Monday, September 30, 2024

Distinguished Attorney, Activist, Public Intellectual, Journalist, and Author Mya Wiley On Her New Book 'Remember, You are a Wiley' (VIDEO + AUDIO)

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

Remember, You Are a Wiley
by Mya Wiley
‎Grand Central Publishing. 2024

[Publication date:  September 17, 2024]

A moving, politically-charged memoir of surviving trauma and the power of activism from MSNBC legal analyst, professor, civil rights lawyer and former New York City Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley.

Born in a country that has repeatedly traumatized her and her loved ones, Maya Wiley grew up in a household that prioritized activism, hope, and resilience above all else. This attitude landed her father on President Nixon’s enemies list as her mother organized third-party political platforms. Still, they modeled hope for their children. In the decades since, she has borne witness as presidents and political figures used racism and fascism to gain power, and as cities have again and again elected white men, effectively shutting out people of color and women from having a political voice. As a result, she has been forced, time after time, to confront death, injustice, and indifference—just as her Civil Rights activist parents did before her.

After a mayoral race that further exposed our country’s deep divisions, Maya is ready to share her story and that of her parents: one of passion, possibility, and compassion in the face of fear and injustice. She takes readers through her unconventional upbringing, her father George Wiley‘s tragic death and the resulting trauma, as well as how her experiences spoke to racial, gender, and class identity. Against this painful backdrop, Maya charts her journey of coming into herself and finding hope in a dire political landscape. She also digs into how her previous struggles informed her platform, driving her to represent those who have similarly felt voiceless or ignored. In facing and sharing her own past, Maya shows readers how they too can remain optimistic in the face of adversity.


REVIEWS:



"Remember You Are Wiley is a book that offers hope and inspiration in a moment of division and political unrest in America. Everyone who knows Maya Wiley knows that she speaks truth to power at a time when we desperately need it. It’s clear from this book that the Wiley family made Maya the fierce truth teller she is today and we can all learn important lessons from their example that lives through her. This inspiring history of activism and a family legacy of social justice and civil disobedience are essential to understanding why she is the essential voice for this moment in American political history."―Zerlina Maxwell, author of The End of White Politics

"Maya Wiley’s story of her fascinating family is a powerful testament to the perils and possibilities of building a multiracial democracy in America. And she is a perfect and important narrator of our past and present challenges and times."―Joy-Ann Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author Medgar & Myrlie and The Man Who Sold America

"An inspiring read:"―Booklist

"The making of an activist lawyer...A candid self-portrait of a determined woman." ―Kirkus
 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 


Maya Wiley is president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights coalition. She is a former legal analyst on MSNBC. A life-long civil rights advocate and a civil rights attorney, she mounted a historic performance in New York City's 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, contesting to be the first woman Mayor on a reform platform. Prior to that race she served as senior vice president for social justice at the New School University and as a member of the graduate faculty at its Milano School. She was the first Black woman to serve as Counsel to a New York City Mayor, Maya’s expertise and compassionate approach was (and remains) almost unprecedented in the world of advocacy, activism and politics. She also serves as the Joseph L. Rash Jr. Chair of Civil and Human Rights at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, Harlan, their three cats and her revolving door of young adult children, two of whom are biological and others happily inherited. 
 

Between the Lines: Remember, You Are A Wiley by Maya Wiley

VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3eSJwYUUQY&t=1452s 


Streamed live on September 24, 2024 
 #SchomburgLive
 
PLEASE NOTE:  The interview begins @18:00
 
About this event Civil rights lawyer and former New York City Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley will join us to share her journey of coming into herself and finding hope in a dire political landscape documented in her new memoir Remember, You Are A Wiley. Wiley will be in conversation with Christina Greer, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. GET THE BOOK Copies of Remember, You Are A Wiley will be available for purchase from the Schomburg Shop in Harlem. PARTICIPANTS Maya Wiley is a nationally respected civil rights attorney and activist who has dedicated her life to the fights for justice, equality, and fairness. Wiley’s father was a leader in the civil rights and economic justice movements, and she has been a leader inside and outside government. Serving as the first Black woman counsel to the mayor of New York City, she helped deliver on civil and immigrant rights. During her tenure, the city also saw an expansion of minority/women-owned business enterprises contracts. Following her time at City Hall, Wiley moved to academia as a faculty member and senior vice president for social justice at the New School University. As a Henry Cohen professor of public and urban policy at the New School, Wiley founded the Digital Equity Laboratory on universal and inclusive broadband. She also served as a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Christina Greer (Moderator) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, Lincoln Center (Manhattan) campus. Her research and teaching focus on American politics, Black ethnic politics, campaigns and elections, and public opinion. She is the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream and author of the forthcoming manuscript How to Build a Democracy: From Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan to Stacey Abrams. Greer writes a weekly column for The Amsterdam News and is a frequent political commentator on several media outlets. She is the co-host of the New York centered podcast FAQ-NYC. ABOUT REMEMBER, YOU ARE A WILEY A moving, politically-charged memoir of surviving trauma and the power of activism from MSNBC legal analyst, professor, civil rights lawyer and former New York City Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. Maya is ready to share her story and that of her parents: one of passion, possibility, and compassion in the face of fear and injustice. She takes readers through her unconventional upbringing, her father George Wiley‘s tragic death and the resulting trauma, as well as how her experiences spoke to racial, gender, and class identity. Against this painful backdrop, Maya charts her journey of coming into herself and finding hope in a dire political landscape. She also digs into how her previous struggles informed her platform, driving her to represent those who have similarly felt voiceless or ignored. In facing and sharing her own past, Maya shows readers how they too can remain optimistic in the face of adversity. #SchomburgLive | Learn more about the Schomburg Center at schomburg.org.
 

Remember, You Are a Wiley by Maya Wiley

Audiobook preview

Remember, You Are a Wiley 

Authored and Narrated by Maya Wiley:

0:00 Intro 

0:03 Remember, You Are a Wiley  

0:40 The Movement Family 

10:40 Outro  

#mayawiley #rememberyouareawiley

 
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
 
A moving, politically-charged memoir of surviving trauma and the power of activism from MSNBC legal analyst, professor, civil rights lawyer and former New York City Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. Born in a country that has repeatedly traumatized her and her loved ones, Maya Wiley grew up in a household that prioritized activism, hope, and resilience above all else. This attitude landed her father on President Nixon’s enemies list as her mother organized third-party political platforms. Still, they modeled hope for their children. In the decades since, she has borne witness as presidents and political figures used racism and fascism to gain power, and as cities have again and again elected white men, effectively shutting out people of color and women from having a political voice. As a result, she has been forced, time after time, to confront death, injustice, and indifference—just as her Civil Rights activist parents did before her.   After a mayoral race that further exposed our country’s deep divisions, Maya is ready to share her story and that of her parents: one of passion, possibility, and compassion in the face of fear and injustice. She takes readers through her unconventional upbringing, her father George Wiley‘s tragic death and the resulting trauma, as well as how her experiences spoke to racial, gender, and class identity. Against this painful backdrop, Maya charts her journey of coming into herself and finding hope in a dire political landscape. She also digs into how her previous struggles informed her platform, driving her to represent those who have similarly felt voiceless or ignored. In facing and sharing her own past, Maya shows readers how they too can remain optimistic in the face of adversity. 
 

REMEMBER, YOU ARE A WILEY

REMEMBER, YOU ARE A WILEY

A MEMOIR

by Maya Wiley  

RELEASE DATE: September 10, 2024

A candid self-portrait of a determined woman.

The making of an activist lawyer.

In a forthright memoir, Wiley, an attorney, a New York City mayoral candidate, and a former legal analyst for MSNBC, pays homage to her parents, both civil rights activists whose examples served her as she navigated racism, sexism, and personal trauma. Her father, George Wiley, was a charismatic Black organic chemistry professor and civil rights and economic justice activist; her defiant white mother, Wretha Whittle, left her Southern Baptist family to enroll at Union Theological Seminary and mentor girls in East Harlem. The couple met at Syracuse University, where George was a newly hired faculty member and Wretha, a graduate student. Together they worked at the Syracuse chapter of CORE, tackling racial discrimination in housing, jobs, and schools. In 1964, James Farmer asked George to serve as associate national director of CORE in its New York City headquarters, an opportunity undermined by rivalries and ideological conflicts within the organization. The family—now including Maya and her older brother—relocated to a gentrifying Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where their home became a center of civil rights activity. Maya’s life was upended at age 9 when her father fell off their recently acquired cabin cruiser and drowned. Only she and her brother were on board, unable to save him. Beset by anger, fear, and guilt, she was later diagnosed with PTSD. As a biracial student, Wiley struggled to fit into “the color palette” of Washington’s public schools, Georgetown Day School, the Field School, Dartmouth, and Columbia Law School. She never lost sight of her parents’ ideals: doing an internship in the Philippines investigating human rights violations and serving a federal clerkship and positions at the ACLU, the U.S. attorney’s office, and the George Soros Open Society Institute, all confirming her commitment to progressive change.

A candid self-portrait of a determined woman.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024

ISBN: 9781538739938

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: August 15, 2024


BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR 

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

 

AUDIO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqCd91i4_x8

 

at

Friday, September 27, 2024

The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Global Capitalism--PART 37

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/opinion/trump-maga-sources-support.html

“...Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus and general resentment toward minorities.

The political scientists Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski and John V. Kane captured this phenomenon in their June 2021 paper, “Activating Animus: the Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support.”

Trump’s support, they wrote, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.”

Mason, Wronski and Kane analyzed data collected by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group from polls in which “respondents were asked to indicate their feelings toward these four Democratic-aligned social groups.”

The result?

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups is strongly related to Trump approval. People who felt strong animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. people were significantly more likely to be fond of Trump.

The authors found that among those with the lowest level of animus toward Democratic groups, their favorability toward Trump is around 0.3 on the 0 to 1 scale. This level of favorability increases to over 0.5 among those who have the most animus toward Democratic groups, representing a 23-percentage-point increase.

Interestingly, though, “feelings of animosity toward Democratic groups do not predict favorability toward the Republican Party, Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell,” Mason, Wronski and Kane wrote. Instead, “Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward marginalized groups in the United States.”

The authors continue:

Among partisans, those who are most hostile toward these groups are about 15 percentage points more supportive of Trump than those who are least hostile. For independents, this relationship doubles in size, where those most hostile toward Democratic-linked groups are about 30 percentage points more favorable toward Trump than the least hostile.

Thus, animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum.

Their conclusion amounts to a warning, even if it’s veiled in academic language:

This research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trump’s unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern.

Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments.”

–Thomas Edsall, “The Real Trump Mystery”, New York Times, September 25, 2024
 

At the Republican National Convention, Trump supporters wave signs that read “Trump America First” and “Trump Make America Great Again.”

Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times

The Real Trump Mystery
by Thomas B. Edsall
September 25, 2024
New York Times

[Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.]

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.

Trump has made it clear that in a second term he would undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered one piece of the puzzle, addressing the question, “Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”

Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:

If there’s one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, it’s who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them. Only in this case, I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support. I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support. Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month. Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”

I’m talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has two million listeners a week, and Jones was said in 2011 to have a larger online presence than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

I’m talking about the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million and on whose programs Trump intermittently served as a kind of special guest villain in the manner of a villain on the 1960s “Batman” show.

I’m talking about American Media, the company that owns The National Enquirer, The Star, The Sun and The Weekly World News, run by Trump’s close friend David Pecker; the combined weekly circulation of its publications is well in excess of two million.

Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic Parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake fights they know in their hearts were fixed.

The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.

In “Popular Reactions to Donald Trump’s Indictments and Trials and Their Implications for the 2024 Election,” Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argued that this denial — “motivated ignorance reinforced by right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”

After an analysis of hundreds of surveys, Jacobson concluded:

Republicans and Trump voters downplay the importance of the crimes charged, and large majorities refuse to admit that Trump committed such crimes anyway.


In the abstract and before the fact, a conviction on any of the felony charges would be projected to devastate Trump’s support. But after Trump was convicted in that case, the share of Republicans and prospective Trump voters who said they would not vote for a felon fell sharply.


Not only do a substantial majority of Republicans deny that Trump ever committed a serious crime as president, but an even larger majority of them also believe he should be immune from prosecution if he did.

Jacobson describes the logic of truth denial among MAGA supporters of Trump:

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.

Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right? Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.

In fact, there appears to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards Trump for his incessant distortions of the truth.

Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Denmark’s Aarhus University, responded by email to my inquiries, suggesting that “the paradox is that people who are fed up with the political system don’t support Trump despite Trump’s behavior and the charges against him but, to some extent, because of his behavior and the charges against him.”

“According to our research,” Petersen added, “people who feel anger and feel threatened reach out to dominant politicians who are willing to act in aggressive and transgressive ways. Such a personality is seen as attractive because people expect them to be able to prevail in conflicts against opponents, including, in this case, the overarching political system.”

Support for Trump, Petersen continued,

is part of a greater attraction toward populist politicians that we see across Western democracies, yet, with its most clear expression in the United States. Our own research on extreme antipathy toward the political system — what we term a need for chaos — shows that such emotions are rooted in feelings of loneliness and being stuck in your place in the social hierarchy. Essentially, having an unfulfilling life and not being able to change that. American politicians and many European counterparts have not been able to remedy such feelings, and we are seeing the result of that.

In a 2020 paper, “Dominant Leaders and the Political Psychology of Followership,” Petersen and Lasse Laustsen argued that “followers strategically promote dominant individuals to leadership positions in order to enhance their ability to aggress against other groups.”

In a paper from 2023, “The ‘Need for Chaos’ and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors,” Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Kevin Arceneaux made the case that “some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos, to burn down the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”

What drives this need for chaos?

Feelings of status loss and marginalization, even if imagined rather than real, have shaped recent political events, including the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the rise of populism in Europe.

Frustrations about status loss have been observed among members of traditionally privileged groups (e.g., white men), but actual experiences of historical injustices to members of marginalized groups can also trigger deep dissatisfaction with the political system (e.g., among Black individuals).

While the destructive impulses of those high in measures of the need for chaos would appear to be maladaptive, Petersen and his colleagues argued that “there may be functional benefits to displays of destructive intent for marginalized individuals.”

For example:

First, displays of destructive tendencies may serve as hard-to-fake signals of the motivation to impose costs and, hence, operate as a general deterrence device. Second, if individuals react with severe aggression to rejection, others may be pressured to invest in burnishing the person’s sense of self as a way to reduce the person’s ire. Finally, as a dominance strategy, marginalized individuals may see destruction as a form of niche construction, in which they cultivate a social ecology where they are more likely to be successful.

After analyzing eight surveys in the United States with a total of 10,921 respondents from February 2018 to February 2022, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that white men, a core Trump constituency, were unique in many respects:

White men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges. While white men do not feel highly status-challenged on average, they are more likely to seek chaos when they do.

The threat of marginalization is a powerful force among those in this constituency. According to Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux:

Group-based feelings of being unable to advance in society fuels a need for chaos among white men. Consistent with notions of aggrieved entitlement among historically dominant groups, many white men are preoccupied with their societal standing and react with aggression against any threat.

Both Black men and white men may be high in need for chaos but for different reasons. Thus, Black men, on average, face more significant status threats than white men, but consistent with theories of aggrieved entitlement of historically privileged groups, white men react more aggressively when they feel threatened.

In one of the blunter attempts to explain support for Trump, Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan addressed this support in their 2018 paper, “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy,” asking, “How can a constituency of voters find a candidate authentically appealing, i.e., view him positively as authentic, even though he is a lying demagogue, someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices?”

The authors’ answer:

A particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests.

In this context, Trump’s brazen disregard for truth, tradition and custom works to his advantage:

The greater his willingness to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader. His flagrant violation of norms (including that of truth telling) makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves, lest they be tainted by scandal.

But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

Working to Trump’s advantage is the fact that many voters are not willing to punish politicians in their own party who violate democratic norms.

Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, noted in an email:

Voters value candidates’ support for democracy but not very much. Only 13 percent defect from an undemocratic in-party candidate. Even candidates who had political scandals typically get a large share of the vote from their base.

Voelkel cited an April 2020 study, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik, political scientists at Temple and Yale.

Graham and Svolik found “the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: Only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing on several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism and candidate platform divergence.”

“Most voters,” Graham and Svolik concluded,

are partisans first and democrats second: Only about 13.1 percent of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party.

Partisan loyalty is crucial to Trump’s success. He has a base — roughly 43 to 45 percent of the electorate — that sticks with him through good and bad times.

One reason for this is what Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, called the crystallization of the electorate. In an email, Lelkes explained what he meant:

Crystallization describes a world where people’s attitudes won’t be swayed, no matter what new information they get. Campaign dynamics do very little to move attitudes. Polarization is the engine of crystallization.

Intense partisan hostility works to Trump’s advantage in a number of ways, according to Lelkes. First, MAGA loyalists believe “the investigations against Trump are witch hunts and baseless.” Lelkes added that, taking this logic a step further,

people think that the other side is dangerous and that we need someone willing to do whatever it takes to stop them. That is, they think they are protecting democracy by supporting Trump. Finally, in a polarized world, people value policy and partisan outcomes over democracy — they are willing to tolerate some authoritarianism to further their own political goals.

Well before Trump’s ascendance, key Republican leaders and strategists set the stage for his near deification within the ranks of the party.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, replied by email to my inquiry, making the case that Republican elites adopted strategies that allowed Trump to wrest power from them:

Something important had been occurring for decades at the elite level in the G.O.P. Starting with Black civil rights in the 1960s, leaders started to take positions that would ultimately attract a different party base than the one that existed before.

Next it was opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, with clear implications for women’s equality. Then it was a stance against L.G.B.T. rights. The G.O.P. remained steadfastly religious in its orientation, while Democrats started to embrace secularity.

The thing that ties all these issues together is a stance toward societal change. Traditional or modern, some call it closed or open.

After the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, Hetherington wrote, “party elites decided in their autopsy that they needed to take a more open tack in trying to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse base of support.”


Trump, however, “challenged this leadership consensus. Elites lost control of the base right there — but bear in mind that Republican appeals on race, gender and sexual orientation were responsible for creating that base.”

Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus and general resentment toward minorities.

The political scientists Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski and John V. Kane captured this phenomenon in their June 2021 paper, “Activating Animus: the Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support.”

Trump’s support, they wrote, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.”

Mason, Wronski and Kane analyzed data collected by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group from polls in which “respondents were asked to indicate their feelings toward these four Democratic-aligned social groups.”

The result?

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups is strongly related to Trump approval. People who felt strong animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. people were significantly more likely to be fond of Trump.

The authors found that

among those with the lowest level of animus toward Democratic groups, their favorability toward Trump is around 0.3 on the 0 to 1 scale. This level of favorability increases to over 0.5 among those who have the most animus toward Democratic groups, representing a 23-percentage-point increase.

Interestingly, though, “feelings of animosity toward Democratic groups do not predict favorability toward the Republican Party, Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell,” Mason, Wronski and Kane wrote. Instead, “Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward marginalized groups in the United States.”

The authors continue:

Among partisans, those who are most hostile toward these groups are about 15 percentage points more supportive of Trump than those who are least hostile. For independents, this relationship doubles in size, where those most hostile toward Democratic-linked groups are about 30 percentage points more favorable toward Trump than the least hostile.

Thus, animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum.

Their conclusion amounts to a warning, even if it’s veiled in academic language:

This research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trump’s unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern.

Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments. 
at

Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri Turns Down Noguchi Award Over Keffiyeh Ban at their Museum

 
Author Jhumpa Lahiri Turns Down Noguchi Award Over Keffiyeh Ban

The Noguchi Museum in New York City terminated three workers who refused to comply with a dress code policy prohibiting the headscarves.


by Valentina Di Liscia
September 26, 2024
Hyperallergic

 
Jhumpa Lahiri (photo by Jacopo M. Raule/Getty Images for Miu Miu)


Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has declined the Noguchi Museum’s 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in a gesture of support for former workers at the institution who were fired for wearing keffiyehs, headscarves popular in many Arab countries and symbolic of Palestinian heritage and solidarity.

“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy, which removes political statements from the workplace,” a Noguchi Museum spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Hyperallergic. “We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views.”

The Queens institution has come under mounting pressure from workers and community members in the last month after announcing a new policy that bans staff from wearing keffiyehs. Billed as a dress-code update that prohibits “political” statements to avoid “unintentional alienation of our diverse visitorship,” the policy was immediately repudiated by employees, over 50 of whom signed an internal petition calling for its reversal. The petition text, reviewed by Hyperallergic, cited the keffiyeh’s significance as a cultural garment and warned that the policy would “decrease the museum’s credibility and tarnish its public image” if it became public.

Three gallery attendants who said they would not comply with the rule, Trasonia Abbott, Natalie Cappellini, and Q. Chen, were terminated on Wednesday, September 4, as first reported by Hyperallergic. A fourth worker, the museum’s director of Visitor Services, was previously let go amid the policy fallout.

That weekend, dozens of supporters rallied outside the institution in protest. They wore keffiyehs and held signs referencing Isamu Noguchi’s legacy as a socially engaged artist, and called for leadership Director Amy Hau, Deputy Director Jennifer Lorch, and board co-chairs Spencer Bailey and Susan Kessler to be held accountable.



Noguchi Museum workers and supporters protested outside the institution on Sunday, September 8. (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

Lahiri’s refusal of the award is the latest development in a story that has catapulted a largely beloved local museum to the headlines as institutions around the country face accusations of silencing pro-Palestine expressions. Recently in New York, a program manager at the 92Y lost her job after she refused to remove a watermelon sticker and take down a poster that read “Ceasefire Now, End the Genocide, Free Palestine.”

The writer’s decision also coincides with the unanimous passage of a United States Senate resolution honoring Wadee AlFayoumi, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed to death in a brutal hate crime in Plainfield, Illinois, last October. The statement, which marks the first time Congress has recognized Palestinian Americans in a resolution, according to the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, also acknowledges the keffiyeh as a Palestinian cultural symbol.

The Isamu Noguchi Award, conferred annually since 2014, honors individuals who show “the highest level of artistic integrity.” Previous awardees include sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, novelist Hanya Yanagihara, and artist Theaster Gates. This year, Lahiri and Korean-born artist Lee Ufan were selected to receive the award at the museum’s benefit gala on October 29.

Lee’s studio and gallery have not yet responded to a request for comment. He is expected to accept the prize, the museum’s spokesperson said.

Lahiri, a British-born American writer, is known for works that examine the South Asian immigrant experience in the United States. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel, The Lowland (2013). In May, the author signed an open letter addressed to university presidents in support of Gaza solidarity protests on campuses nationwide.

Lahiri has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s inquiry. Via her agent, the author declined to comment to the New York Times, which first reported on her decision.

“I’m glad that there are people of principle in the world,” Abbott, one of the three terminated gallery attendants, told Hyperallergic, expressing gratitude for Lahiri’s withdrawal. “I hope Lee Ufan follows suit and rejects the award as well.”

The Noguchi Museum, Abbott noted, has previously made public statements against systemic racism, white supremacy, and violence toward people of color under the banner of its namesake artist’s commitment to freedom and equality.

Now, a message from Director Hau recently posted on the institution’s website reads: “The Museum was not established as an advocacy or social justice organization, and because Noguchi passed away in 1988, we cannot speak on his behalf or claim to represent his views on today’s complex global issues.”

Abbott views this as a bias against Palestinian and Arab people amid Israel’s intensifying military escalation in Lebanon and Gaza’s rising death toll.

“Before Amy Hau and the board decided to rewrite history, they had no problem capitalizing on Noguchi’s more activist leanings and applying them to the current world,” Abbott said. “To attempt to take a neutral stance in the face of this is disgusting, especially given Noguchi’s anti-war sentiments while he was still alive.”




ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Valentina Di Liscia


Valentina Di Liscia is the News Editor at Hyperallergic. Originally from Argentina, she studied at the University of Chicago and is currently working on her MA at Hunter College, where she received the Brodsky Scholarship for Latin American Art History. 
 
Send your inquiries, stories, and tips to valentina@hyperallergic.com.

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Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)



Culture


The Gifts of Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)

The intellectual titan bestowed on us so many things, chief among them a reminder to Always Be Historicizing.

by Kate Wagner
September 26, 2024
The Nation

 
The late literary and cultural critic.(Creative Commons)

On Sunday, the literary theorist and critic Fredric Jameson—an intellectual titan and one of the torchbearers of Marxist thought through the tenebrous night of neoliberalism—passed away at the age of 90. The outpouring of mourning that followed seemed to unite even the most fractious of intellectual combatants within the broader left. Through screenshots of e-mails, testimonials of generosity, and reflections on seminars, a depiction emerged of a man who not only amassed one of the most impressive bodies of work within his field but who also was, fundamentally, someone who believed in criticism as a discourse, between teacher and pupil, between the work and the public.

Jameson, a literary critic, may not be the first name that comes to mind when considering the field of architecture, but he is perhaps the preeminent critic of postmodernism—an embattled term that spanned whole swaths of cultural production, buildings included. He worked during one of the most transformational periods of architectural production and discourse of the long 20th century, namely, the transition between high modernism and an emerging postmodernism. He carefully dissected this transition in his most well-known work, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which analyzed the shift across architecture, literature, film, and economics. At the time, there was not yet a consensus on what to call the period of economic development that emerged in the imperial core after World War II, when classical market capitalism began to evolve into a new stage, one defined by consumerism and technocracy. Conservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell called it the “post-industrial society”; Jean Baudrillaud deemed it “the consumer society”; and, following the economist Ernest Mandel, Jameson came to call it “late capitalism” for most of his career. (These days, we have generally come around to the term “neoliberalism.”)

Within art and culture, according to Jameson, these new economic forces, an attempted populist synthesis of high and low art, a penchant for pastiche, an explosion in post-structuralist theory, and a general repudiation of modernism all congealed into a large-scale development called postmodernism. Despite being best known as a literary critic, Jameson pursues architecture with special gusto in Postmodernism simply because, of all the arts, architectural postmodernism was the one most concerned with the total rejection of modernist ideals. Jameson unpacks the faux-populism of proponents of postmodernism like the architect Robert Venturi—who claimed to privilege messy, vernacular buildings over the austere, monochromatic ones produced under dogmatic modernism—by rooting this alleged emancipation of taste in the material economics of its day. His analysis remains relevant in a time when unimaginative, technocratic architects like Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels still thrive on the same rhetorical techniques, except in a far more patronizing way than their much cleverer predecessors. But of all the passages in Postmodernism, the one whose prescience haunts me the most is this:

If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project, but also the unavailability of the older national language itself….

For with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style…the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now-global culture.

He was a thinker of vast scope. In reading his essays, one wonders how it was even possible for someone to have read so much material across so many different fields. Yet, despite pulling from so many sources—film, philosophy, literature, architecture, art—he never did so in a way that narrowed his audience. On the contrary, he often expanded it. There is a reason his work is perhaps the most beloved of all his contemporaries by autodidacts. He believed fundamentally in the intelligence of the reader and understood that the readers of his work may not be as well-acquainted with certain terms or thinkers from outside his core field of literary studies, so he filled his essays with brisk, accessible summaries, helpful footnotes, or short tangents that solidified his own purpose in using such references.

I started reading Jameson in my sophomore year of music school, which is a very specialized, almost trade-like field of study. While I was familiar with some important critics and thinkers, namely the Frankfurt School, which had an outsize influence on music, through Jameson I gained access to many texts and cultural artifacts I would have never heard about otherwise, simply because he included me, the reader, in his writing. He introduced me to texts by Barthes, Eco, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, and more, simply because he bothered to take that small amount of time to introduce their ideas.

Despite his reputation as an academic writer, Jameson was equally erudite, sprawling, concise, chatty, conversational, witty, and even funny. He would always use this lecture-like technique, which I imitate a lot, of introducing some concepts or texts at the beginning of the essay and then sticking a pin in them, trusting the reader to hold that thought—it’ll come back, often like a magic key, later. He always took the reader on a journey with him, and when you conclude a Jameson essay, you often experience a distinct sense of being unable to look at something the same again. (And also of wanting to stop by the nearest bookstore.) Furthermore, at a time when the left was fractured by the world-historical developments of the latter half of the 20th century, he never shied away from exploring heterodox strains of thought, whether Gramsci, Lefebvre, or Althusser, or ideas as diverse as Spanish autonomous communities and Yugoslav self-management.

Above all, he was a dialectical critic, and his adage of “always historicize” was potent at a time when people believed history itself to be over. He juxtaposed ideas with their opposites to illuminate how they came to be within the impossible situation of their historical moment. He respected ideas and engaged with them at length, even those it’s obvious he disagreed with. He put competing ideas in dialogue with one another, found the slippages in both, and often emerged with an understanding or reckoning that left them in balance, despite being sometimes irreconcilable.

His 1985 essay “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” typifies a Jamesonian synthesis. Among Marxist thinkers in architecture, there were conflicting views on what the death of modernism would herald. On the one hand, there were thinkers like Henri Lefebvre who, following Gramsci, believed in the possibilities of “emergence” from within small, potentially utopian cavities that would form in the great mouth of hegemonic capitalism. On the other hand (and this is very much a reduced summary), the theorist Manfredo Tafuri saw architecture as being so inextricably linked with capitalism, so embedded within its ideology and material conditions, that there would never be any possibility to resist within the field; the only way forward was the end of capitalism and the development of a new social order. I was and remain extremely sympathetic to this perspective, pessimistic as it may be. So when I first read Jameson talking about Tafuri, I was on guard. (“Mommy and Daddy are fighting,” I said to a colleague at the time.)

However, Jameson does something interesting by unifying these views under a common theme, that of a “necessary failure” to which these writers must “painfully submit in order to practice dialectical thinking.” He writes:

[D]ialectical history must somehow always involve a vision of Necessity, or, if you prefer, must always tell the story of failure…. dialectical interpretation is always retrospective, always tells the necessity of an event, why it had to happen the way it did, and to do that the event must have already happened, the story must already come to an end.… The restructuring of the history of an art in terms of a series of situations, dilemmas, contradictions, in terms of which individual works, styles, and forms can be seen as so many responses or determinate symbolic acts; this is then a first key feature of dialectical historiography.

The other, of course, is materialism, the acknowledgment that ideologies are not independent, that they are inherent in and shaped by the way human beings fashion, from the stuff of life, material relationships and the productive world. Or, as Marx put it succinctly, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” It’s imperative not to lose sight of this during our present time of profound failure—of institutions, of media, of politics as we knew it in the past century, and of technology. Fortunately, Fredric Jameson did the next generation of critics an invaluable service by practicing and perfecting what he preached.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 

Kate Wagner is The Nation’s architecture critic and a journalist based in Chicago and Ljubljana, Slovenia.


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