Tues: Poor White People. So Much Discrimination!

Poor White People.  So Much Discrimination!

A white student who was expelled from Howard University’s law school is suing the historically Black university in Washington, D.C., alleging race discrimination and creating a hostile environment.

Plaintiff Michael Ray Newman, who attended the Howard University School of Law in fall 2020 after having received a $26,250 annual scholarship, was expelled about two years later in September. The lawsuit, which Newman’s attorney filed Feb. 16 in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, says he suffered “emotional, mental and economic harm” and seeks more than $2 million in damages.

The suit is the result of a series of events in 2020 involving Newman’s making comments on a professor’s forum page where students engage in public debates and discussions. Newman moved the discussion to the forum after he voiced his opinion in a previous GroupMe chat about disagreeing with the Black community, saying “they believe government solves problems,” countering his belief that he saw it only as “causing problems,” according to court documents.

Frank Tramble, a vice president and the chief communications officer for Howard, said that, while the university “declines to comment on pending litigation substantively, the University is prepared to vigorously defend itself in this lawsuit” and that the claims “provide a one-sided and self-serving narrative of the events leading to the end of the student’s enrollment” at Howard.

Newman displayed “a pattern of antagonizing actions against other students” who were attending the law school, Tramble added. Examples he cites include Newman using the death of a law student to “further his views on COVID-19 and the vaccines.” He then was expelled for “disruptive and harassing conduct” per the university’s disciplinary policies.

The lawsuit claims Newman also compared himself in a Zoom chat box as a white student at a historically Black university to a Black student attending a predominantly white school, saying he felt “utterly disenfranchised.” After both incidents, many of Newman’s classmates contacted school administrators and sought his expulsion, some even complaining that the controversies he caused distracted from their studies, according to the suit.

After Newman apologized to his classmates formally and verbally, a classmate in January 2021 discovered and retweeted a July 2020 tweet from his private Twitter account, which showed the infamous image of the emancipated slave Gordon, also nicknamed “Whipped Peter,” posted with Newman’s tweet, “But we don’t know what he did before the picture was taken!” the suit says.

A Greek and Armenian Silver Lining

Take Greece. Before the earthquakes, which claimed tens of thousands of lives and flattened entire cities across Turkey’s southeast, the country’s relations with Greece were on the verge of collapse. With both nations gearing up for elections, there were widespread fears that ever-increasing tensions in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean could escalate into a full-on military confrontation. But everything changed after the earthquakes hit and the scale of devastation Turkey is facing became apparent.

The government of Greece sent tens of thousands of tents, beds and blankets to the disaster zone to help survivors. It also deployed fully equipped teams of rescue professionals, doctors and paramedics to the region. On February 12, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias paid a visit to the earthquake-stricken Hatay province, becoming the first high-ranking official from a European Union member state to do so. Private Greek citizens have also been eager to support their neighbours through this crisis, donating what they can to charities working in affected areas and sharing messages of solidarity on social media. Turkey responded with genuine gratitude, leading Dendias to say he welcomes “the shift in Ankara’s tone”.

The earthquakes also led to an ease in Turkey-Armenia tensions.

Putting its longstanding differences and disputes with Ankara aside, the Armenian government sent food, medicine, drinking water and other emergency supplies to devastated cities and towns soon after the quakes. Armenian research and rescue crews were also on the ground. Armenian crews taking part in rescue operations in Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras, two provinces that were home to large Armenian communities in the past, was highly symbolic. More importantly, the aid from Armenia crossed into Turkey through the land border which has been sealed since the early 1990s. On the back of these goodwill gestures, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan visited Ankara on February 15 to discuss the ongoing efforts to normalise ties between Armenia and Turkey.

Is it OK to Poll About Loaded Questions?

The polling group presented survey takers with an oddly phrased question: Did they agree or disagree with the statement, ‘It’s OK to be white’?

When a slim majority of Black respondents said yes, comic strip creator Scott Adams cited the results to argue that Black Americans are “a hate group,” urging White people to “get the hell away from” Black people. His racist rant prompted hundreds of newspapers to pull his “Dilbert” comic in disapproval, rendering the decades-old cartoon homeless.

The survey question was asked by the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports, whose head pollster described it as a “simple” and “uncontroversial” query. But in fact, the phrase in question has a freighted history that implies more than its face-value meaning.

The phrase “it’s okay to be White” was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign meant to provoke liberals into condemning the statement and thus, the theory went, proving their own unreasonableness. White supremacists picked up on the trend, adding neo-Nazi language, websites or images to fliers with the phrase.

Survey takers familiar with that background may have wanted to avoid expressing approval of wording co-opted in that way, experts said.

Rasmussen, citing respondents reached through automated landline calls and a panel of volunteer participants, reported that 53 percent of the 117 Black participants agreed with the statement but 26 percent of Black participants disagreed and 21 percent said they weren’t sure.

“Anyone who did know the history of it or who had a suspicion about the history of it might react to that Rasmussen question with some skepticism,” said Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies racial attitudes and public emotions. “And that wouldn’t be a sign that they didn’t like White people.”

In a video that Rasmussen posted on Twitter alongside the survey results, head pollster Mark Mitchell presented the question as a good-faith effort to capture public opinion — something he claimed Rasmussen is unique in doing. (“The reality of American public opinion does not match what you’ve being told in the news, at schools or colleges, by corporations and by your public officials.”) Mitchell suggested that mainstream journalists would hesitate to report on the result of the question because it “conclusively undermines the current racial orthodoxy.”

“All we did was ask very simple questions that should be uncontroversial, and we are reporting on what Americans told us, nothing more,” Mitchell said in the video. While Adams cited the number of skeptical Black respondents to raise race-based alarm, Mitchell cited the majority of respondents of all races who approve of the phrase to take aim at liberal-leaning groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center for designating it a problematic phrase.

In recent years, Rasmussen has shifted from serving primarily a right-leaning polling firm to more actively amplifying conservative causes, with a website featuring commentary from conservative and libertarian pundits. In the video about the recent survey question, Mitchell also hyped polling results that he said showed “nearly half the country is concerned that vaccines are causing a significant number of unexplained deaths.” (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has said there is no evidence covid vaccines are causing deaths.) On Twitter, the firm also elevated misinformation about alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election and highlighted conspiracy theories suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “set-up.”

Rasmussen did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment on the history of the phrase “it’s okay to be White.”

White supremacists have used the phrase since at least the early 2000s, said Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Six years ago, the term gained popularity when people on the discussion forum 4chan decided to employ the phrase as a stunt.

The trolls posted sheets of paper with just the words “it’s okay to be White” on building doors and other public locations in the hope that some people would become upset and express frustration. Many people saw through the prank, Pitcavage said, and recognized its malicious intent.

The next year, the trolling movement picked up again. A post on 4chan said the goal was to “bait the left into revealing their hatred and racism towards white people for the voting public to see,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. The posters appeared on the campuses of at least 14 universities, including on a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Cabrillo College in Northern California. At Duke University, pumpkins carved with swastikas were found near some of the fliers.

The phrase continued to pop up in the years that followed. A student was expelled from Oklahoma City University School of Law in 2019 after posting fliers with those words. In 2020, a man plastered a North Carolina synagogue with posters of the term twice in three days. In Portland, Maine, this month, several dozen people staged a counterprotest to a former city council candidate holding a banner with the phrase.

For those who know about that baggage, Pitcavage said, the words “it’s okay to be White” are not nearly as innocuous as they may seem. Even for people who are unfamiliar, he said, the weird phrasing may suggest that it is meant to troll or trigger them.

We Aren't Out of the Drought

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is struggling with drought or the threat of drought, as Europe experiences an unusually warm, precipitation-free winter and swaths of the American West remain mired in an epic megadrought.

But it’s not just those pockets feeling the pain in the U.S. Most of the Western United States is in some form of drought, with areas of extreme drought concentrated in the Great Plains and Texas. A 23-year megadrought has left the Southwest at the driest it is estimated to have ever been in 1,200 years, based on tree-ring data.

That’s very bad news for Texas cotton farmers. The New York Times recently reported that “2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas,” leading to short supplies and high prices of tampons and cloth diapers, among other products. “In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops — nearly six million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change,” the Times noted.

Even recent heavy storms in California haven’t brought the state out of drought, because the precipitation deficit is so big.

“I want to be clear that these storms — and the likely rain and snow we may get over the next few weeks — did not, nor will they fully, end the drought, at least not yet,” Yana Garcia, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said last Wednesday. “We’re in better shape than we were two months ago, but we’re not out of the woods.”

Just days earlier, Lake Powell, the second-largest U.S. reservoir, dropped to a new record low. Powell is created by a Colorado River dam along the Arizona-Utah border, and if the reservoir goes much lower, experts warn, water won’t be able to pass through it. Millions of people who rely on the Colorado would then lose access to their water supply.

“If you can’t get water out of the dam, it means everyone downstream doesn’t get water,” Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University, told USA Today. "That includes agriculture, cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix." The hydroelectric power plant for which the dam was constructed would also cease to function.

When the current 23-year megadrought plaguing the American West began, Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the largest U.S. reservoir, also on the Colorado — were 95% full. Now, they’re one-quarter full, according to Udall.

In order to prevent what one California official calls “a doomsday scenario,” the Department of the Interior will have to impose reductions in water allotments for downriver users.

Scientists say that the underlying conditions — growing demand for water and naturally occurring periodic drought — are being exacerbated by climate change. Warmer temperatures cause more water to evaporate, making both droughts and heavy precipitation more extreme. Climate change makes droughts “more frequent, longer, and more severe,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey.