Sneakers, elastic pants: People 

WHITE MEN IN WHITE COLLAR JOBS

 alter office wear amid COVID

By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO

This photo provided by Brooks Brothers shows a model showing a Brooks Brothers casual office wardrobe. Going back to the office, many don't want to return to structured looks like suits, zip-front pants and pencil skirts from the pre-pandemic days. But they also don't want to look unprofessional. So they're experimenting with new approaches, forcing retailers and clothing brands to respond with colorful blazers in knit or sweatshirt fabrics, pants with drawstrings or elastic bands, and new casual twists on the collared button-down dress shirt. (Matt Albiani/Brooks Brothers via AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — Blazers in knit fabrics, pants with drawstrings or elastic waists, and polo shirts as the new button-down.

Welcome to the post-pandemic dress code for the office.

After working remotely in sweats and yoga pants for two years, many Americans are rethinking their wardrobes to balance comfort and professionalism as offices reopen. They’re giving a heave-ho to the structured suits, zip-front pants and pencil skirts they wore before the COVID-19 pandemic and experimenting with new looks. That has retailers and brands rushing to meet workers’ fashion needs for the future of work.

“Being comfortable is more important than being super structured,” said Kay Martin-Pence, 58, who went back to her Indianapolis office last month in dressy jeans and flowy tops after working remotely in leggings and slippers for two years. “Why feel buttoned up and stiff when I don’t have to?”

Before COVID-19, Martin-Pence used to wear dress pants with blazers to the pharmaceutical company where she works. She’s gone back to heels, but they’re lower, and she says she will never wear dress pants again to the office.

Even before the pandemic, Americans were dressing more casually at work. The time spent in sweats accelerated the shift from “business casual” to “business comfort.”

Still, return-to-office dressing remains a social experiment, said Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who coined the term “enclothed cognition,” or how what people wear affects how they think.

“My guess is that it will go more casual, but maybe it doesn’t,” Galinsky said. “People are going to be consciously thinking about: ‘Am I wearing the right outfit for being in the office?’ They’re going to be thinking about what they’re doing, the context they’re in, and the social comparisons of what others will be doing.”

Steve Smith, CEO of outdoor sportswear brand L.L. Bean, said people are stepping out of their “typical uniform” — whatever form that may take.

“They’re going to expect more flexible hours, to be able to work in hybrid model, and to be comfortable — as comfortable as they were at home,” he said. “Some of the office uniforms, office wardrobes, are shifting and changing. There’s no reason why it can’t be permanent.”

Data from market research firm NPD Group and retailers reflect the shifting trends.

Wire-free bras now represent more than 50% of the total, non-sports bra market in the U.S., reversing a long-term trend, according to NPD. Sales of dressy footwear have been rebounding since 2021, but they’re still 34% below 2019 levels and more likely fueled by the return of social occasions, not the office, NPD said. Instead, casual sneakers are now the most common shoes for work.

Clothing rental company Rent the Runway said rentals for blazers were up nearly twofold in February from last year, reflecting a return to offices. But its customers are choosing colorful versions like pastel and fabrics like lightweight tweed, linens and twill. It said “business formal” rentals — traditional workwear like basic sheaths, pencil skirts and blazers — are roughly half of what they were in 2019, said Anushka Salinas, president and chief operating officer.

Stitch Fix, a personal shopping and styling service, noted men are increasingly choosing options like hiking and golf pants for the office. For the first three months of the year, revenue for that type of clothing was up nearly threefold over a year ago.

Polo shirts have replaced the collared button-down for men, and there’s strong demand for pull-on pants, the company said. The ratio of elastic-waist work pants to those with buttons or zippers on Stitch Fix was one to one in 2019; now it’s three to one.




Other workers, however, are feeling excited about dressing up again.

Emily Kirchner, 42, of Stevensville, Michigan, who works in communications for a major appliance manufacturer, said she’s investing more in her wardrobe as she returns to the office. She used to wear tunic tops and leggings from Stitch Fix in the pre-pandemic days. Now, she’s turning to the service for high-end jeans, blouses and blazers.

“It’s kind of fun to dress up,” said Kirchner, who had a baby early in the pandemic and wants to wear clothes that don’t make her look like what she calls a “frumpy mom.” “It’s kind of like that back-to-school feeling.”

Retailers had to pivot to Americans’ changing demands throughout the pandemic and now again with many returning to offices. Upscale department store Nordstrom, for example, has opened women’s denim shops to highlight its expanded selection as it sees more women wearing jeans to work.

Even Ministry of Supply, a company looking to make work clothing as comfortable as exercise wear, had to make big changes. When the pandemic hit, it was stuck with piles of tailored pants and jackets in performance fabrics deemed irrelevant for a remote workforce.

The Boston-based company started by graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quickly reengineered the items, sticking in elastic waistbands and removing zippers. It also slimmed down hems on pant suits to give them “sneaker″ cuts.

As workers return to the office, Ministry of Supply is keeping those relaxed looks and sneaker cuts and has permanently eliminated zippers — all its pants have elastic waistbands or drawstrings. It’s also reinventing its tailored suit.

“The new challenge is: How do I look presentable when I am in person without sacrificing comfort?” said Gihan Amarasiriwardena, co-founder and president.

The 200-year-old haberdashery Brooks Brothers had a bigger challenge — it never followed the casual office attire trend several years ago like its rivals. Under a new owner and CEO Ken Ohashi, the company has found success in offering relaxed styles in a post-bankruptcy reinvention.

Now, 45% of its offerings are casual sportwear like sweaters and polo shirts. Before the pandemic, that figure was 25%, Ohashi said.

He said dress shirts are making a comeback as workers return to the office. But Brooks Brothers is adding a twist: a stretch version of its cotton-knit shirts with the comfort of a polo. It also is offering colorful jackets.

“The guy is attracted to novelty right now, novelty color, novelty print, novelty pattern,” Ohashi said. “Historically, that guy came in, and he was buying a navy, a charcoal and black suit. He definitely wants to mix it up. And I think that is here to stay.”

___

Associated Press writer David Sharp contributed from Freeport, Maine.

Fran Drescher, head of actors' union, seeking tax breaks for group's 'middle class members'

Sitcom star wants to see Congress pass the Performing Artists Tax Parity Act.


By Nicholas Ballasy
Updated: May 1, 2022 

Actress Fran Drescher, president of the Hollywood labor union SAG-AFTRA, is seeking tax breaks for "middle class members" of the union.

Drescher wants to see Congress pass the Performing Artists Tax Parity Act, which would amend the 2017 tax reform bill signed by former President Trump to "increase the adjusted gross income limitation for above-the-line deduction of expenses of performing artist employees, and for other purposes." The bill has bipartisan cosponsors.

Drescher described the legislation pending in Congress as a "big deal" that would help actors and actresses.

"We're looking for tax breaks for our middle class members, it's called PATRA, the Performing Artists Tax Parity Act, and that's a big deal because actors spend a lot of money before they even get a job just in trying to secure a job," she said.

Drescher noted that the tax benefit is on the books but "we just want to expand it a little bit."

Her organization also wants to see passage of the American Music Fairness Act, which is to "close up the loophole on AM/FM radio; it's the only last area where a performer gets played and a singer or a musician doesn't get paid."

Drescher said that the broadcaster currently makes money off of the performers.

"So we want them to pay like Pandora does, and Spotify and iTunes, and it's time for that to happen," she said.

There's a 'new boogeyman' freaking out Americans susceptible to conspiracy theories

Bob Brigham
April 30, 2022

Man wearing tinfoil hat (Shutterstock)

Following birtherism, PizzaGate, QAnon, Great Replacement, and Donald Trump's delusions about election fraud, there is now a "new boogeyman" gaining traction.

"In late 2020, conspiracy theorists started telling everyone who’d listen about a sinister plot called the 'Great Reset.' The global elites of the World Economic Forum (WEF) had either co-opted or outright concocted the COVID-19 pandemic, they falsely claimed. Then world leaders and technocrats, almost all of whom are supposedly active agents or compromised puppets of the Forum, adopted what conspiracists see as senseless and draconian policies, like lockdowns, ostensibly to curb the spread of the virus—but really to destabilize and traumatize the globe," Mark Hay reported for The Daily Beast.

He reported on a Telegram channel with around 28,500 subscribers.

"But the channel specifically suggested the WEF and its allies’ next big world domination gambit may be a 'cyber pandemic,' an ill-defined but massive false flag cyberattack, or series of attacks, on financial institutions. Or the entire power grid. Or the internet as a whole," he explained. "That’s not an isolated take. There’s been sporadic talk of an incoming, elite-orchestrated 'cyber pandemic' in Great Reset circles for well over a year. But the idea of this digital threat, and its imminence, has seemingly gained traction across the conspiratorial web since around the end of last year—and especially since the start of this March."

In March, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) discussed the "Great Reset" with Alex Jones, who declared bankruptcy after being sued by Sandy Hook families for pushing a conspiracy theory that the mass shooting was a false flag operation.

"The idea of a cyber pandemic is not actually new. Broadly, it’s in keeping with the cybersecurity world’s use of biological disease metaphors to explain digital risks. (Think: computer virus.) As early as 2004, cybersecurity researchers used the term to talk about the risks associated with increasingly interconnected digital ecosystems, in which a novel virus or exploit could hit one weak link, then cascade outwards through wider systems," he reported. "All conspiracy theories evolve, blending with other ideas they come in contact with to adapt to new audiences or changing circumstances. The Great Reset itself, experts explained, appears to just be an update of older conspiracy theories about the dark machinations of global elite cabals that’ve been circulating since at least the 1700s, always identifying new foes and plots."

He noted a post that recently appeared on a Reddit forum linking the conspiracy theory to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

“This is a fixed war sponsored by WEF [sic]. Putin is as much WEF as the western leaders are, don’t you be fooled,” the user wrote. “If EVENT 201 was the precursor to COVID 19, then last year’s CYBER POLYGON will be the predictive event for the coming CYBER WINTER of total global telecommunications collapse which will be achieved through Russian Nuclear Submarines. We will be fooled once again!”

Read the full report.

'Clock show' 60 Minutes does epic interview with 'Birds Aren't Real' parody conspiracy theorists

Sarah K. Burris
May 01, 2022


Travel booking site Kayak recently mocked conspiracy theorists with a commercial depicting a middle-aged woman imploring her family to "open your eyes!

Now, one of the more famous fake conspiracy theories used to mock QAnon followers and the far right is getting the "60 Minutes" treatment.

Speaking to the network, the chief architect of the conspiracy theory that birds aren't real, explained that the government is actually using surveillance drones to monitor people of the world.

Peter McIndoe explained that seagulls are a perfect example that birds aren't real. He noted that if one watches them swoop down and grab your food, they don't actually eat it. According to McIndoe, the birds take it back to the Pentagon to be studied.

“[We’re] fighting lunacy with lunacy,” said Claire Chronis, who works with McIndoe on the Birds Aren’t Real campaign.

"How do you feel about '60 Minutes' I'm surprised you've decided to sit here with us," asked reporter Sharyn Alfonsi.

"I'm not gonna go on news shows, but shows about clocks and time, I'm okay sharing my information with," said McIndoe with a dead-panned expression. "I understand this isn't anything like the media. So, thanks for having me on your clock show."

The group also includes Cameron Kasky, a Parkland student who survived the mass shooting at his high school and also joined the campaign. Many conspiracy theorists have disputed that mass shootings actually happened. The most famous example comes from Alex Jones and other far-right news outlets who claimed for years that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting wasn't real. They went so far as to attack family members of murdered children. One family had to move several different times because they were so inundated with threats. Jones was ultimately ordered to pay the parents millions of dollars in damages for his role in promoting the conspiracies.

Kasky explained that their key way to fight the lies of older generations is with their own lies that mock their elders.

"We don't want to use language that actual harmful and hateful conspiracy theories use to target people," said Kasky. He was harassed, doxxed and attacked online. He was called a crisis actor and his father and grandfather were called sex traffickers, an allegation that QAnon throws around without any real accountability.

See excerpts from the show below:

 

  

Russia Ukraine war: 'Ghost of Kyiv' fighter pilot was a 'super-hero' hoax, Ukrainian air force finally admits

1 May, 2022 

The ghost of Kyiv was a 'superhero-legend' created around Major Stepan Tarabalka. Photo / Twitter

NZ Herald

The mysterious "Ghost of Kyiv", a Ukrainian fighter pilot who reportedly shot down dozens of Russian aircrafts, is a myth the Ukraine air force has finally admitted.

The supposed pilot's death was reported by media including The Times of London, who identified the "Ghost of Kyiv" as Major Stepan Tarabalka, a 29-year-old father-of-one.

Tarabalka had been hailed a hero and is credited with taking out as many as 40 Russian aircraft.

However the Ukraine air force has now conceded the hero pilot was a myth.

"The ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend, whose character was created by Ukrainians!" Ukraine's Air Force Command wrote on Facebook overnight, killing off the rumour.

The air force confirmed that "Tarabalka is not 'Ghost of Kiev', and had not shot down 40 planes, instead claiming the ghost character was "a collective image of pilots of the Air Force's 40th tactical aviation brigade, who defend the sky over the capital".

He was reportedly shot down on March 13. The Times of London had said he was killed while battling an "overwhelming" number of enemy forces.

Tarabalka has been posthumously awarded Ukraine's top medal for bravery in combat, the Order of the Golden Star, with the title Hero of Ukraine.

The legend of the Ghost of Kyiv became known when the Ukrainian government had publicly credited the then-anonymous pilot with shooting down six Russian jets on the first day of the war.

"People call him the Ghost of Kyiv. And rightly so," the official tweet said, saying he had "already become a nightmare for invading Russian aircraft".

Ukraine's General Staff later tweeted another picture of the ace fighter pilot in the cockpit of his MiG-29 jet with his face covered, captioned, "Hello, occupier, I'm coming for your soul!"

His identity remained a mystery this entire time, seemingly even to his family, when told of their loved one's death last month.

"We know he was flying on a mission. And he completed the mission, his task. Then he didn't return. That's all the information we have," his dad, Evon Tarabalka, said in an interview with the NPR soon after the pilot's death.

According to his parents, Tarabalka's lifelong dream was to become a fighter pilot, after growing up next to a military airfield in the village of Korolivka.

"Since early childhood, he always dreamed of the sky, about flying higher than the clouds," his mother Nahtalia told NPR through a translator.

"He would always watch the paratroopers in their air exercises. And he would run in their direction to try to see where they landed," she added.

The ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ was never alive, Ukrainian air force says


By Lateshia Beachum
Yesterday 

A T-shirt features the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a symbol of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)


The “Ghost of Kyiv.”

That’s what admirers called a Ukrainian fighter pilot who was said to have shot down 40 enemy planes. Over the weekend, Ukrainian officials admitted that the ghost, in fact, never existed.

“Ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend whose character was created by Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s air force said Saturday, confirming that it was all a bit of mythmaking.

The news came two days after the Times of London identified the ghost as Maj. Stepan Tarabalka, a pilot who died March 13 in an air battle with Russian forces.

The Ghost of Kyiv is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda promoting the prowess of the nation’s fighting forces and lifting morale. Although Ukrainian officials and former president Petro Poroshenko promoted the myth, the air force warned people to not “neglect the basic rules of information hygiene” and to “check the sources of information, before spreading it.”

Ukraine and Russia have been spreading propaganda during the war, with Ukraine focusing on hearts and minds internally and throughout the West. Government officials in the invaded country share day-to-day events, operations and victories on Twitter, Telegram and Facebook. Social media platforms have been struggling to keep up with fast-spreading, dubious information, engaging in fact-checking that sometimes goes beyond their own policies or contradicts them, The Washington Post has reported.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears 2½ months of bloodshed, the nations’ fabricated messages don’t have the same weight, propaganda scholars told The Post.

The Ukrainian air force said on Instagram that images of the ghost on social media are “a collective image of the pilots of the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade of Air Force, which protects the sky of the capital,” and that “they suddenly appear where they are not expected.”

That didn’t stop the myth from being promoted and capitalized upon.

Ukrainian model manufacturer ICM Plastic Model Kits used the ghost to promote its products and warned Russians against commenting on its post about the ace pilot shooting down 30 “planes of the invaders.”

Days into the war, the Security Service of Ukraine claimed that the ghost had shot down 10 enemy planes, protecting Ukrainians. Facebook has since flagged the post as false.

With he aviation mystery now debunked, it’s unclear why Ukrainian leaders decided to confess that the beloved pilot was falsely promoted as a real person.

Adam G. Klein, associate professor of communication studies at Pace University’s New York City campus, said it’s important to realize that Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are fighting a Russian military eight times larger.

“Perhaps [Ukrainian leaders] wanted to acknowledge the identity and bravery of the actual fighter pilot who was believed to be the Ghost of Kyiv and was recently killed in battle,” he said, addressing the reason behind the reveal. “Perhaps the legend they created was no longer needed. But I suspect that at some point it becomes more valuable to remind these Ukrainian fighters that this feat is not the work of myth or superheroes, but rather the reality of actual Ukrainian fighters who have defended their skies together.”

It’s also possible that officials might have received criticism for continuing the charade and wanted to make things clear, said Samuel C. Woolley, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s school of journalism and school of information. And, he said, the use of propaganda isn’t always as sinister as the emotions the word evokes.

Woolley noted that the word “propaganda” has been stretched to be nearly unrecognizable from when the Catholic Church used the method to spread the religion in the New World, to a more modern-day use that includes denunciation of political opponents.

“The technical meaning is politically biased information that’s spread with intent to influence public opinion or societal action,” he said. “Propaganda is neither a good or bad thing. Yes, it’s used for control, but the question is: Are Ukrainians using it in this circumstance to bring the country together as it’s being attacked by an authoritarian regime?”

The Ghost of Kyiv probably was an encouraging figure akin to Rosie the Riveter of World War II or Uncle Sam, Woolley said, characters created to sway the public to support war and to summon feelings of patriotism.

“The comparison is an attempt to boost morale among countries fighting a despotic leader versus, on the Russian side, a despot attempting to use it to control media and to instill fear in his own populace to get done the things he needs to get done,” he said.

Ukraine admits ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ fighter pilot is a myth

By ARIJETA LAJK

On social media, the “Ghost of Kyiv” was a military hero, an ace fighter pilot hailed for supposedly shooting down multiple Russian planes. The tales began just days into the war and circulated for months, bolstered by official Ukrainian accounts.

But on Saturday, Ukrainian authorities admitted that the legendary pilot was a myth.

“The Ghost of Kyiv is a super-hero legend whose character was created by Ukrainians!” Ukraine’s air force said in Ukrainian on Facebook.

The statement came after multiple media outlets published stories wrongly identifying Major Stepan Tarabalka as the man behind the moniker. Tarabalka was a real pilot who died on March 13 during air combat and was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine, Ukraine’s air force said last month.

But he was not the Ghost of Kyiv, the force said in Saturday’s statement.

“The information about the death of the The Ghost of #Kyiv is incorrect,” Ukraine’s air force wrote in a separate post Saturday on Twitter. “The #GhostOfKyiv is alive, it embodies the collective spirit of the highly qualified pilots of the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending #Kyiv and the region.”

The legend emerged just a day after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, as social media users began to spread claims, without evidence, of an anonymous fighter pilot who had single-handedly taken down multiple Russian planes.

Memes, unrelated photos, and even footage from a flight simulator video game circulated on social media, claiming to show the Ghost of Kyiv during combat.

On Feb. 25, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted a photo that Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense had shared three years earlier, falsely claiming it showed the Ghost of Kyiv who had taken down six Russian pilots.

Two days later, Ukraine’s official Twitter account shared a video including the same picture, along with footage of fighter jets in combat, set to pulsating music, with the caption: “People call him the Ghost of Kyiv. And rightly so — this UAF ace dominates the skies over our capital and country, and has already become a nightmare for invading Russian aircrafts.”

That same day, Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, shared the same old photo on Telegram — but now claiming he had shot down 10 occupying planes.

By the time news outlets, including the Times of London, falsely identified the pilot as Tarabalka on Friday, reports had increased the ghost’s toll to 40 planes. The Times later updated its story to reflect the air force’s new position on the Ghost of Kyiv.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/03/fact-and-mythmaking-blend-in-ukraines.html

CRT AND PRAXIS

The Ivy League’s Reckoning With Slavery Is Long Overdue

Harvard comes clean, but it and others still put self-interest over fairness.


MICHAEL MECHANIC

Senior Editor| 
Mother Jones

APRIL 28, 2022

A 1764 engraving of Princeton's Nassau Hall (left) and President’s House, where the enslaved servants of a deceased campus president were to be auctioned off in 1766.

Henry Dawkins/Princeton University Archives

In a report released on Tuesday, Harvard began the process of grappling with its connections to the “peculiar institution” of slavery: “We now officially and publicly—and with a steadfast commitment to truth, and to repair—add Harvard University to the long and growing list of American institutions of higher education, located in both the North and in the South, that are entangled with the history of slavery and its legacies,” the introduction proclaims.

Contrary to the simplistic narratives many American schoolkids are fed, slavery was much more than the foundation of the South’s agrarian economy and the font of its white wealth. Slavery thrived in the North, too, and even when those colonies began to outlaw it, they continued to profit from and fuel demand for the cotton, sugar, and other products that relied on forced human labor. (Clint Smith includes an eye-opening chapter about slavery in New York in his acclaimed recent book, How the Word Is Passed.)

Slavery was integral to Harvard, according to the report. From its 1636 founding until 1783, when Massachusetts deemed slavery unlawful, the college’s leaders, faculty, and staff “enslaved more than 70 individuals,” the report notes. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.”

Harvard also profited via, “most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading.”

The university, which is now creating a $100 million restitution fund, also profited indirectly from, “most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading.”

The report brought to mind a 2017 article about slavery at Princeton University that I came across while researching my own book about the advantages bestowed upon America’s elite. The town of Princeton, where I attended high school in the early ’80s, had a substantial Black population despite its relative affluence and preppie vibe. There was a rumor then, which persists, that Princeton students from slave states used to arrive on campus with their enslaved servants in tow, and then free them upon graduation—hence the thriving local Black community. That rumor is false, as it turns out.

Princeton historians Craig B. Hollander and Martha A. Sandweiss wrote, in the above-mentioned article, that the college formally forbade students from bringing enslaved servants to campus in 1794, yet “we found absolutely no evidence” that they had ever done so, Sandweiss told me in an email. “Closest we found is the well documented story of James Madison, whose enslaved servant basically accompanied him to campus, dropped him off, and headed back home to Virginia.”

The same was not true of the leadership. Hollander and Sandweiss reported that the first nine presidents of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was then known, were slave owners, or had been at some point. When Princeton’s fifth president, Samuel Finley, died in July 1766, they wrote, his possessions were put up for sale: These included “two Negro women, a Negro man, and three Negro children.” The woman, according to Finley’s executors, “understands all kinds of house work, and the Negro man is well fitted for the business of farming in all its branches.” If they remained unsold, they were to be auctioned off at the president’s campus residence on August 19 of that year.

(Like most universities with direct ties to slavery, Princeton hasn’t set aside money for restitution or reparations, although it and other schools have launched major research projects—Sandweiss directs Princeton’s—to document those connections. The Princeton Theological Seminary, a separate local institution, created a roughly $28 million reparations fund in 2019.)

On campus and off, Hollander and Sandweiss reported, Princeton students encountered enslaved Black people who delivered wood to their rooms, tended nearby fields, or worked in town. John Witherspoon, the college’s sixth president and namesake of one of Princeton’s main streets downtown, was also a slave owner, despite espousing a philosophy that, according to Alabama historian Margaret Abruzzo, emphasized “human benevolence and sympathy as the foundations of all morality.” Still, Abruzzo wrote that Witherspoon’s teachings “gave a generation of students a language for challenging slavery.”

Princeton’s relationship with slavery was a complicated one. It considered itself, more than most schools at the time, a national university, where students from the North and South might exist in harmony. A substantial portion of the student body—almost two-thirds of the class of 1851, per Hollander and Sandweiss—hailed from slavery states. Princeton was relatively conservative, yet views on campus tended against slavery. Princeton was “ground zero” for the colonization movement, which advocated sending freed Black people to Africa or giving them segregated land.

There was some abolitionist sentiment on the fringe, but more notably, the college became “ground zero” for the colonization movement, which advocated sending freed Black people to Africa or providing them with land elsewhere so they might live apart from whites. (A group with ties to the college helped acquire the land that would become Liberia.)

Samuel Stanhope Smith, who succeeded Witherspoon as president of the college, had also kept enslaved people, yet “taught his students that slavery posed a particularly dire threat to the nation’s spiritual, moral, and political well-being,” Hollander and Sandweiss wrote. Yet Smith was no abolitionist. “No event,” he exclaimed, “can be more dangerous to a community than the sudden introduction into it of vast multitudes of persons, free in their condition, but without property, and possessing only habits and vices of slavery.”

Smith also wrote that “neither justice nor humanity requires that [a] master, who has become the innocent possessor of that property, should impoverish himself for the benefit of the slave.”

Upon moving to Princeton in 1813, according to Hollander and Sandweiss, the college’s eighth president, Ashbel Green, “purchased a 12-year-old named John and an 18-year-old named Phoebe to work as servants in the house. Green wrote in his diary that he would free them each at the age of 25, or 24 ‘if they served me to my entire satisfaction.’”

As a kid, I’d always imagined abolitionists as a righteous and heroic lot. Indeed, they faced fierce and sometimes violent backlash from pro-slavery forces. (Hollander and Sandweiss recall an incident in 1835 wherein a group of Princeton students set out to lynch a white abolitionist; they ended up running him out of town.)

Only later did I learn that very few abolitionists supported equal rights for Black people. There was widespread fear, as Smith expressed, that freeing the slaves and giving them rights posed a threat to the republic, one even greater than the national dispute over slavery. Slave owners, meanwhile, were terrified of retribution and fiercely protective of their “property.”
So while white abolitionists loathed the institution, as Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his book Stony the Road, most remained white supremacists. Even Abraham Lincoln, who sometimes used the n-word, proclaimed, during a Senate campaign debate with his incumbent rival, Sen. Stephen Douglas, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.”

“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races,” Abraham Lincoln proclaimed during one debate.

“I agree with Judge Douglas that [the Black man] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment,” Lincoln said. “But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is…the equal of every living man.”
Gates notes that when the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended northern anti-slavery rallies, he “suffered a considerable amount of jeering, harassment, and even physical abuse.” As Douglass wrote in his own newspaper, The North Star: “The feeling (or whatever it is) which we call prejudice, is no less than a murderous, hell-born hatred of every virtue which may ever adorn the character of a Black man.”

Getting back to higher education, which was (and remains) the most effective path to upward mobility, restitution seems in order from many an academic institution—Dartmouth is another example—not just for their direct role in slavery, but for how long it took them to start offering Black people an education.

Princeton’s first Black students weren’t admitted until 1945, part of a Navy-sponsored program, and women weren’t allowed in until 1969. (“If Princeton goes coeducational…PRINCETON IS DEAD,” protested one alum.) Harvard proved more progressive, graduating its first Black man in 1870 and opening its doors to women, via sister college Radcliffe, in 1920.

But even today most of these universities hang onto the nepotistic practice of legacy admissions, which runs counter to any notion of fairness and restitution. A 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public ones gave an admissions boost to the children of alumni, and sometimes to the grandchildren and siblings of alumni.
In a survey by the school paper, 43 percent of Harvard’s legacy students said their parents made at least $500,000 a year.

Freshman classes at legacy schools are typically 10 percent to 20 percent descendants of alumni—which rivals and sometimes exceeds the enrollment of underrepresented racial groups. A survey of Harvard’s class of 2019 by the campus paper, the Crimson, found that 28 percent of incoming freshman had one or more alumni relatives, and nearly 17 percent had at least one alumni parent. Of the direct legacies in the survey, 43 percent said that their parents earned at least $500,000 a year.

For the classes of 2000 through 2019, Harvard’s average legacy acceptance rate was about 34 percent, compared with 6 percent for non-legacies, according to an analysis commissioned by an (ironically) anti-affirmative action group that is challenging Harvard’s admissions policies in court. At Stanford, the legacy admissions rate is about three times the non-legacy rate. At Dartmouth, which also has legacy admissions, 15 percent of the class of 2025 are children of alumni.

The Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s campus paper, reported that just 2 percent of the 35,370 students applying for the class of 2022 were legacies, but nearly one-third of them were accepted. That’s compared with an overall admissions rate of 5.5 percent, 6.2 percent for students of color. The resulting class was more than 14 percent legacy students. In his 2016 book The Price of Admission, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Golden wrote that elite private colleges, as a condition of their tax-exempt status, are prohibited from engaging in racial discrimination, yet the legacies who suck up slots at the expense of other qualified students are overwhelmingly wealthy and white.

Alumni will make up lots of rationales for the legacy system, but the reality is that it has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with the fact that legacies and their families are viewed by colleges as likely donors. So despite efforts by some to make amends for their actions in the past, most Ivy League schools, and others, continue to put financial self-interest above all that’s right and fair.

THE OLDEST TROPE

‘Don’t Say Gay’ Laws and the Propaganda of Predatory ‘Groomers’

Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity.

April 28, 2022 

by Warren Blumenfeld 

LONG READ

Since January 2021, Education Week has found that 42 states have either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Sixteen states have already imposed these restrictions.

Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity.

For example, the Florida House has imposed new restrictions on how race is discussed in schools, colleges and workplaces. The bill went to Governor Ron DeSantis’ desk for approval.

Voted 24-15 along party lines to approve a measure labeled “Individual Freedom,” it connects with DeSantis’ demand for a “Stop WOKE” Act, which diminishes what he terms liberal ideology that impacts the teaching of history in schools and circulating throughout corporate diversity training.

Currently as well, states are proposing legislation to restrict transgender rights in athletics or in accessing some health services and others to limit overall LGBTQ protections especially in schools.

Let us take Florida again as an example. Primarily passed by Republicans in the state legislature and signed in law, the new so-called “Parental Rights in Education” act, more appropriately referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, reads in part:

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

At least twelve other state legislatures are now appropriating Florida model in considering similar “Don’t Say Gay” laws. These states currently include Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, South Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Ohio.

Before signing the bill, DeSantis stated at a press conference that teaching kindergarten-aged kids that “they can be whatever they want to be” was “inappropriate” for children. “It’s not something that’s appropriate for any place,” he said, “but especially not in Florida.”

He continued: “We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”

“Groomers” and Pedophiles

Added to the propagandists’ lexicon, right-wing politicians and pundits are referring to educators as “groomers” who bring into their classroom discussion topics related to sexual and gender identities as defined as those who “groom” their students to either become LGBTQ or are groomed to be sexually exploited by predatory sexually exploiting pedophiles.

This conspiracy theory of predatory pedophiles is longstanding in the history of stereotyping and scapegoating, but it has gained heightened magnitude during the Trumpian era.

When asked by a reporter during a White House briefing about the QAnon movement in August 2020, Donald Trump appeared to court its support by replying that “I heard that these are people that love our country.” He asserted that he had not heard much about them, “other than I understand they like me very much” and “it is gaining in popularity.”

QAnon is an umbrella moniker for a movement that spreads conspiracy theories that top U.S. military officials recruited Donald Trump to run for the presidency to expose and vanquish the “deep state” tied to a cabal of Satanic worshiping pedophiles who operate a child sex trafficking ring, which ultimately kills and eats the children they abuse to extract life-extending chemicals found in youthful blood.

This is eerily reminiscent of the so-called “Blood Libel” beginning in 1144 in England when Christian leaders accused Jews of slaying William of Norwich, a Christian male child, to use his blood in the making of the sacred Jewish matzos. Many Christians believed that Jews used the blood of Christian youth because it was virginal and innocent and, therefore, was the most potent medication to heal hemorrhoids, to relieve pain during circumcision, to increase fertility, and to cure the so-called “stink of the Jews.”

Also, in line with the assertion of Christian leaders that Jewish men menstruate because they practice circumcision, they, along with Jewish women need the blood from Christian youth to replenish their bodies of the blood lost during menstruation.

In 1475, Simon of Trent in Northern Italy, the son of a tanner and barely 3 years old, was allegedly killed by the Jews for his blood. Christians also accused Jews of slaughtering Christian male youth because they wanted to symbolically re-execute Jesus.

Local leaders falsely indicted several Jews in Trent for Simon’s death and had Jews in the area killed. The charge of ritual murder continued into the 20th century C.E. Christian clergy have also accused Jews of inflicting circumcision on Christian infants as a means of inflicting involuntary conversion to Judaism (“recruitment”).

Today, QAnon alleges that a cabal includes high visibility powerful people such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, and George Soros, plus Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama among others who control the media and important politicians.

The movement continues to grow even as other conspiracies that QAnon forwards have proven untrue.

Trump’s July 4, 2020 rally, when many believed the late John F. Kennedy Jr. would emerge from hiding to claim his rightful role as Trump’s running mate, came and went.

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As a far-right conspiracy theory movement, QAnon has garnered the national spotlight as Marjorie Taylor Greene, with ties to these baseless conspiracies, won a Republican primary election in Georgia’s 14th Congressional district, a solidly Republican district.

Following her election, Trump praised her with his burning Twitter fingers as a “future Republican star….Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”

Though the FBI brands QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat, Donald Trump obviously cares not about the danger posed by this movement, but, instead considers it as a group of supporters he can mine in his possible run for the presidency in 2024.

This mass delusion that is QAnon proposed that a secret cabal ran a global child trafficking pedophilic network supported by Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump was trying to stop. This delusion, though, inspired what would be referred to as “Pizzagate,” the false claims that the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was the alleged center for a human trafficking and child sex ring.

Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, entered Comet Ping Pong on December 4, 2016, and fired three shots from his AR-15 style rifle sticking the restaurant’s walls, deck, and door.

Welch said he came to the pizzeria to “self-investigate” the conspiracy theory, and if true, to free the children held there. Police surrounded the building, and he surrendered without further incident. He was sentenced to serve four years in prison.
Longstanding Pedophilic Conspiracies Against LGBTQ People

Throughout history, most dominant groups have depicted or represented minoritized groups in a variety of negative ways to maintain control or mastery. Dominant groups represent minoritized groups through myths and stereotypes in proverbs, social commentary, literature, jokes, epithets, pictorial depictions, and other hegemonic forms.

A crucial point in the psychology of scapegoating is the representation of minoritized “Others,” in historian John Boswell’s words, as “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority,” and dominant groups have long accused both LGBTQ people of acting as dangerous predators concentrated on ensnaring, torturing, and devouring primarily children of the dominant group.

When demagogues play on people’s fears and prejudices by invoking these images for their own political, social, and economic gains, in more instances than not, this results in loss of civil and human rights, harassment, violence, and at times, death of the “other.”

Although, in the overwhelming majority of cases, close family members, primarily men who identity as heterosexual, abuse and molest youth, the cultural perception persists that primarily gay and bisexual men — and by association, lesbians and trans people — prey on the young.

For example, Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian media ministry organization, asserted in published accounts in 2010 that gay rights advocates are forcing their viewpoints (their so-called “gay agenda”) in schools in the guise of bullying prevention.

Focus on the Family spokesperson, Candi Cushman, argued that gay activists are the real schoolyard bullies while conservative Christians are the victims. According to Cushman, “We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled.”

The Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative Christian organization, published an article titled “Let’s End Taxpayer Supported Homosexual Recruitment in Public Schools,” which asserted:

“The state-endorsed pro-homosexual teacher/teen ‘Teach Out’ held at Tufts University in Boston in March has outraged concerned citizens. There’s growing concern among parents over the use of tax dollars to fund homosexual recruitment programs in the public schools. During the Teach Out, state HIV instructors taught teenagers how to engage in deviant sex acts and they also taught teachers how to indoctrinate children into accepting homosexuality as normal.”

Former beauty queen and Florida Orange Juice Commission spokesperson, Anita Bryant, spearheaded her so-called “Save Our Children” campaign, which succeeded in overturning a gay-rights ordinance in Dade Country, Florida in 1977. The ordinance was finally reinstated in 1998. According to Bryant, “a particularly deviant-minded [gay] teacher could sexually molest children.”

These stereotypes have been validated further institutionally. The 1992 Republican Party platform openly endorsed this form of oppression, stating that “[The Republican Party] opposes any legislation or law which legally recognizes same-sex marriages and allows such couples to adopt children or provide foster care.” In fact, some states still explicitly ban LGBTQ people from adopting or serving as foster parents.

In recent years, the fear of pedophilia has been used to justify the previous ban on gay and bisexual boy scouts and scoutmasters, as argued by Rob Schwarzwalder, 2013, Vice President of the conservative Washington, DC-based public policy and lobbying organization, Family Research Council (FRC): “The reality is, homosexuals have entered the Scouts in the past for predatory purposes.”

Tony Perkins, FRC President, in a 2011 fundraising letter for the organization addressing the LGBT communities’ so-called public promotion of homosexuality to youth, wrote: “The videos are titled ‘It Gets Better.’ They are aimed at persuading kids that although they’ll face struggles and perhaps bullying for ‘coming out’ as homosexual (or transgendered or some other perversion), life will get better. …It’s disgusting. And it’s part of a concerted effort to persuade kids that homosexuality is okay and actually to recruit them into that lifestyle.”

A stereotype is an oversimplified, preconceived, and standardized conception, opinion, affective attitude, judgment, or image of a person, group, held in common by members of other groups. Originally referring to the process of making type from a metal mold in printing, social stereotypes can be viewed as molds of regular and invariable patterns of evaluation of others. Though every LGBT and Jewish person is unique in many ways and is multidimensional, when dominant groups stereotyped them, they are reducible to a single trait.

Stereotyping can and often does result of singling out individuals and groups as targets of hostility and violence, even though they may have little or nothing to do with the offenses for which they stand accused. This is referred to as scapegoating. With scapegoating, there is the tendency to view all members of the group as inferior and to assume that all members are alike in most respects. This attitude often leads to even further marginalization.

We must hold state legislators who are banning discussions of LGBTQ people in the classrooms responsible for this further marginalization and for the harassment and possible violence that may result.

NAOMI  JUDD RIP
ESSAY: For a gay country boy, Naomi Judd did build a bridge

By JEFF McMILLAN

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Wynonna Judd, left, and her mother, Naomi Judd, of The Judds, perform during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta on Jan. 30, 1994. Naomi Judd, the Kentucky-born matriarch of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds and mother of Wynonna and Ashley Judd, has died, her family announced Saturday, April 30, 2022. She was 76. (AP Photo/Eric Draper, File)

Somewhere in Michigan in the early 1990s, a teenage farm boy clings to a chain-link fence at the edge of the county fairgrounds. He is angling for a distant, and free, glimpse of Naomi and Wynonna Judd.

They step into view briefly, gliding on high heels to the edge of the grandstand stage. From this distance, illuminated by a spotlight, they are a blur of sparkling sequins and red hair. Naomi, the mother of the duo and the de facto emcee, says something, but even amplified, her words float away in the hot August night.

Soon, though, a gentle strumming and Wynonna’s throaty voice carry to him: “I would whisper love so loudly, every heart could understand that love and only love can join the tribes of man.”

Then, his mother calls to him: “Jeff, get in the car! It’s time to go.”

I’m not sure what it was, but for me and for most people, the chemistry between Naomi and Wynonna and the feelings they stirred inside the listener were almost tangible. My first (and only) sighting of them is forever etched in my mind.
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After word Saturday of Naomi’s death, I’m now realizing how much I’ve been through with them.

When I was a preteen beginning to reckon with my sexuality and dealing with bullies, and the Judds sang “Mama He’s Crazy,” I understood the narrator’s insecurities -- why would anyone want me?

After my grandfather died, I listened to “Grandpa” over and over, crying that he would no longer be able to tell me about the good old days, which he actually used to do. (The song has since lost its luster for me a bit — the good old days weren’t really that good. But I still always think of my grandpa.)

And after my father died, I wanted to be at that breakfast table they sang about in “Love Is Alive,” soaking up all the love that sat there.

Those voices. That hair. Those gowns. For a lonely gay boy in the rural Midwest, they were a calling card, and a lifeline of sorts.

Wynonna was clearly the bigger voice of the duo. But without Naomi’s harmonies and stage presence, I doubt her daughter ever would have become the one-name star she is. And would Ashley have made it in Hollywood without her mother’s support?

As I grew older, the story of the Judds impressed me, and I saw bits of it in my own life. Naomi’s single motherhood, a nurse trying to score a recording contract, clicked with my view of my newly widowed mother, another country woman, trying to keep it together while still raising children.

If Naomi could do it, so could she. And so could I.

When cancer visited one of my leg bones after my senior year in high school, I thought of Naomi and her hepatitis diagnosis. Eventually she triumphed over it. So did I.

I went off to college, got married (well, committed -- same-sex marriage wasn’t yet legal in those days) and ended up in New York. Like Naomi, I had persevered and made it out.

There, I cultivated a new circle of friends, many of them also from Michigan. One night a Judds song came on, I forget which one, and one of my new friends began singing along. It turned out we all loved the Judds. I had to go to all the way to New York City to find my country people.

Soon we two couples became inseparable, taking camping trips together several times a summer. When my husband and I moved to Philadelphia and they stayed in New York, we continued our campground reunions, and there was never a camping trip without a Judds singalong around the fire, under the starlit Pennsylvania sky.

Both couples have since divorced, and I have remarried — making sure to impress an appreciation of the Judds upon my new husband — but we all remain close and in touch. The lack of animosity between us reminds me of that line in “Love Can Build a Bridge,” perhaps Naomi’s crowning achievement as a songwriter: “Love and only love can join the tribes of man.”

I once sang that song at a piano bar, and a man in the audience approached me afterward, impressed by the song (probably not by my performance). It was so beautiful and artful, he thought it was a Broadway song. No, I said, just an old country song. He was shocked.

In this world, at this time, can love really join the tribes of man? It was not a question when the Judds asked, “Don’t you think it’s time?” Naomi knew the answer all along.

___ Follow Jeff McMillan on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jeffmcmillanpa

CRT IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Black doctors say they face discrimination based on race
By KATE BRUMBACK

Dr. Dare Adewumi poses for a portrait, Tuesday, March 15, 2022, in Atlanta. Adewumi was thrilled when he was hired to lead the neurosurgery practice at Wellstar Cobb Hospital in Austell, Ga., in the Atlanta-area near where he grew up. But he says he quickly faced racial discrimination that ultimately led to his firing and has prevented him from getting permanent work elsewhere. His lawyers and other advocates say he's not alone. 

(AP Photo/Mike Stewart)


ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. Dare Adewumi was thrilled when he was hired to lead the neurosurgery practice at an Atlanta-area hospital near where he grew up. But he says he quickly faced racial discrimination that ultimately led to his firing and has prevented him from getting permanent work elsewhere.

His lawyers and other advocates say he’s not alone, that Black doctors across the country commonly experience discrimination, ranging from microaggressions to career-threatening disciplinary actions. Biases, conscious or not, can become magnified in the fiercely competitive hospital environment, they say, and the underrepresentation of Black doctors can discourage them from speaking up.

“Too many of us are worried about retaliation, what happens when you say something,” said Dr. Rachel Villanueva, president of the National Medical Association, which represents Black doctors. “We have scores of doctors that are sending us letters about these same discriminatory practices all the time and seeking our help as an association in fighting that.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, Black doctors made up just 5% of active physicians in the U.S. in 2018, the most recent data available. People who identify as Black alone represent 12.4% of the total U.S. population, according to the 2020 U.S. census. For the 2021-2022 academic year, 8.1% of students enrolled in medical schools identified as Black alone. The medical school association and the National Medical Association in 2020 announced an initiative to address the scarcity of Black men in medicine — they made up only 2.9% of 2019-2020 enrolled students.

The American Medical Association, the country’s largest, most influential doctors’ group, is also trying to attract Black students to medicine, working with historically Black colleges and universities and helping secure scholarships, president Dr. Gerald Harmon said.

“We’re trying to put our money where our mouth is on this and our actions where our thoughts are,” he said, acknowledging that, among other things, a shortage of Black physicians contributes to poorer health outcomes for Black patients.

Some Black doctors who believe they’ve been mistreated are speaking out. Adewumi, 39, filed a federal lawsuit in September against Wellstar Medical Group and Wellstar Health Systems alleging employment discrimination based on race.

“If they don’t like him, that’s one thing, but you can’t penalize someone — according to the law — based on race,” his lawyer C.K. Hoffler said. “And that’s the exact thing that happened to Dare. And that’s what many, many highly skilled, highly trained, highly credentialed African American doctors are experiencing in this country.”

Adewumi said some of his surgical decisions were questioned and he was placed on a performance review plan, steps he says were a pretext to push him out. He said he had a previously unblemished record and his white colleagues didn’t face similar scrutiny.

“I’ve worked so hard, done so much to get to this level, and all I really wanted to do was help sick people,” he said. “And here I was having this taken away from me for no reason other than my skin color.”

William Hill, an attorney for Wellstar, said the case is sealed so he’s unable to speak about specifics.

“Wellstar does not discriminate. Dr. Adewumi has not been the subject of discrimination or unfair treatment. Patient care and safety are Wellstar’s top priorities,” Hill wrote in an email, noting that they have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Dr. Stella Safo, an HIV specialist, is among a group of past and present employees at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at Mount Sinai in New York City who in April 2019 sued alleging sex, age and race discrimination. Some claims have been dismissed but others are moving forward. Safo’s claims focus on alleged gender discrimination, but she said that, as a Black woman, race and gender discrimination are intertwined. Since filing the lawsuit, she’s heard from a lot of people with similar stories.

Adewumi’s allegations don’t surprise her: “It’s what many of us have gone through directly,” she said.

Speaking out has been “terrible,” Safo said, adding that she risked her career and lost friendships. But she’s felt vindicated by changes: The New York City Council last year passed legislation to create an advisory board to examine racial and gender discrimination in hospitals.

A judge sealed Adewumi’s lawsuit and some filings in the case at the request of Wellstar, which cited confidential information. The following account of what happened comes from an interview with Adewumi and a complaint he filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which in July granted him permission to sue.

Adewumi signed on in March 2018 to lead neurosurgery services at Wellstar Cobb Hospital in Austell, Georgia. The hospital hadn’t had a neurosurgeon for a decade and referred patients elsewhere, including Wellstar Kennestone Hospital, where Adewumi’s supervisor worked.

As his practice started to flourish, Adewumi felt his supervisor was targeting him “with the intention of undermining my skill as a physician and pushing me out of the group,” the EEOC complaint says.

In November 2018, Adewumi began receiving “letters of inquiry” about surgeries he’d done. These anonymous letters can be submitted by any member of the medical staff or be triggered by a patient complaint. They’re reviewed by the hospital’s medical executive committee.

At first, Adewumi said, he didn’t know what the letters were, having never received anything similar. But within eight months, he had received 15, all but one filed by colleagues.

Separate independent reviews requested by the hospital and by Adewumi’s lawyers found that concerns stemmed from differences in opinion about the approach or surgical technique, not patient care standards or safety, according to the EEOC complaint.

In contrast, Adewumi said, he’s aware of at least two cases where white colleagues performed surgeries that were unnecessary or left a patient disfigured. He doesn’t believe they received letters of inquiry or were disciplined in any way.

After trying unsuccessfully to mend the relationship with his supervisor, Adewumi said he went up the chain to raise concerns and a hospital system executive suggested it might be better if he resigned. Floored by the suggestion, Adewumi refused to quit.

Wellstar then proposed an “action plan.” It wasn’t meant to be punitive but would help “better integrate” him into the main group of neurosurgeons at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital, he was told.

Several Black doctors in Georgia and elsewhere who spoke to The Associated Press said the hierarchy and competition in hospitals, where surgeons are evaluated and compensated based on productivity, can lead to people being targeted if they aren’t liked or are perceived as professional threats. Racial bias can compound that, they said.

Adewumi suspects that’s what happened to him. Before arriving at Wellstar, he’d done two fellowships on spine and brain tumors, learning difficult techniques that others within the neurosurgery group couldn’t do. Additionally, his presence at Wellstar Cobb meant lucrative surgeries were no longer being referred to his colleagues at Wellstar Kennestone.

During an action plan check-in meeting in August 2019, medical executive committee leaders applauded Adewumi’s progress. Two months later, on Oct. 8, he was fired “not for cause.” He was assured he’d done “nothing wrong,” that he was being dismissed because “certain relationships were not fostered.”

His termination was effective at the end of a 180-day notice period, in April 2020, but he wasn’t required or allowed to work at the hospital in the meantime. That meant he couldn’t fulfill a six-week “mentorship” requirement, leaving his action plan incomplete.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus began to strain hospitals, he emailed Wellstar administrators offering to come back temporarily in any capacity to help. He figured the hospital could use extra hands, and it could allow him to complete his action plan and resolve his situation without suing. But Wellstar refused.

With his action plan incomplete, the hospital refused to give him a “letter of good standing,” leaving him unable to find a hospital that will credential him, meaning he can’t work as a neurosurgeon.

“They have cornered him and locked him out, effectively,” Hoffler said. “You don’t do this by happenstance, by mistake. This is intentional and deliberate and that is why we have a lawsuit pending.”

Indonesia fights violence against women with new law

Indonesia took almost a decade to pass a bill toughening the penalties for sexual violence. Activists say the conservative culture prevents awareness and keeps victims from coming forward.

Indonesian women have protested sexual violence in previous demonstrations in Jakarta

Earlier this month, Indonesian lawmakers passed a controversial bill targeting sexual violence, a step long awaited by women's rights activists but one that has been criticized for taking far too long.

The bill had mainly been held up by one Islamic conservative party, which claimed it would violate Islamic principles, be prone to misinterpretation — and promote "free sex."

Compared to other Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, women in Indonesia have more freedoms in the areas of self-expression and lifestyle choices.

However, women's rights activists say an increase in Islamic conservatism in Indonesia is challenging these freedoms. This has been exacerbated by low enforcement of the law in cases of sexual abuse and ignorance as to what constitutes sexual harassment and how to protect victims.

Long road to equal rights in Indonesia

Titiek Kartika Hendrastiti, a gender studies researcher at the University of Bengkulu, said the lengthy time taken to pass the bill reflects an Indonesian "dualism" when it comes to sexual abuse.

People consider sexual assaults to be an offense and wrong, yet, at the same time, a disgrace, which leads many victims not to come forward.

Hendrastiti said instead of reporting a rape to the police, many people still seek "family ways" to "solve" the problem, including marrying the victim to the perpetrator.

This way, a rapist is considered as "being responsible" for the victim, while "saving" the honor of the victim and their family.

"There are double standards; cultural factors have driven the long delay in passing the bill," she said.

What does the bill change?

The sexual violence bill is meant to provide a legal basis for addressing rape and sexual harassment, including defining rape as the act of forced sex without consent. It also foresees more help and support for victims

The law covers nine forms of sexual violence, including non-physical sexual harassment, forced marriage, forced contraception/sterilization, sexual abuse and sexual slavery.

Domestic abuse survivors rally for justice

It was introduced by the National Commission Against Violence against Women in 2012, yet it would be 2016 before the bill came up for parliamentary debate. After a long stretch and several controversies, the new legislation finally passed on April 12, 2022.

Mike Verawati Tangka, an activist with the Indonesian Women's Coalition, said she was grateful that the bill had been passed, though things could have moved a lot quicker.

"It all depended on the government's political will," she said.

Tangka also welcomes the victim trust fund established by the law to compensate victims of sexual abuse and help them recover.

"So far there have been no reservations regarding victim trust funds. We welcome this and appreciate the government," she told DW.
Indonesia sees increase in sexual violence

During the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, sexual violence cases increased in Indonesia.

Data from the Indonesian Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection showed there were about 25,200 cases of sexual violence in Indonesia, up from around 20,500 cases in 2020.

Meanwhile, in 2021, several gruesome sex crimes triggered public anger, such as the rape of 13 underage girls by an Islamic boarding school teacher in West Java Province.

High-profile sex harassment cases were reported in schools and offices. In some of the cases, victims only received help after their cases went viral on social media.

"We are on the verge of sexual assault emergency, therefore the bill needed to be passed soon," said women right's activist Susi Handayani.

Indonesia's parliament passed the sexual violence law on April 12

Why was the bill delayed?

The Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) was the only party rejecting the bill. Kurniasih Mufidayati, a leading PKS lawmaker, told DW that the recently passed bill could be prone to misinterpretation.

The wording of "sexual consent" before having sex was seen as problematic, as the party believes the right to sexual consent should only be applied to married people.

They also questioned some points relating to sexual orientation, forced abortion and forced marriage.

However, Mufidayati reiterated that the PKS strongly opposes all forms of sexual crimes, saying it was "committed" and had helped thousands of victims.

Edited by: Wesley Rahn

Germany: 4 injured in clashes involving far-right extremists

Four members of a far-right group have been injured in the eastern German city of Zwickau, during clashes between extremists and counterdemonstrators. The victims were attacked with unknown blunt instruments.

Clashes broke out during a march by the far-right group "The Third Way" in the German city of Zwickau

Four people from a far-right group were seriously injured in the German city of Zwickau, in the country's east, as they returned from a march of like-minded extremists on Sunday.

The four were reportedly seriously injured when they were attacked leaving the Crimmitschau suburban rail station following the march, leaving bloodstains.

All four were responsive but taken to hospital for injuries to their hands and heads. Witnesses said blunt instruments were used in the attack on members of the far right.

What happened in Zwickau?

Some 500 extremists from the far-right The Third Way (Der Dritte Weg) had been expected in Zwickau Sunday. At its peak, some 1,650 people took part in the march and the counterdemonstrations, according to police in eastern Saxony.

Police said 1,100 officers were on duty in Zwickau to protect "the fundamental right of freedom of assembly."

Police are investigating the attack on members of the far right and are looking for up to ten individuals from a left-wing group they believe to have been involved in the incident.

Incident follows earlier clashes

A police spokesperson said that earlier Sunday, members of the far right had thrown stones at a train filled with left-wing activists as their train arrived in Glauchau from Dresden. Police responded by arresting 37 right-wing extremists.

In the earlier incident, two counterdemonstrators sustained mild injuries while one was seriously injured.

In Glauchau, one attacker gave a Hitler salute while another wore a belt featuring a swastika. Saxony police said charges were filed for the use of unconstitutional symbols.

In nearby Chemnitz there were also clashes at the railway station earlier in the day. Fifty far-right demonstrators were removed from a train headed for Zwickau.

ar/jsi (AFP, dpa)