CONNECTING THE DOTS

A Colleague’s Response to Scott Yenor’s article on The Daily Signal’s website, “Transgender Activists Are Seeking to Undermine Parental Rights” which was published on August 2, 2017

A Political Science Professor at Boise State University’s article was promoted on the Boise State University’s School of Public Service’s facebook page, and there were several students and community members that expressed concern. I first became aware of this on the Friday before the now famous “Unite the Right” rally which took place in Charlottesville Virginia, August 11 and 12, of 2017. I was moved to write a brief piece which exposed the continuum between what I saw from a voice on our campus, and the extreme end of the continuum on display as a national tragedy. At the time that I wrote the very short piece, I did not know what might come of it. I shared it with my supervisor, who was aware of discussions on campus around navigating public reaction to this professor's piece. The School of Public Service sought my permission to publish what I had written on their website to provide institutional balance to what was being interpreted as de facto support of anti-feminist, anti-LGBT and trans-phobic scholarship. Although I authored the piece below, it’s inclusion on the SPS website was the decision of the Dean of the School of Public Service, Dr. Corey Cook after the piece had been reviewed by several senior university administrators. The piece has since been removed, but as the author, I have chosen to include the original piece here, on my own blog so that it can remain available. What follows is the piece as it was published on the SPS site and as I wrote it on August 13, 2017.

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There is something here.  This is not random.  There is a reason that I was contacted by both colleagues and community members expressing concern and outrage about an update from one of the campus departments, which shared an article, that one of their faculty members has recently produced.  Folks that contacted me were concerned about the content of the article that they characterized (I think correctly), as derogatory of feminists, the LGBT community and people generally concerned with issues of justice related to gender.  This issue arose just the day before the tragic events in Charlottesville, Va. became a national moment of attention.  There is a reason that these things happened in succession and their proximity in my attention is no accident.

The article that folks were referring to is a piece written by a tenured professor at Boise State University, Dr. Scott Yenor, entitled, “Transgender Activists Are Seeking to Undermine Parental Rights”.  Dr. Yenor’s ties to the Heritage Foundation should shed some light on the general “culture war” tenor of the piece, in which he posits, basically that feminism’s ultimate aim is something slightly less than cultural Armageddon, in which the real end to the march of progress that saw gay marriage as a victory, is a social order in which neither children nor parents have any rights protection with respect to one another in a sort of stalemate of gender sovereignty.  His piece is easy enough to dismiss on logical grounds, but serves as a very telling peek into the pathetic fear of change gripping those that patronize such sources as the Heritage foundation.   

It is also, however, the seed of a dangerous idea; the dangerous idea that those different from you are not just different than you, but that they actually have nefarious ends and seek to destroy you and everything you cherish. It is this dangerous idea that is the very same seed that, when nourished and allowed to grow, becomes the kind of hatred and intolerance that we saw on Display in Charlottesville.  The anti-defamation league’s pyramid of hate (available on the anti-defamation leagues’ website) visually depicts the relationship between this kind of seed and it’s ultimate end.  It is a meaningful graphic that brings into sharp relief the evolutionary relationship between behind closed-door cultural alienation as an individual and how those lonely individuals seek out like-minded others and eventually foster a sense that these fear based and misguided ideas should spur some action.  The pyramid depicts a process which builds from bias to individual acts of prejudice that ultimately produce discrimination, bias motivated violence and build to a genocidal end.  It is a powerful graphic that cites history as its ultimate author.

There is a direct line between these fear fueled conspiratorial theories and the resurrection of a violent ideology which sees the “other” as a direct threat to existence and therefore necessary to obliterate.  It is not an absolute succession and it is not a line without potential breaks or interruptions.  Not every person who agrees with Yenor’s piece is likely to become an espoused Neo-Nazi, but likely every Neo-Nazi would agree with the substance of Yenor’s piece.  It is this troubling truth that should move us to more critically and forcefully call this connection out in a clear and plain way.  Yenor’s piece includes a seed of hate that needs to be labeled for what it is, the spirit of an ideological animal called supremacy; supremacy of male over female, of straight over gay and of our way over yours.  Supremacy is the root of genocide and this is a seed that we must label as clearly and plainly as possible as “toxic”, and a danger to all those that would handle it.  I realize that some would call me alarmist for identifying such an association at all, but as someone that has grown up in the rural west, I just don’t know how you can deny the logic that reducing the impact of toxic seeds by identifying them helps us to ultimately control the character of what we will inevitably have to sow. 

The Gleaming Wall of Liberty

The Shameful Earth Tattoo You May See From Space

Hypocritical though it may seem to erect a prison wall around the world’s shining beacon of liberty,

Unacknowledged motivations bubble in a seething cauldron of rancorous fear and incredulously denied bigotry

Creating a defiant scar of petulant separation to be seen on the Earth’s face from worlds beyond, across time and space

Kindling the dormant collective neural pathway of anti-humanity that from time-to-time seems to doggedly plague our collective race

Stirring though, as well, the exhausted soul of direct democracy against her retreat from a market-fueled media cacophony

Today I choose to RESIST a hopelessness borne of the spectre of a dimly lit path to tyranny, suspiciously validated by votes cast in agony

Energized by an inchoate and growing solidarity with sisters, brothers and all others whose awoken eyes can now more clearly see

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RESISTANCE blooms defiantly as we exalt the simple truth that NO wall can be made to divide those that are dedicated to a dream of universal humanity

UN-PRECEDENTED

An a·cros·tic is a poem, word puzzle, or other composition in which certain letters in each line form a word or words.  I have written an acrostic for today, for now, for you.  This acrostic’s message is in the first letter of each line.  When viewed you can see that the first letter of each of these lines spell out the word ORGANIZE.

I have titled this Poem: "Unprecedented"

Over the arc and through the bitter cold of this brash winter of rancorous discontent there is a defiant light that shines

Reviving the life of a movement awoken with a fresh spirit and invigorated focus; it is a light glowing in your handmade signs

Generations connected in the dream of equal justice too big and too strong to ever fade away

American through and through in that dream’s character of a struggle for justice and equality whose time has come today

Never goaded by the twittering bluebirds of pettiness and rage chirping caustic messages late into the night

Inspired by the first family of grace to meet the lowliest of lows with only the highest of our height

Zealously energized are we, ready to face the dawn of a day that the world never expected to be

Ever devoted to the dream that is made by the steadfast, hands-on, every day work of people just like you and me

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Francisco Salinas 1/16/17

An open letter to Joe Scarborough (and all the other "Joe's" of America)

Do you know what?   I watch your television show. I generally appreciate your openness to the seemingly sadly foregone days of actual bi-partisan politics.  I also appreciate good police officers, and I am thankful for them.  I am thankful for the good that they continue to do and have done.  They ALL have a hard job.  I think they would have an easier job if they did not have to worry about a hyper militarized citizenry to be fearful of; but I digress.

Do you know that not all of them are good?   Here’s the thing; there are a LOT of people of color in the United States who have genuine and personal experience being treated poorly by police officers, for what we suspect is nothing more than being a person of color.   Is that so hard to believe that you need to try to marginalize all of us by lumping us together as supporters of looters trying to create a martyr out of a thug?  I am not a looter and I am not a looter apologist, I am not even burning down a building.  I am a citizen; an educated citizen, an educator in fact, and I have been treated poorly by some police officers.  Not all of them, but enough to decide that I would rather always drive the speed limit than take a chance that I’ll meet a bad one.  Bad ones have guns just like good ones do.  The bad ones will also lie to justify the things they do.  I don’t just believe this; I have experienced this.   It appears…looking all across the country, that I am not alone.  Are you tempted to dismiss me?  Here’s a fact: There are a LOT of people of color in the United States that this experience resonates with.

Do you think I’m being unreasonable?  Here’s what I think is unreasonable; people who decide how the lived reality of another person should be properly interpreted.  Would you, as a man, tell a woman how she should feel when she’s giving labor or how she should interpret treatment by another man?  I’ll bet you’d see that as pretty preposterous.  Why is that?  When you decide that I can’t be trusted to interpret my own lived reality properly, how is that not a reflection of a belief in your superiority over me?  Is it that you think that I have bias while you are above this?  Is it that I have a “stake” in a particular interpretation of that reality which you think biases me so much that I ignore the truth?  Are you really so blind to your own bias and your own “stake”?

Your level of outrage at the creation of a narrative in the media that doesn’t reflect your own lived reality is just beautifully ironic.  In response to your missive, actually nobody “needs” to tell you anything.  If you were simply to accept that their reality is just as valid as yours it would provide all the reconciliation you seek.  You could abandon your own rigid inability to allow the voices of others whose reality differs from yours to coexist and the integration of multiple perspectives could create a fuller and more informed version of truth.  There is not a massive disconnect between reality and the perception of others, there is a massive difference between your perception and theirs.  Your assumption that your perception IS reality is the only root of this disconnect.

And finally, yes, Michael Brown is worth standing up for.  Michael Brown was not a “thug”, he was barely an adult and it looks to me like he made some mistakes.  I will admit, however, I did not know him and all that I know about him seems very incomplete and very biased, but I don’t want to perpetuate the dehumanization of this dead young man by continuing to call him a “thug.”  I saw the tape of him in the store and leaving the store.  I don’t like what it looks like he did and he should have been held accountable for those choices.  I don’t pretend to know the full truth of that matter, but from what I saw, it does not look good.  I know I am softhearted; I work with students about his age.  I see them and read their papers.  I know that I am sometimes surprised at what I come to know of them by reading what they write.  An exterior that does not match my expectations of what they sometimes write can fool me.  I know that a tough exterior sometimes develops especially in young men of color as a defense mechanism against a world where they feel the odds are stacked against them.  I say this not to excuse poor choices, but to humanize someone that was a student, maybe a flawed student, and maybe a student on the wrong path, but a student nonetheless who will now never have a chance to work on improving himself for himself.

That grand notion of equal justice, in fact, is not meant to apply exclusively to people that aren’t “thugs.”  That grand notion is meant to apply to all of us.  Calling him a “thug” over and over is both unkind and dehumanizing and calls into question the motive of seeking to discredit him.  If he is not worth being a martyr, why is his character worth being sacrificed? 

The Michael Brown response is not a strategy.  Michael Brown’s story is a tragedy.  It is one tragedy too many.  What if I told you that I thought that the quote by Neal Boors about free speech sums up my feelings on Michael Brown and equal justice?  Boors’ idea that “Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection”, it is this idea that invites in me a notion that Michael Brown may be, in fact, exactly the right symbol for a rigorous standard of equal justice.  Maybe it’s exactly because it’s so easy for so many people to immediately accept an alternative narrative that he was an irredeemable “thug” that equal justice is so important for someone like him.

Maybe he deserved to be arrested, maybe he deserved to be physically restrained, maybe he deserved to be in jail.  I don’t believe he deserved to be shot over and over and left to die in the street like an animal.  It is too easy for me to believe that a police officer might operate using all the tools at his disposal with an unaccounted for level of bias informing his perspective, and it is too easy and too credible for me to believe that he would lie to protect himself.  That is not just a problem for me.  That is OUR problem.  Michael Brown’s story is one tragedy too many, and even he deserved the protection of the equal justice that remains worth fighting for, for ALL of us.  Michael Brown’s death and the activism since does not risk the possibility that well-meaning people of color will elevate an unwilling martyr, it presents an opportunity for all well meaning people to look comprehensively at a reaction that seems disproportionate to them and either ask “why?” or to conveniently dismiss it as “BS”.