Human Rights
Good piece: “The history and resurgence of The Transexual Menace” by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris, Gay City News, February 25, 2025, gaycitynews.com….🏳️⚧️🗽
An Example of White Terror Depicted in WPA Art
“South” by Philip Reisman. “Executed for the Public Art Works Project, 1934."*
The South here is portrayed as a place of white terror: lynching, cross burning, Ku Klux Klan. Note, too, the figures on the left: men in chains working at gun point, modern-day slave labor powering industry. The prisoner whose face is visible is Black, the armed guard white. (Click to enlarge for detail.)
I’ve always avoided posting such images, but the history whitewashing of the current administration is making me think differently. This art, at least, is respectful. It depicts the humanity of the victims, unlike the grizzly souvenir postcards circulated by the terrorists.
* Source: NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179787.
A message to Putin from my car’s rear end. The same goes for his White House asset. #RussiaIsATerroristState #SupportUkraine #SupportHumanRights
The way “Suffragette” depicts the use of social pressure to make and then ostracize a working class suffragette, drive her out of her home, lead the father to give up their child… Yikes! This film should inspire productive classroom discussions.
📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.
🏳️⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.
There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773
“Daisy Bates takes a walk – Activist Daisy Bates picketing with placard: ‘Jailing our youth will not solve the problem in Little Rock. We are only asking for full citizenship rights.'” Ca. 1957.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Demonstrations Collection, image id 1953728.
Valuable multilingual resource: “Immigrants' Rights,” www.aclu.org….
🏳️⚧️ From the Church of Sweden via @transworld.bsky.social:
God, today on Transgender Day of Remembrance, I want to remember everyone who doesn’t get to be called by their right name, everyone who is hated so much that it leaves an imprint on their soul, everyone who needs a place where they can breathe, and where they can be themselves. Amen.
“Minneapolis Assault on Transgender Women Sparks Rally,” Transvitae, November 20, 2024. 🏳️⚧️
In Minneapolis, two transgender women were violently attacked, prompting a rally and raising fears within the trans community amid President Trump’s re-election. As concerns over rising transphobia grow, community leaders emphasize solidarity, self-defense, and advocacy to protect the rights and safety of transgender individuals.
Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition
I doubt I’ll have the bandwidth to follow the machinations in Washington’s halls of power, as I did during the previous administration. I got out of the habit under the current one because I was exhausted, didn’t feel threatened, and ended up living a twelve-hour drive away. And now I want to focus on the parts of my life and world where my individual agency, talents, and interests might be leveraged for things more constructive, more life-affirming.
First, though, I’ll allow myself to imagine some of the worst coming our way, just to get the darkness out of my mind and into words: the destruction of the regulatory state and of our public medical, environmental, climate, and weather research infrastructure; the violent and cruel erasure of entire communities; the enslavement, indentured servitude, or other forms of abusive exploitation of people without papers under the “protection” of unscrupulous employers, landlords, neighbors, and government agents; the creation of a new generation of Hoovervilles inhabited by people with no health insurance, no immunizations, and pensioners whose Social Security checks and Medicare benefits no longer keep them housed; preventable contagious diseases killing our children; lawfully mandated medical malpractice killing girls, women, and trans men with the bad luck to become pregnant; the loss of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and community members to exile, to self-harm, and to the violence of bullies given license by their chosen leader; the possibility that insulin might grow out of my reach; the knowledge that Medicare will never cover the costs of help with elder care while I still need such help, and while private equity funds squeeze what they can out of old folks homes, leaving them woefully understaffed, their populations vulnerable to contagious disease, inattention, and abuse.
It doesn’t have to go this way, not even under the next president. But do we think a GOP-controlled Senate will respect the filibuster the next time around, if they manage to get the House too? Isn’t that just one more convention that the next president can demand they drop? And have any of them demonstrated even the slightest willingness to defend their institution, sure in the knowledge that they are part of a separate branch of government? GOP representatives in the House are no better, as they demonstrated during the previous president’s two impeachments.
American presidents have enormous amounts of power, and now, it seems, controlling the party and the mob will give the next president even more. Or will some Republican legislators put their constituents ahead of the slash-and-burn ideologues? What groups will they decide government might have a role in protecting? Of course, the House could still flip Democratic. Some Republicans could develop a conscience. Or the ambitions, incompetence, and contradictory aims, values, and beliefs of Orange Face’s supporters could lead to lots of friendly fire and delays.
Caveat: the GOP marched in lockstep to regain the presidency, but we have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. It’s possible they prefer to carry out dissent internally. It’s also a sure thing that Mr. Red Tie will keep all eyes on himself, with lots of help from the media, while the poisons are concocted in Congress and in other parts of the executive branch.
"Susan B. Anthony to the women of today: 'Everything but the vote is still to be won'" by Nina Allender (1872–1957) for the Women's National Party, Equal Rights: Official Weekly Organ of the National Woman's Party, February 24, 1923, via Library of Congress.
Russia is intent on eradicating the Ukrainian language and all aspects of Ukrainian identity, with young Ukrainians a particular target.
Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.
Joseph Cox, “Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics,” 404 Media, Oct. 23, 2024.
You don’t have to be religious or Catholic to love this one. 🏳️⚧️
Something I blogged 16 years ago on the basis of documents I frequently taught undergraduates: Received Rights versus Human Rights in the ‘Declaration of Independence’
The current moment reminds me of how desperately we need to teach the contested and often fraught history of human rights. We need better literacy on the subject. I’ve done this in a required Western Civ course at GMU.
Reading about Evidence of Russia Using Starvation as a Weapon in its War on Ukraine
"New Report: 'Deliberate Pattern' of Starvation Tactics against Ukrainian Civilians by Russian Forces in Siege of Mariupol City" by Global Rights Compliance, June 13, 2024. (Summary in Ukrainian followed by English)
Full report in English (PDF) — "The Hope Left Us": Russia’s Siege, Starvation, and Capture of Mariupol City
Full report in Ukrainian (PDF) — "Надія залишила нас": Облога, моріння голодом і захоплення Маріуполя Росією
I still need to process this report, but its outline already lines up with the reporting presented in the prize-winning Frontline/AP documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol” (available in full on the Internet Archive). Its chapters include:
Reading Aryeh Neier on Israel, International Humanitarian Law, and Justice
Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?”, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2024.
The author, who has seen much as one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, has long been “sparing” in his application of the term “genocide” to state-committed atrocities over the past several decades. Initially he did not think of Israel’s indiscriminate, even criminal violence against civilians as genocide, because Israel had a clear right to defend itself against the barbarous acts of Hamas.
I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."
Riots
Minnesota Governor Walz’s assertion that ongoing riots are no longer about George Floyd ring true in a way. But were they ever about one man? Floyd’s death was certainly no one-off. The protests—and the participation of so many young people—should give pause to those leaders who would gloss over this society’s brutal injustices and disparities.
An Encounter between our Enslaved and our Immigrant Pasts
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.
– Frederick Douglas, quoted in Patrick Young, “When a Ban on the Chinese Was Proposed and Frederick Douglass Spoke Out,” Long Island Wins, February 8, 2017.