in which they are suspending other laws guaranteed rights. The brutality arm =/= the courts and legal system. The false interchangeability of knowledge, function, and power has “crept” in (promoted from on high, purposely) to the point where though the distinctions are constantly plowed over, they are still used as an excuse for lack of actual helpful assistance or accomplishment, and because of their *de juris only* state of or enactment of their distinction, people, that is, lay people, including *employers* and people forcibly, both physically and otherwise, as it goes, involved in the one of the “branches” do not fully if at all know the distinctions and their differences, and namely, implications (charge constantly conflated with conviction), just as is clear from the  impossibility of checks-and-balances apparent in the way to describe this part of problem, as de juris only.
      The problem also extends to everyone who works with the cops: Look at New Mexico’s medical professionals, medical practitioners being in the caring, nurturing professions, participating in the excessive, unnecessary anal probing, under directives of the police force and a judge, of the person (indubitably representative) who sued over it; or the Albuquerque EMTs who violently dehumanize over the fact that a person takes a psychiatric medication that they have a prescription for, while on a call that APD cops are sent to, and sent to FIRST, who do the same–*and* accuse a person of not taking their “meds,” as excuse for dehumanizing degrading treatment and violence…in front of life-saving EMTs who either remain silent or participate in these contradictory and equally degrading manners. Unfortunately, I know a number of people who have been subjected to this experience.

#MARSHALLLAW #eminemstate #doyougetityet

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In response to Bill Cosby’s “We Cannot Blame the White People Any Longer”

“You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” — Audre Lorde

This is why Bill Cosby has been called an “oreo” in YT’s sweater, and accused of being black bougie.

It is true and very sad that some, maybe many African-Americans/Black people don’t know a lot about African countries. Picking up extra work at a factory once, I spoke French with and helped translate from/for a number of French-speaking workers from French-colonized African countries, primarily the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). A young Black/African-American guy worker asked me, “Where’d you learn to speak African?”
Most of the Black/African-American people I’ve been acquainted with are well-spoken and educated, though admittedly I’ve run primarily in college educated circles. (Pun intended, as reiterated by a couple of Black/African-American woman with Master’s degrees and their own business, who still dealt with a lot of racial discrimination, blocked in-roads to business based on assumption of a lack of traditional education or racial mistrust.)

These two particular women had been able to trace and find out as much as possible about their nations, tribes, and ethnic groups of origin in Africa (among the European roots their lineages were mixed with).

However, the choice to try to make a better life in the new world is not quite the same as being sold and kidnapped onto the Middle Passage into slavery on a foreign continent.

I do agree with Dr. Cosby about the term African-American; it is othering. But there are many who say the history of origin should not be erased in defining people as this minority and historically oppressed group in favor of assimilation. And if it were done away with, would it help stop racial discrimination, or ignore and undermine it? In fact, would deleting this race label insult the people who fought for it in the Back to Africa Movement, and the associated gains? Would it cover up or help to ignore the problems facing this group of people as a group? …As a (supposed/socially constructed) race based on skin color?

The Wisdom of Non-Experts

The Thesis Whisperer

This post was written by Jonathan Downie, a PhD student, conference interpreter, public speaker and translator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He co-edits LifeinLINCS the unofficial blog of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University. He is married with two children.

His newest blog Rock Your Talk aims to help people keep on improving in their public speaking. In this post Jonathan gives some thought to an important topic – should we work harder to non academic others in our research?

Nowadays, most academic disciplines are pretty closed shops. Sure, they might have the odd study that involves another discipline and there might be the odd paper calling for greater collaboration but the limits of collaboration are firmly set.

We all know the rules. If you need help with research, you are expected to go talk to another researcher. If your research crosses disciplinary boundaries, you…

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