Palm Springs Will Remove ‘Racist Trees’ Separating Black Neighborhood from Golf Course
The city of Palm Springs, California, announced that it would remove a row of trees blocking a black neighborhood from viewing a municipal golf course.
Palm Springs Mayor Robert Moon and other city officials told residents Sunday they would be removing the line of trees and a chain link fence separating the properties after residents said the trees kept property values in the predominantly black neighborhood down, the Desert Sunreports.
Residents in the area say the trees were planted there in the 1960s as a form of racism — because the invasive tamarisk trees blocked views of the golf course and the San Jacinto mountains, keeping property values low so black families could not make money on their property.
We want in your “HOODS” Damit!
City manager David Ready warned that the tree removal would not happen right away because the full city council would have to vote on the issue. He added that the trees would be down in three months.
The city estimates that the tree removal would cost $169,000.
I bet you any kind of money your tax dollars are paying for this
University teaches white employees how to overcome the ‘discomfort’ of being white
University of Michigan training session used ‘Privileged Identity Exploration Model’
A two-day professional development conference held recently at the University of Michigan included a training session that aimed to help white employees deal with their “whiteness” so they could become better equipped to fight for social justice causes, according to organizers.
Participants who took part in the “Conversations on Whiteness” session, held December 5 during the university’s Student Life Professional Development Conference, were taught to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their White identity, explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it,” the university’s website states.
The goal was to help participants in “unpacking Whiteness” to support students and staff with issues and efforts “related to identity and social justice,” the website added.
The “Conversations on Whiteness” session was one of more than a dozen workshops offered at the conference, held Dec. 4 and 5. The whiteness session utilized the “Privileged Identity Exploration Model” to help white participants explore the “discomfort” of their “white identity,” according to organizers.
First introduced in 2007 by University of Iowa professor Sherry Watt in a College Student Affairs Journal article, the model purports to be a method for understanding how people react to stimuli that alert them of the privilege they hold. The model is to be used by “facilitators” to “engage participants in discussions about diversity,” according to Watt.
Watt states there are eight defenses people use to avoid recognizing their privilege. Examples of defenses include “denial,” where someone simply refuses to admit their privilege, and “minimization,” where someone trivializes the impact of their privilege.
The College Fix reached out for comment to the three university staff members listed as facilitators of the event: Abby Priehs: associate director of residence education; Steve Bodei: associate director of Student Life Leadership Education; and Nick Smith: director of campus involvement.
When asked why the “unpacking Whiteness” event was created, and whether or not students at the University of Michigan had complained about the quality of racial discourse on campus, Smith responded: “This is an internal training for U-M Student Life staff.” A subsequent query to Smith was not returned.
Neither Priehs nor Bodei responded to phone calls from The Fix on Monday night.
The Student Life Professional Development Conference was based around the overall theme of “Identity, Wellness, & Work: Healthier, Happier, & More Efficient,” according to the University of Michigan’s student life website.
Additional sessions were titled “Building and Strengthening Your Assessment Muscles,” “Empower, Safety and You,” and “Making Meaning: the Role of Spirituality in Higher Education.”
Another session, titled “I Don’t Feel Safe Talking About Race,” was devoted to giving staff “tools to create a safer climate to promote dialogue around racial issues.” Meanwhile “The Intersection of Well-being, and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion on Campus” workshop aimed to help Student Life staff “work towards wellness justice for all students on campus.”
The University of Michigan is not alone in holding trainings to help staff cope with “intersecting identities.”
American University hosted a training event earlier this year designed to help staff understand their own identities.
Among the research guides available online from the University of San Francisco, meanwhile, is a “White Privilege Resource Guide” that provides resources to help researchers deal with their various forms of privilege.
Omarosa Interview On WH Exit: I Have A “Profound Story” To Tell That World Will Want To Hear
Dismissed Trump aide Omarosa Manigault gave an explosive exit interview to Good Morning America on Thursday. She said she resigned her position, that she was not fired. In fact, Manigault claims her resignation isn’t effective until January the 20th. Manigault’s official title is Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison.
GMA host Michael Strahan asked her to explain reports that she was distressed with President Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville and his public support of Roy Moore. Manigault said she has to be “very careful” about her response because, according to her, “I have to go back and work with these individuals.”
“I have to be very careful about how I answer this but there were a lot of things that I observed during the last year that I was very unhappy with, that I was very uncomfortable with, things that I observed, that I heard, that I listened to,” she said.
However, in true reality show fashion, Omarosa teased she has a “story to tell” and she will do so when she officially leaves the White House.
“But when I have a chance to tell my story to tell — quite a story — as the only African-American woman in this White House, as a senior staff and assistant to the president, I have seen things that have made me uncomfortable, that have upset me, that have affected me deeply and emotionally, that has affected my community and my people and when I can tell my story, it is a profound story that I know the world will want to hear,” Omarosa promised.
“I had more access than most and people had problems with that, people had problems with my 14-year relationship with this president. I’ve always been loyal to him,” she said.
Omarosa, however, did not bash Trump.
She was asked to address Trump’s promise to unify the country. She said it is “almost impossible” to unify a divided country and called it ridiculous to expect something of that magnitude to happen in 11 months. However, she said Trump did “try.”
“I think that he tried in his own way,” Omarosa said. “There are things that he could have done and things that this administration needs to continue to do to try to bring this country together and hopefully they’ll succeed for the good of the nation.”
“There were a lot of things that I observed during the last year that I was very unhappy with,” Manigault said.
Manigault, widely known for her antics on the first season of The Apprentice, hosted by Trump, once said, “every critic, every detractor” will have to “bow down” to President Trump weeks before the election.
Omarosa was reportedly escorted from the White House grounds by security on Tuesday. Some reports say she was “physically dragged” off the premises. However, she also called it a “false narrative” that she had to be removed from the White House.
NYT’s Yamiche Alcindor reported on MSNBC Thursday morning that Omarosa was uncomfortable with President Trump’s response to Charlottesville. According to Alcindor, she was also getting under Chief of Staff John Kelly’s skin because she was regularly presented inflammatory news pieces to the president to get him riled up.
“We all had to adjust to his very different militaristic style,” Manigault said of Kelly. “But I had a very clear, outlined, defined role for what I did, and every captain, every coach gets an opportunity to use a sports analogy to choose their team. Donald Trump chose me for his team. And I’m not certain as John Kelly was starting to develop his team that is someone that wanted me to be on his team.”
Alcindor also repeated the report that Manigault was “dragged” from the building.
“She was not very much liked by her colleagues,” the Times scribe said. “She has a lot of enemies in the White House who could be telling people stuff because they don’t like her,” she said of those giving negative reports of the former Trump advisor.”
Women had accounts banned from Facebook for responding to male trolls with sentences like ‘men are trash,’ in part because the company classifies white men as a protected group.
When comic Marcia Belsky sarcastically replied “men are scum” to a friend’s Facebook post back in October, she never anticipated being banned from the platform for 30 days.
That was exactly what happened.
Belsky was shocked at the severity of the punishment considering her relatively innocuous comment, and immediately spoke to her fellow female friends about the ordeal. They could relate.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, countless women have taken to Facebook to express their frustration and disappointment with men and have been promptly shut down or silenced, banned from the platform for periods ranging from one to seven days.
Women have posted things as bland as “men ain’t shit,” “all men are ugly,” and even “all men are allegedly ugly” and had their posts removed. They’ve been locked out of their accounts for suggesting that, since “all men are ugly,” country music star Blake Shelton “winning the sexiest man isn’t a triumph.”
“I personally posted men are scum in November and I received a seven-day ban. It’s still ongoing. Two days and 23 hours left,” said comedian Alison Klemp.
Kayla Avery, a comedian in Boston, said she’s been banned close to 10 times by Facebook and is serving out the end of her third 30-day ban.
One of the first times she got banned was when her page was flooded with male trolls calling her derogatory and sexist terms. Avery posted “men continue to be the worst” she said, because she said she “felt helpless to stop their hate.”
“There was one guy who was threatening to find my house and beat me up,” she said. “I got banned before I could even successfully report it.”
In late November, after the issue was raised in a private Facebook group of nearly 500 female comedians, women pledged to post some variation of “men are scum” to Facebook on Nov. 24 in order to stage a protest. Nearly every women who carried out the pledge was banned.
“It wasn’t the best protest because it clearly didn’t work,” said Klemp. Avery said she is still suffering the consequences after posting “men are trash” on that day.
On Nov. 28 a Twitter thread by comedian Rae Sanni documenting her experience of being banned by Facebook went viral and countless other women began to share their stories.
The problem has become so widespread that Avery even created a website to document these women’s tales. The site, FacebookJailed.com, shares women’s experiences of being punished by Facebook for making benign comments about men or standing up to trolls, sometimes juxtaposed with Facebook’s inaction against men who have hurled insults or racial slurs back.
“Comedian and writer Rae Sanni has been targeted by nazi trolls who hurled dozens of threatening and violent messages and comments at her for days,” a recent post reads. “Rae Sanni was banned by Facebook while her abusers are free to say sh*t like this without being in violation of community standards.”
The post features screenshots provided by Sanni where Facebook does not deem comments calling her the N-word hate speech.
When reached for comment a Facebook spokesperson said that the company is working hard to remedy any issues related to harassment on the platform and stipulated that all posts that violate community standards are removed.
When asked why a statement such as “men are scum” would violate community standards, a Facebook spokesperson said that the statement was an attack and hate speech toward a protected group and so it would rightfully be taken down.
As ProPublica revealed in an investigation in June, white men are listed as a protected group by the platform.
A Facebook spokesperson clarified that this is because all genders, races, and religions are all protected characteristics under Facebook’s current policy. However, it’s clear that even with 7,000 Facebook content moderators, things slip through the cracks.
Female comedians have speculated that it’s internalized misogyny on the behalf of Facebook’s content moderation team that leads to punishment such as banning to be doled out unequally. Several have tried posting “women are scum,” had their friends report the posts, and subsequently suffered zero consequences.
While this explanation is tidy, it’s almost certainly false. Facebook employees receive extensive training around specific issues and their work is regularly reviewed to account for any personal biases.
But the system is far from perfect.
One issue with the way Facebook moderators currently review posts is that many “problematic” posts are viewed individually, without context because of privacy concerns. Facebook moderators also aren’t able to view personal or demographic information about the original poster. This means that they sometimes don’t know whether a piece of content was posted by a black queer woman or a white straight male.
It also means the moderators don’t know whether the poster has a history of spreading messages related to white supremacy, or has participated in targeted harassment campaigns against specific groups before.
With hate speech in particular, the person writing the post is just as relevant as what is being said. The fact that Facebook’s moderators aren’t always given this information means that sometimes benign statements can be misinterpreted, and vice versa.
Context also matters. One reason female comics often seem to run afoul of Facebook’s guidelines is that the company’s content moderators fail to recognize the humor in their posts. Popular tropes such as “ban men” are interpreted literally under Facebook’s current set of community standards, and women suffer the consequences for attempting to express themselves.
In the past, ironic misandry has been a popular way for women to deal with living in a world where they’re exposed to frequent abuse at the hands of powerful men. Yet, if a woman takes to Facebook to vent about how she “wants to imprison men and milk them for their male tears,” she could quickly lose access to her account.
Trolls know this. “The ironic thing about Literal Nazis is that they have weaponized taking things literally,” BuzzFeed writer Katie Notopoulos wrote recently.
Feigning outrage at statements that were clearly not written to be interpreted that way has become a favored tactic of the alt-right, Gamergate, and movements known for their coordinated harassment efforts. When moderators can’t make this distinction they punish innocent parties and embolden trolls.
“There was one guy who was threatening to find my house and beat me up. I got banned before I could even successfully report it.”
— Kayla Avery
Meanwhile, outright false and defamatory information—like Pizzagate communities accusing private citizens of pedophilia because of their political beliefs—still thrive on the service.
Facebook’s spokesperson stressed that it was working on a fix to this and the company plans to look at ways to eventually apply its policies in a more granular way. In the future it hopes to take into account the history of oppression with different genders and ethnicities, etc. when reviewing posts, but stressed that Facebook is a global platform.
In the meantime, two women who are both not in the comedy world but have had their content flagged or removed said the bans have made them feel much less comfortable posting on Facebook about sensitive topics like the #MeToo movement.
Avery said that posting on Facebook, no matter what issue, can feel like walking across a minefield.
“I get cold feet to post stuff, especially if I try to share something that’s going on that I want to bring attention to. because I feel like I’m going to get in trouble somehow,” she said. “Sharing anything is nerve racking. It’s like, ‘What’s ok? What’s not ok? What’s going to cross the line this time?’ It makes me feel crazy, like Facebook is gaslighting us.”
Heather Fink, also a female comedian, said the problem has also begun to spread to Instagram. She has had several posts there removed where she said she was simply talking about her Facebook ban and now no longer trusts the platform to ensure her voice is heard.
The #MeToo movement has been perpetuated via social media thanks to the open nature of most platforms and the ability for women to speak out publicly in their own words. If Facebook’s community guidelines are being enforced irregularly, whether intentional or not, women say it stifles their ability to speak truth to power and share their stories.
“Facebook is absolutely silencing women.”
— Heather Fink
“Social media is how we communicate. Preventing women from expressing themselves like this is an intimidation tactic,” said Meredith, a social-media strategist who has had several of her friends banned.
“This feels like a deliberate and systematic act—and whether it was or it wasn’t, it needs to be addressed publicly by Facebook and Instagram, especially as we’ve seen plenty of examples of true, dangerous hate speech remaining on these platforms even after being reported.”
Avery said Facebook’s banning policy itself ties into the #MeToo movement.
“How else can we have a genuine reaction to what’s going on?” Avery said. “Facebook is absolutely silencing women.”
College Paper Fires Writer Who Called White DNA ‘An Abomination’
A college paper fired a writer who called the DNA of white people “an abomination,” according to a Monday report.
Texas State University student journalist Rudy Martinez said that “white death will mean liberation for all” in the November column and The University Star fired him after previously retracting and apologizing for the column, reported The College Fix.
“The author of this column has jeopardized the atmosphere of inclusivity at this university and will no longer be published in The University Star,” read a correction from the paper’s editorial board.
Along with constructive criticism, the editorial board said that the paper has received death threats and “hate mail,” as well as threats to defund The University Star.
Conservative students at Texas State have started a petition to defund the publication; it has over 1,500 signatures at the time of publication.
“Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all,” said Martinez in his now-retracted column. “Accept this death as the first step toward defining yourself as something other than the oppressor. Until then, remember this: I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”
“The column’s central theme was abhorrent and is contrary to the core values of inclusion and unity that our Bobcat students, faculty, and staff hold dear,” said Denise M. Trauth, president of Texas State.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Martinez for comment, but received none in time for press.
The Democratic Party and the liberal left’s obsession with disparate impact race politics crept into K-12 public education. Their latest social engineering experimentation uses black and Hispanic kids in poor urban classrooms as pawns for political power. Education is secondary.
Liberals believe they can artificially wipe away serious behavior problems that are cultural in nature. They do this by labeling reasonable standards of classroom discipline as racist or discriminatory. When urban schools with predominantly black and Hispanic students enacted protocols that create an environment where learning can take place, more suspensions and expulsions resulted, accompanied by a widening of the achievement gap between black students and their white counterparts.
The knee-jerk reaction from liberals was to claim that school disciplinary policies that disproportionally affected black and Hispanic kids were culturally insensitive, discriminatory and evidence of racism. The liberals were confusing correlation and causation. School officials were even discouraged from calling police even in cases of violent assaults – that could also be considered racist.
Social engineers in colleges and universities began drawing up untested experiments using black and Hispanic kids as laboratory rats. They wanted to show that leaving disruptive kids in the classroom, instead of removing them for serious behavior violations including assaults on teachers, would improve scholastic performance.
Instead, disruptions and scholastic performance both got worse. Leaving disruptive kids in a classroom is a danger not only to the teacher but to other students as well. The university professors are nowhere near the classrooms to see the disaster they created with their inane idea, nor are they held accountable.
Not surprisingly, no amount of cultural sensitivity training of school officials will negate the culturally dysfunctional baggage brought to school every day by students.
Too many black kids today do not come to school in a state of readiness to learn. They have not been read to by parents. They are not socially adjusted for a group environment like a classroom, nor have they been reasonably disciplined for unwanted behavior. This emotional baggage is then thrown into the lap of a teacher who does not have the education or skills for handling these serious emotional and behavioral problems.
Kids have an excuse because of their age, immaturity and bad parenting. The parents of those disruptive kids have no excuse. Long ago, parents were absolved of their responsibility to raise their kids effectively. Liberal social dogma told them racism was at the root of their inability to raise kids who were ready for the demands of a school classroom.
Poverty was to blame too. Now liberals had a reason for not just government but economic intervention as well. This gave the left a two-for-one moment to enact expensive government-run tax-supported programs. They could spend more money not just on unproven education experiments but also on new anti-poverty programs.
K-4 programs have become K-3 programs. This further absolves mainly black and Hispanic parents from their rightful responsibility of raising their kids.
We are on our way to kids being taken immediately from the maternity ward to a government school. They are already being fed three meals a day and provided for by taxpayer-funded after-school programs. Why not just start them on the road to government dependency, not to mention indoctrination and exposure to leftist dogma, as early in life as possible?
GOP politicians in Congress have been reluctant to challenge the efficacy of these expensive programs lest they are accused of not caring about black and Hispanic children, or being outright racist. Nothing makes a white Republican politician run like their hair is on fire faster than being accused of not caring about black kids.
Education has always been the traditional vehicle for upward mobility in America. It is even more important in today’s knowledge-based economy.
Blacks who have embraced education are less likely to have kids who drop out of school, commit crimes, join gangs or make other flawed lifestyle choices like drug and alcohol abuse and having children they are ill-equipped to raise.
One of the hallmarks of slavery was criminalizing the education of black children thus keeping them ignorant. I would argue that many of today’s public school policies achieve the same results – they keep kids ignorant.
The goal of social activists is not to fix education problems but to fix the statistics. They are focusing on the wrong thing. Statistics can be exploited not only to make school problems (seem to) disappear, but also to demonstrate the need for the continuation of government programs. The kids who fail in school today are the population that tomorrow will fill jails and prisons and be in need of government assistance.
Former President George W. Bush called these low expectations “soft bigotry.” He was right. Now the left wants to back up the soft bigotry with faulty statistics.