#it feels like everyday i wake up to new alerts about mass shootings and gun violence

[muncedes]

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#it feels like everyday i wake up to new alerts about mass shootings and gun violence #how is this even real #i’m burnt out and tired #and the fact that ppl’s immediate reactions is to make jokes and comparisons #at least my kids can go to school without bulletproof vests haha #how is that comical #people are literally replying to the cnn breaking news tweet making this about qatar #are you okay in the head

[leftpress]

Trump and the Muslim Question

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Muslims don’t need allies. We need comrades.

Gage Skidmore / Flickr

by Asad Haider | 11.16.16

For the past decade and a half, my family has reacted to every terrorist attack with a special kind of anxiety.

Setting aside any concern about falling victim to an explosion, we cross our fingers and speculate creatively on the identity of the perpetrator. Perhaps, this time, it was simply a white paranoid schizophrenic. Or maybe a laid-off gun nut with no release valve for his rage. Or, better yet, a run-of-the-mill neo-Nazi who would direct public indignation in an appropriate direction.

Regrettably, the perpetrators of these attacks often turn out to be Muslims. The ensuing phone conversations with my parents — secular Pakistani immigrants whose piety does not extend beyond a distaste for pork — revolve around admonitions to be careful what streets I walk on and to avoid arguments with white people.

They’re not just being overprotective. Since the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, hate crimes against Muslims, or those perceived as Muslims, rose 78 percent.

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After the shooting in Florida, Aziz Ansari described in the New York Times how such anxieties were amplified by the hate speech of now president-elect Donald Trump. “It makes me afraid for my family,” Ansari wrote, and remembered the months after September 11 when it had become routine to walk down the street and be called a terrorist by a stranger.

Already the 2000 election of George W. Bush — one that liberals today, gnashing their teeth over the Electoral College and the white voter, are fond of recalling — had put us on alert. But the collapse of the Twin Towers, which we watched over and over again that day in school with disbelief, seemed to reverberate in the everyday experience of immigrants who had, until then, learned to live with a culture of condescending and occasionally exclusionary toleration.

Now, for some of those tolerant individuals, the mere presence of my family became an issue of homeland security. I found myself being called “Osama” by my classmates while the teacher watched with either apathy or agreement. I was seized with unexpected fear at the ice cream shop when an avuncular old white man suddenly scowled at the sight of my family and began ranting in our direction about “terrorists from Iraq” as we made our way to a table, threateningly wielding cones of cookies and cream.

I do not often recall these experiences. Although racial identity, for a time, framed most of my social interactions, white people grew more civilized in the years that followed, going as far as to elect a black man named “Hussein” as their president.

Recounting my experiences of discrimination seemed to draw reactions of pity — the pity of the condescending white liberal who is now called an “ally.” In the post-9/11 political reality I was coming to understand, this was clearly not a salutary reaction.

Just after the attacks, white Americans acted as though 9/11 represented a historically unprecedented scale of suffering. But I had spent my childhood summers in Pakistan, where I saw the streets filled with children like me — homeless, starving, too weak to bat the flies off of their bodies. Something in the political geometry was out of alignment.

I proceeded to arm myself with an obsessive reading of Noam Chomsky. I dove headfirst into the movement against the Iraq War which mushroomed at the nearby Penn State campus, and I became convinced that the only solution to the violence and suffering that assaulted us in our daily news was an end to American imperialism and therefore global capitalism.

I remain convinced. And I hope that after the experiences of Bush and Obama, the movement against Donald Trump will not be satisfied with partial solutions. But I worry that in the name of Muslim-Americans like me, white liberals will lose sight of the fundamental political responsibility they have today.

An Old Paradox

To be sure, the hatred of Muslim immigrants is a deeply political problem, but it is not a new phenomenon engineered by Trump and his associates. We are dealing with a problem as old the nation-state itself — the fundamental contradiction of the nation state, which, as Étienne Balibar has pointed out, implies the confrontation and reciprocal interaction “between the two notions of the people”: First, “ethnos, the ‘people’ as an imagined community of membership and filiation.” And second, “demos, the ‘people’ as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights.”

The first sense of the “people” internalizes the national border — it is the wall Trump hopes to build inside the American’s head. It is a feeling of belonging to a “fictive ethnicity,” an imaginary community that is constituted by national borders, but in reality consists of heterogeneous populations brought together by migration and movement — a plurality that is suppressed by the fantasy of a unitary racial and spiritual essence.

The second sense of the “people” is the political one, the one which appears to be manifested in our Bill of Rights. It is meant to apply regardless of identity; it is the song of the Statue of Liberty, which offers its freedoms to all the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, indifferent to their particularities.

The contradiction between these two notions is the original sin of the American nation. It is stated in the first sentence of its first official document: “We, the People,” says the preamble of the Constitution, written by slaveowners. As Balibar puts it:

this construction also closely associates the democratic universality of human rights … with particular national belonging. This is why the democratic composition of people in the form of the nation led inevitably to systems of exclusion: the divide between “majorities” and “minorities” and, more profoundly still, between populations considered native and those considered foreign, heterogeneous, who are racially or culturally stigmatized.

This democratic contradiction came clearly to the surface in the French Revolution, with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. In 1843 a young Karl Marx subjected this declaration to critical scrutiny.

In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx was responding first and foremost to Bruno Bauer’s rejection of the demand for Jewish emancipation. According to Bauer, since this demand was based on the particular identity of the Jew, it was necessarily exclusionary. Political emancipation requires the universality of rights, and is thus incompatible with a particularistic identity.

Like Richard Dawkins, Bauer believed that it was only by casting off every religious superstition that oppression could be overcome. And also like Dawkins, whose fanatical hatred of Islam blinds him to any understanding of social and political inequalities, Bauer thought that the particularism of the Jewish minority was even worse than the more “evolved” religious consciousness of Christianity.

But Marx pointed out that secular political emancipation, the separation of church and state in the name of universal rights, had not actually overcome religious superstition in practice. Famously and prophetically, he cited the United States as an example. This was because rights were granted to individuals, Marx argued, and were therefore “the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.”

Protecting the individual’s rights in the political sphere did not mean the end of oppression by religious authorities and the owners of property. Therefore neither Bauer’s supersessionist universalism, nor the particularism of a minority, could lead to real, human emancipation. This would involve going beyond political emancipation and overcoming the exploitation of the market.

In States of Injury, Wendy Brown summarized Marx’s argument:

Historically, rights emerged in modernity both as a vehicle of emancipation from political disenfranchisement or institutionalized servitude and as a means of privileging an emerging bourgeois class within a discourse of formal egalitarianism and universal citizenship. Thus, they emerged both as a means of protection against arbitrary use and abuse by sovereign and social power and as a mode of securing and naturalizing dominant social powers.

This implies a “paradox” for liberalism that persists to this day. When rights are granted to “empty,” abstract individuals, they ignore the real, social forms of inequality and oppression that appear to be outside the political sphere. Yet when the particularities of injured identities are brought into the content of rights, they are “more likely to become sites of the production and regulation of identity as injury than vehicles of emancipation.”

In other words, when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury, physical or verbal, that group ends up defined by its victimhood, and individuals end up reduced to their victimized belonging.

Brown shows how this logic undermines the logic behind an influential (albeit controversial) strand of feminism: Catherine MacKinnon’s attempt to redress the masculine bias of the law. MacKinnon’s anti-pornography feminism was based on the premise that the right to free speech conflicted with the right of women to be free from sexual subordination.

But as Brown asks, “does a definition of women as sexual subordination, and the encoding of this definition in law, work to liberate women from sexual subordination, or does it, paradoxically, reinscribe femaleness as sex­ual violability?”

Brown’s critique suggests that when rights are demanded by a particular identity, and the whole horizon of politics is the defense of this category, its members end up fixed as victims. Rights themselves end up reduced to a reaction to an injury inflicted on this victim. Their emancipatory content disappears.

So by presenting a legal argument which tries to give rights a substantial content, the content of particular identities, MacKinnon ends up producing a fixed category of “woman” — as helpless victims.

This is precisely the problem which comes to the forefront in the contemporary “Muslim question.”

Beyond the Liberty of Circumstance

In France, this question was debated in 2004 when the hijab was outlawed in public schools. The question then became: should the hijab be defended because Muslims are defined by the fact of wearing it? Does the freedom of the French migrant population consist in a defensive response to the injury inflicted by the banning of the headscarf?

Surely, the racism implied by the banning of a Muslim accessory should be condemned and attacked. But to the extent that this is framed as a defense of the rights of Muslims, the perspective of liberal tolerance traps the Muslims it claims to defend within a victimized identity rather than joining them in a project of collective emancipation.

We can take this discussion further by understanding the “paradox” of rights as a concrete political antagonism, as Massimiliano Tomba does in his comparison of the two versions of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The first, 1789 Declaration, Tomba argues, grounds rights in a juridical universalism: “the universalism that comes from above and that implies a subject of right who is either passive or a victim who requires protection.”

Whether it is a woman to be protected from pornographic speech or a Muslim to be protected from religious prejudice, juridical universalism grants no agency to these subjects — their only political existence is mediated by their protection by the state.

The 1793 Declaration, in contrast, manifests an insurgent universality, one which is brought onto the historical stage by the slave uprisings of the Haitian Revolution, the intervention of women into the political process which had excluded them, and the demands of the sans-culottes for a right to food and life.

It “does not presuppose any abstract bearer of rights,” but instead “refers to particular and concrete individuals — women, the poor, and slaves — and their political and social agency.” Here we encounter a new paradox: “the universality of these particular and concrete individuals acting in their specific situation is more universal than the juridical universalism of the abstract bearers of rights.”

In 1799 Toussaint Louverture was asked by France to write on the banners of his army, “Brave blacks, remember that the French people alone recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights.” He refused, pointing to the slavery which persisted in France’s other colonies, and replied in a letter to Bonaparte: “It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we wish; it is the adoption absolute of the principle that no man, born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow man.”

To fight the xenophobia rising with Trump’s election, we must still claim the legacy of this insurgent universality, which says that we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone. The view of a Muslim as the passive victim of an injury, who must be protected by the benevolence of a white liberal, is to be rejected as ruthlessly as the hate speech of Trump.

In Trump’s America, I am afraid. Because of my name, because of my skin color, I am in danger. But more profound than my fear is my anger. I am outraged not at the risk I experience as an individual, but at the sharpening and deepening of the obscene inequality of the capitalist system, at the daily violence of deprivation that will be visited most harshly on the poor of this country — including the white poor — and at the divisions cultivated among us by fear, anger, and manipulation, that prevent us from forming the collective power that can overcome our subordination.

I am not interested in allies, in sympathy or protection. I am interested in comrades, of every complexion, who will fight alongside me for a better world.

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[njawaidofficial]

Here’s How Teen Shows Like "Degrassi" Try To Get School Shootings Right

https://styleveryday.com/2018/03/23/heres-how-teen-shows-like-degrassi-try-to-get-school-shootings-right/

Here’s How Teen Shows Like "Degrassi" Try To Get School Shootings Right

Degrassi: Next Class

Netflix

Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon remembers the day executives at the WB informed him that the third season finale of his wildly popular show, about a vampire hunter and her supernatural friends, would be delayed. It had been four weeks since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre — an attempted bombing and mass shooting that killed 15 — sparked a nationwide debate over gun control and the effects of violent entertainment. The episode’s plot included a school explosion and a scene in which armed students attack the mayor, so out of sympathy for victims and fear of copycat killings, the network broadcast a rerun instead. Another Buffy episode from that season, called “Earshot,” featured a suspected school shooter, and its airdate was also rescheduled.

Whedon understood the decision. “I was like, We shouldn’t say boo about it because of course they should [postpone],” Whedon told BuzzFeed News in a recent interview, recalling the “horror” and “sense of hopelessness” he felt in the aftermath of Columbine.

It wasn’t the last time an episode of a teen series would face controversy following a school shooting. Four months after a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Glee aired an episode in which students go on lockdown after hearing gunshots. While co-creator Ryan Murphy praised it as “the most powerful, emotional Glee ever,” some Sandy Hook parents criticized the episode for coming “too soon” after the tragedy. (In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, Murphy found himself in a similar situation, deciding to tone down the graphic visuals from an episode of his show American Horror Story: Cult that featured a mass shooting scene.)

After last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Paramount Network delayed the premiere of Heathers, a television series remake of the 1988 cult film about a pair of teenagers who murder their classmates. “Out of respect for the victims, their families and loved ones, we feel the right thing to do is delay the premiere until later this year,” the cable network said in a statement.

The premiere of the TV show Heathers has been delayed after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Paramount Network

School shootings aren’t going away, and the conversation over how they’re portrayed on television isn’t either. While politicians and cultural critics, including President Trump, have criticized Hollywood for “glorifying violence,” showrunners and directors told BuzzFeed News they think carefully about how they’re depicting shootings.

Whedon, a vocal NRA opponent who says he’ll attend this weekend’s March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, said “actual deadly accessible guns are the issue,” not the entertainment industry. Still, he decided not to prominently feature the use of firearms on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, unless they were in the hands of villains. “When we were making Buffy, we actually had a chance to say, ‘Oh, we can actually take a very hard stance here,’” Whedon said. “It’s not a cop show. We’re not wed to the idea of the shootout in the alley.” Throughout the show, Buffy refuses multiple times to use a gun against her enemies. (“These things? Never helpful!” she says about firearms in a Season 6 episode.)

@joss / Twitter / Via Twitter: @joss

In the aftermath of Columbine, Whedon didn’t think his show would provoke copycat killings, because the weapons were portrayed in a negative light. In the episode “Earshot,” Buffy finds a classmate assembling a rifle in the school’s clock tower. She believes he is going to kill their fellow students, but it turns out “the school shooter angle in the episode was a red herring,” Whedon explained. The boy actually intends to kill himself, but Buffy talks him out of it and immediately dismantles his weapon.

But Whedon acknowledged that viewer reaction is hard to predict. In the 2002 episode “Seeing Red,” Buffy is shot and beloved character Tara Maclay is killed by Warren Mears, a misogynist outcast. At the time, Whedon assumed that a bad guy using a gun couldn’t lead to copycat behavior. “He represented the worst in everything, so I didn’t think people were going to be like, Hey, let’s jump on that bandwagon!” Whedon said. But that was in 2002. Now, given the frequency of mass shootings across the country, he isn’t so sure: “But god knows what I’ve learned lately is that bad examples don’t seem to throw people off.”

Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) confronts a student with a gun in the episode “Earshot” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The WB

Asked what advice he’d give to someone writing a school shooting storyline today, Whedon stressed respect for the characters and for the gravity of the situation: “If you’re in the head of a person who’s trapped in a classroom, if you don’t let genre tropes outweigh the physical and mental experience of the people you’re filming, then you have a shot at saying something useful.”

For Whedon, the Parkland students turned activists call to mind some of the messages he was trying to convey in his work: “I spent most of my career writing about teenagers who would lay down their lives for each other and would stand up to all injustice, and I thought I was writing fantasy.”

Similarly, Linda Schuyler and Stephen Stohn — two of the Canadian showrunners behind Netflix’s Degrassi: Next Class — said they find the Parkland survivors “deeply moving” and plan to incorporate elements of their activism into the forthcoming season of the high school series. The two said it’s “highly likely” they will explore a school shooting, too.

“It’s something that’s happening with greater frequency, and it’s happening to teenagers … and our attitude on the show has always been, whatever is out there affecting our young people, we should be talking about it on Degrassi,” said Schuyler.

The pair previously tackled school shootings in the first season of Degrassi: Next Class and in an episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation. “Time Stands Still,” perhaps the best known episode of the show, saw Jimmy Brooks (played by now-rapper Aubrey “Drake” Graham) shot by a troubled classmate. When crafting the story around that episode, Sohn said they were “very concerned” about the possibility of inciting a “copycat situation,” but pursued the storyline to portray how access to guns, coupled with an environment of bullying, “can be a pressure cooker for some of these kids to explode.”

Jimmy Brooks (played by now-rapper Aubrey “Drake” Graham) is shot by a classmate.

DHX Media

“We do not want to glorify things, and we don’t want to sensationalize them,” Schuyler said. When writing the aforementioned school shooting episodes, the showrunners consulted with Barbara Coloroso, an expert on bullying and an author who published a book on the issue soon after the Columbine massacre. They also spoke directly to teenagers with the goal to write material that would resonate with and accurately reflect their young viewers. “Hopefully as storytellers, we are being respectful enough to all sides of the story,” Schuyler added.

Jimmy Brooks (Drake) is paralyzed after being shot by a classmate on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

CTV

Although Schuyler and Sohn feel it’s their duty to tackle issues that teenagers go through, they have no plans to portray anything “overtly political.”

“The mandate of our show is to sort of take what’s happening in the environment politically and make the political personal,” said Schuyler. “We wouldn’t address gun control per se, but we will look from a particular character’s point of view at how damaging the misuse of guns can be and how damaging it can be when bullying isn’t dealt with at an early stage.”

Some showrunners and producers looking to portray gun violence and mass shootings have turned to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control and often works with television producers and writers to create storylines for shows like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Wife.

Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone) consoles a young boy who accidentally shot his playmate on Grey’s Anatomy.

ABC

For Avery Gardiner, copresident of the Brady Campaign, it’s just as important to depict the everyday shootings that occur across the United States — and not just high-profile mass shootings.

While ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy featured a storyline about a mass shooter who murders two of Dr. Meredith Grey’s colleagues, a 2016 episode centers on a young boy who accidentally shoots his playmate after finding the weapon in his mother’s drawer. It was a plotline the Brady Campaign consulted on. And immediately following the episode, actor Ellen Pompeo urged the importance of keeping guns unloaded and properly stored, away from children, in a PSA. The collaboration wasn’t without criticism. The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action condemned the Grey’s episode and the anti-gun messages “permeating television programming and film,” writing: “Thankfully, the episode was immediately followed by a Brady Center ad, alerting viewers to the fact that the preceding program was intended as propaganda.”

Gardiner also stressed the need for shows that depict the reality of how shootings affect the families of victims. Shows like The Chi, a Showtime drama created by Lena Waithe about life in Chicago’s South Side, for example, portrays the factors that might lead one to turn to guns — and how deaths resulting from gun violence affect victims’ loved ones.

“The realities of that violence and how it tears communities apart is something that Hollywood should be showing on TV,” Gardiner continued. “It’s an American problem that we need to be solving.”

LINK: How One New Netflix Series Shows Teen Gun Violence Is Bigger Than Just Parkland

LINK: Survivors Of The Florida Shooting Will Hold A Nationwide “March For Our Lives” To End School Shootings