Book lovers in Carrollwood have something major to celebrate: Barnes & Noble has officially returned to the community with a brand-new bookstore at 13123 N. Dale Mabry Highway in the […]
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In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal recording life at the age of 19. Rereading this often-forgotten debut, Hunter Dukes finds a voice that hungers for worldly experience, brims with bisexual longing, and rages against the injustices of youth.
In the recent flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, one warned of “a distorted narrative” about race “driven by ideology rather than truth.” It singled out a current exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” as an example. The exhibit displays over two centuries of sculptures that show how art has produced and reproduced racial attitudes and ideologies.
The executive order condemns the exhibition because it “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”
The executive order apparently objects to sentiments such as this: “Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct.” But those words are not from the Smithsonian; they are from the American Society of Human Genetics.
Scientists reject the idea that race is biologically real. The claim that race is a “biological reality” cuts against modern scientific knowledge.
I’m a historian who specializes in the scientific study of race. The executive order places “social construct” in opposition to “biological reality.” The history of both concepts reveals how modern science landed at the idea that race was invented by people, not nature.
At the turn of the 20th century, scientists believed humans could be divided into distinct races based on physical features. According to this idea, a scientist could identify physical differences in groups of people, and if those differences were passed on to succeeding generations, the scientist had correctly identified a racial “type.”
The results of this “typological” method were chaotic. A frustrated Charles Darwin in 1871 listed 13 scientists who identified anywhere between two and 63 races, a confusion that persisted for the next six decades. There were almost as many racial classifications as racial classifiers because no two scientists could seem to agree on what physical characteristics were best to measure, or how to measure them.
One intractable problem with racial classifications was that the differences in human physical traits were tiny, so scientists struggled to use them to differentiate between groups. The pioneering African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois noted in 1906, “It is impossible to draw a color line between black and other races … in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself.”
But scientists tried. In an 1899 anthropological study, William Ripley classified people using head shape, hair type, pigmentation and stature. In 1926, Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton, the leading racial typologist in the world, listed 24 anatomical traits, such as “the presence or absence of a postglenoid tubercle and a pharyngeal fossa or tubercle” and “the degree of bowing of the radius and ulna” while admitting “this list is not, of course, exhaustive.”
All this confusion was the opposite of how science should operate: As the tools improved and as measurements became more precise, the object of study − race − became more and more muddled.
When sculptor Malvina Hoffman’s “Races of Mankind” exhibit opened at Chicago’s Field Museum in 1933, it characterized race as a biological reality, despite its elusive definition. World-renowned anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith wrote the introduction to the exhibition’s catalog.
Keith dismissed science as the surest method to distinguish race; one knows a person’s race because “a single glance, picks out the racial features more certainly than could a band of trained anthropologists.” Keith’s view perfectly captured the view that race must be real, for he saw it all around him, even though science could never establish that reality.
In the scientific study of race, however, things were about to change.
By 1933, the rise of Nazism had added urgency to the scientific study of race. As anthropologist Sherwood Washburn wrote in 1944, “If we are to discuss racial matters with the Nazis, we had better be right.”
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, two new scientific ideas came to fruition. First, scientists began looking to culture rather than biology as the driver of differences among groups of people. Second, the rise of population genetics challenged the biological reality of race.
In 1943, anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish wrote a short work also titled The Races of Mankind. Writing for a popular audience, they argued that people are far more alike than different, and our differences owe to culture and learning, not biology. An animated cartoon short later gave these ideas wider circulation.
Benedict and Weltfish argued that while people did, indeed, differ physically, those differences were meaningless in that all races could learn and all were capable. “Progress in civilization is not the monopoly of one race or subrace,” they wrote. “Negroes made iron tools and wove fine cloth for their clothing when fair-skinned Europeans wore skins and knew nothing of iron.” The cultural explanation for different human lifestyles was more robust than confused appeals to an elusive biological race.
The turn to culture was consistent with a deep change in biological knowledge.
Theodosius Dobzhansky was a preeminent biologist of the 20th century. He and other biologists were interested in evolutionary changes. Races, which supposedly didn’t change over time, were therefore useless for understanding how organisms evolved.
A new tool, what scientists called a “genetic population,” was much more valuable. The geneticist, Dobzhansky held, identified a population based on the genes it shared in order to study change in organisms. Over time natural selection would shape how the population evolved. But if that population didn’t shed light on natural selection, the geneticist must abandon it and work with a new population based on a different set of shared genes. The important point is that, whatever population the geneticist chose, it was changing over time. No population was a fixed and stable entity, as human races were supposed to be.
Sherwood Washburn, who happened to be Dobzhansky’s close friend, brought those ideas into anthropology. He recognized that the point of genetics was not classifying people into fixed groups. The point was to understand the process of human evolution. This change reversed everything taught by Hooton, his old teacher.
Writing in 1951, Washburn argued, “There is no way to justify the division of a … population into a series of racial types” because doing so would be pointless. Presuming any group to be unchanging stood in the way of understanding evolutionary changes. A genetic population was not “real”; it was an invention of the scientist using it as a lens to understand organic change.
A good way to understand this profound difference relates to roller coasters.
Anyone who’s been to an amusement park has seen signs that precisely define who is tall enough to ride a given roller coaster. But no one would say they define a “real” category of “tall” or “short” people, as another roller coaster might have a different height requirement. The signs define who is tall enough only for riding this particular roller coaster, and that’s all. It’s a tool for keeping people safe, not a category defining who is “really” tall.
Similarly, geneticists use genetic populations as “an important tool for inferring the evolutionary history of modern humans” or because they have “fundamental implications for understanding the genetic basis of diseases.”
Anyone trying to pound a nail with a screwdriver soon realizes that tools are good for tasks they were designed for and useless for anything else. Genetic populations are tools for specific biological uses, not for classifying people into “real” groups by race.
Whoever wanted to classify people, Washburn argued, must give the “important reasons for subdividing our whole species.”
The Smithsonian’s exhibit shows how racialized sculpture was “both a tool of oppression and domination and one of liberation and empowerment.” Science agrees with its claim that race is a human invention and not a biological reality.
The Conversation U.S. receives funding from the Smithsonian Institution.
John P. Jackson, Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Plant City’s Keel Farms is kicking off spring with one of Tampa Bay’s most anticipated annual events—the 17th Annual Blueberry Festival. Running every Saturday and Sunday throughout April (excluding Easter […]
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Each year during the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” librarians display famous books that have been challenged in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. This book-centric approach seems to be the standard. By focusing on the books themselves, however, do librarians tacitly concede that these books are indeed controversial? Defending challenged books on their merits, as in typical Banned Books Week displays, accepts the debate terms set by would-be censors. The problem is not the book; it’s the act of censorship. We should closely examine the motivations and political context of book banning movements in order to face this challenge with a fuller understanding of the problem. This article describes an exhibit at Florida State University Libraries during Banned Books Week 2022 that confronted this problem directly by trying to understand acts of censorship in Florida history. The exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida,” deployed primary sources readily available online and in the FSU collections to explore who has challenged books in Florida history, and what were their motivations.
Each year in fall, typically in late September, the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors “Banned Books Week,” an annual event observed in libraries across the United States to raise awareness of challenges to the freedom to read and to build community with librarians, authors, publishers, and the reading public. Many librarians take this opportunity to create book displays, often showcasing famous books that have been banned in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. In support of such efforts, ALA maintains a webpage that includes a variety of creative ways to display banned books in libraries. In almost every example on the site, the books themselves are the focus, often with some note about their content that has been considered objectionable.1
But considered objectionable by whom? In describing the current wave of book challenges, the ALA website alludes to “[g]roups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time,” but doesn’t elaborate further about who these groups are.2 PEN America, an advocacy group for writers and free expression, reported that, since 2021, the dramatic increase in the number of book challenges in the United States is largely the work of a movement to “advance extreme conservative viewpoints about what is appropriate and allowable in schools.”3 But who belongs to this movement, and why are they coordinating efforts nationwide to remove books en masse from library shelves across the country? Moms for Liberty, headquartered in Florida, is one of the organizations coordinating today’s book banning movement. For example, Bruce Friedman, a member of Moms for Liberty in Clay County, near Jacksonville, submitted over 400 book challenges to the county school district during the 2022-2023 school year. According to the Tampa Bay Times, which reviewed statewide data on book challenges, over 600 challenges of the total 1,100 received throughout the state that year came from either Friedman or former Escambia County teacher, Vikki Baggett. Baggett presented to the Santa Rosa County chapter of Moms for Liberty in May 2023 to share tips on how to get books removed from school libraries.4 The numbers of book challenges are staggering and the coordinated campaign that now extends nationwide, led by well-connected organizations including Moms for Liberty, suggests there is more to this movement than local parents’ concerns. In the face of this powerful movement against the freedom to read, librarians and the reading public need to follow the advice of censorship and intellectual freedom expert Emily Knox and take seriously the book challengers’ reasons for action, both to better understand their motives and to more effectively respond to attempts at censorship.5
In the summer of 2022, during what seemed at the time to be the height of the mass book banning movement sweeping public and school libraries in Florida, I decided to respond by rethinking the traditional Banned Books Week display. My goals were to turn the spotlight onto the would-be book banners in order to interrogate their motives and to put the current wave of book challenges into historical perspective. I decided to focus entirely on the state of Florida, where I lived and worked, because it was home to most of the university’s student body, and because the state has been the epicenter of US book banning in the twenty-first century. Based on data collected by PEN America, the 2021-2022 school year was, unfortunately, not the height of book banning, but only the beginning. Since that year, when PEN America documented 566 book bans in Florida, the number more than doubled to 1,406 in the 2022-2023 school year, and then skyrocketed to 4,561 book bans in 2023-2024. Since 2022, Florida has led the nation with the most book bans by state.6 Florida has also served as a testing ground for government action, providing a model for other censorious politicians to follow at the state and federal levels.7
It is also important to acknowledge that my individual and institutional positionality made it possible to create an exhibit that some might find politically provocative. I was able to proceed in part because of my union membership in the Florida State University chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. As a faculty member covered by the collective bargaining contract, I enjoyed the same academic freedoms and job security as other university faculty and felt empowered to present an honest and historically accurate narrative of book banners in Florida history. Unions are also under threat in Florida; the Republican-controlled legislature regularly passes new laws making it difficult to sustain union membership and legal recognition. However, at the time of my exhibit, the FSU faculty union had succeeded in meeting each new requirement that the state imposed. I also obtained backing from my library Dean, who supported the project enthusiastically. Additionally, as a cisgender white male, I might not be as easily targeted as faculty and staff from historically marginalized groups, especially given the political backlash currently aimed at campus offices and curricula that support the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. And finally, working at a large research university library meant that my collections were not the typical targets of coordinated book banning movements, which are more likely directed at public and school libraries.8 For all of these reasons, I felt both empowered and compelled to raise my voice on this issue.
In this article, I will share both the content and process of creating my exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida.” In sharing my historical research and experience creating the exhibit, I hope that library workers and other readers will recognize the core message of my exhibit: that book banning is rarely pursued as a good faith effort to protect readers from harmful content. Rather, as evidenced many times in Florida history, acts of censorship are rooted in struggles for power and social dominance. The three major episodes of book banning that I explored in my exhibit coincided with times of social crisis. In Florida, in the 1830s, in the decades after Reconstruction, and again during the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, reactionary forces used censorship as one tool in their bid to control the political narrative in times of significant social and cultural change. This historical approach helps us to see continuities between the motives and methods of book banners past and present. With a clearer understanding of these moments of conjuncture and why censors have challenged books in the past, we may be better equipped to respond today by crafting effective policies, procedures, and political advocacy in our communities. As my exhibit showed, the challenges we face are not new, and recognizing the true motives of book banners is essential to resisting the often powerful interests that seek to limit our freedom to read, learn, and imagine alternative futures.
The idea for this exhibit came together during the summer of 2022, when my graduate course work in nineteenth-century United States history intersected with my role as Humanities Librarian at Florida State University Libraries. As a student, I had recently conducted research on neo-Confederate organizations and how they shaped Southern universities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These groups, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), were very concerned about the history being taught in Southern schools and worked to influence the curricula and textbooks used in schools at all levels, including colleges and universities. This research was fresh in my mind when Dr. Laura McTighe, a professor of religion and frequent collaborator with the library, mentioned to me in conversation that she was reading about how, before the Civil War, Southern enslavers passed laws to punish people found with abolitionist books and pamphlets in an effort to prevent the spread of abolitionist ideas. Putting this conversation in context with my research and today’s book banning movement, I was beginning to see similarities between the censors of each time period.
The final catalyst arrived when a library colleague alerted me to a book that had just been returned with a note written on the inside cover page. (Fig. 1) My colleague wanted to know what we should do with a defaced book, and since it was a history book, it fell to me to make this collection development decision. When I saw that the “defacement” was a note saying, “Warning–this is a racist book,” complete with page numbers to the writer’s purported evidence, I was intrigued. As it happened, the writer was correct. The book was a reprint edition of History of Georgia, by Robert Preston Brooks, one of many examples of histories from Dunning School scholars of the early twentieth century. Named for Columbia University historian Archibald William Dunning, who trained many of the scholars who wrote in this tradition, it refers to an interpretation of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era critical of Black enfranchisement and officeholding while sympathetic to the white Southerners who overthrew the Reconstruction governments, often violently.9 Here in my hands was a physical manifestation of the neo-Confederate movement I had studied and a modern reader’s act of resistance to it. I decided that instead of deaccessioning the book because of the annotation and the book’s overall poor condition, it needed to go into an exhibit!
As I conducted further research on book banners in Florida history, I had to consider how I could represent my findings in a physical exhibit. There were several logistical issues to consider in the process. First, the only space available for my display was a small empty wall on the first floor of our main library building. I took measurements of the space to keep in mind as I selected objects and images to include in the exhibit and worked with colleagues to develop appropriate title banners and signs.
Assembling my exhibit required a bit of resourcefulness. The library did not have locking exhibit cases, so I resolved not to use any rare materials in the exhibit. Instead, most of the objects I displayed were either books from the circulating collection or high-quality scanned images. I borrowed an empty, unused glass-doored cabinet with shelves to place in the center of the exhibit space to hold most of the physical books. A colleague in the library’s technology department was able to lend me a computer monitor, which could be secured with a lock, in order to include a documentary film, played on loop, with permission from the creators.
I printed out scanned images of historical documents and photographs on regular copy paper using the library’s color printer. The quality of the images was high enough that professional printing or high-grade paper seemed unnecessary. I mounted the print outs on pieces of foam core board, cut to size, using double-sided tape. I then affixed these to the wall with adhesive putty. I created exhibit labels using the same process as the scanned images, paying close attention to the font, size, and amount of text on each label.10 All of the materials described here were easily procured from a local office supply store for about $70, which the FSU Libraries was able to reimburse. I did most of the printing, cutting, and mounting. The FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives provided book stands and the mylar strips I used to hold open one of the books on display. My colleagues in the marketing and communication department designed the main logo and printed out the exhibit title sign on the department’s large format printer, so I did not have to account for those costs. Other colleagues helped me to move the cabinet into place, and to set up the computer screen for the documentary. I also created QR codes for some of the object labels with links to related content that couldn’t easily be incorporated into the physical exhibit. After several weeks of researching, final installation took about two days. The exhibit ran from September 19, the start of Banned Books Week 2022, until Thanksgiving break. (Fig. 2)
Fig. 2 “Against Liberty: A History of Book Banning in Florida” exhibit, Strozier Library, Florida State University, 2022. Photo by author.
Throughout Florida’s history, citizens and state agents have used book banning as a form of power to protect their cultural dominance and wealth. In the 1830s, where my exhibit began, enslavers attempted to censor abolitionist ideas in order to prevent slave revolts and other threats to their control of human property. Slave owners had convinced themselves that if enslaved people resisted, ran away, or revolted, as happened frequently throughout the Americas, then it must be because abolitionists had incited Black people to seek freedom. So, assuming that slave resistance was due to “outside agitators,” Southern state legislatures passed laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read, interfered with the US Postal Service, and restricted the movements of Black sailors and local free people of color who might distribute abolitionist books and pamphlets.11 Such measures reached a fever pitch in the 1830s in part because segments of the ruling class had come to embrace abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the US North and in Great Britain among evangelical Protestants and the ascendent industrial elites.12 Enslavers in the US South had previously benefited from the general acceptance of slavery among merchants and manufacturers, at least when limited to the southern states. But beginning in the 1830s, the Slave Power encountered growing resistance in Northern and British newspapers, popular literature, and political speeches as slavery expanded into Florida and some of the western territories created out of the Louisiana Purchase.
One famous example of abolitionist literature that sparked such paranoia and repression was David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, to the Coloured Citizens of the World. (Fig. 3) Walker, the son of an enslaved man and free Black woman, used the US Postal Service to circulate his Appeal from his home in Boston. In it he denounced slavery, called on the “coloured citizens” of the world to rise up against their oppressors, and asked White, Christian enslavers to recognize their sins against God and against liberty.13
Several Southern states passed laws banning such abolitionist literature. The Florida legislature drafted a similar ban (Fig. 4), but it was never enacted owing to Florida’s status as a federal territory at the time. Presumably the federal government wasn’t going to approve a law so prejudicial against its own Postal Service. There were also white Floridians who opposed the law because they felt it would give more legal protections to abolitionists than they deserved. One such group, meeting in 1835 at Shell Point, a coastal town south of Tallahassee, proclaimed that the proposed law against incendiary publications “dignifies the question…subjecting it to the operations of a Grand Jury,” when instead the citizens already have the right “to act in that summary and efficient way, according to the first great dictates which the God of nature has implanted in the bosoms of men.”14 In other words, a local vigilance committee could enact their own justice, likely by assaulting or lynching any suspected abolitionist.
In the exhibit, I paired these attempts to restrict abolitionist literature in the 19th century with evidence of similar reading restrictions enforced by the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), which has banned over 20,000 publications from Florida prisons.15 The scale of the FDC’s book banning is considerable, but so too is the scale of incarceration in Florida. The FDC is Florida’s largest state agency and the third largest state prison system in the country, with an operating budget of $3.4 billion.16 According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2023 over 80,000 Floridians were incarcerated in state prisons. Add to that local jails and federal prisons, and over 157,000 Floridians were behind bars, equivalent to 795 prisoners for every 100,000 Floridians, an incarceration rate higher than the US as a whole.17
Among those books banned in Florida prisons is Tallahassee attorney Reggie Garcia’s book, How to Leave Prison Early, a guide to navigate the state’s clemency, parole, and work release laws and procedures. It may seem shocking that a guide to legal remedies available to incarcerated men and women should be kept from the very readers who could use it most, but to admit that those in prison deserve such relief seems to challenge the power and control of the prison system.
After the Civil War, societies like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) formed to protect the legacy of their Confederate ancestors and to reclaim their cultural power and social status by promoting the “Lost Cause,” a distorted memory of the antebellum South that helped to legitimize the social and racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. These Southern elites focused especially on schools and universities, where control of textbooks and curricula were essential to reestablishing ideological hegemony after the end of Reconstruction. Convinced that the “vindication of the South must come from the pens of southern writers,” the History Committee of the UCV established guidelines for selecting history textbooks to be used in southern schools. As reported in the UCV’s magazine, Confederate Veteran, all histories published in the North were suspected of sectional “prejudices” against the South and were excluded outright from consideration for school adoption.18 (Fig. 5)
Southern authors filled the void left by these banned books with histories of their own, justifying the Southern rebellion as both honorable and Constitutional, while also softening the image of plantation slavery. This project was not limited to the academic histories written by students of Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning, as mentioned above. Caroline Mays Brevard, a historian, author, and scion of two powerful Florida families, taught at Leon High School in Tallahassee and at the Florida State College for Women, predecessor of today’s Florida State University. Brevard’s 1904 book, A History of Florida, which romanticized plantation society and made heroes of the aristocratic enslaver class, was used as a textbook in Florida schools for two decades.19 The myth of the “Lost Cause” that this and many other books promoted took hold by the turn of the twentieth century and became the dominant historical interpretation of American history in white-controlled schools and in popular culture.20
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was particularly successful in controlling which histories were taught in schools. In addition to creating their own evaluation criteria and lists of approved textbooks for Southern schools, the UDC coordinated attacks on anyone who contradicted their Lost Cause mythology.21 When Enoch M. Banks, professor of history at the University of Florida published an academic article stating that the South was “relatively in the wrong” about slavery and the Civil War, the UDC led a public campaign against him. The Florida UDC President, Sister Esther Carlotta of St. Augustine, proclaimed that his “writings proved him so unjust to the South’s attitude in 1861 as to unfit him for that position.” In 1911, Banks was forced to resign his position and left the state.22
In the exhibit, I paired the work of neo-Confederate groups working to control the official history of the South with contemporary debates over American history and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States. The Pulitzer-Prize winning 1619 Project was a frequent target for conservative politicians and activists who resisted a more inclusive and honest accounting of the history of American slavery, and in November 2022, the Florida Board of Education finalized a rule that prohibits using any material from the 1619 Project in K-12 education. The Rule likens the historical interpretations put forth by 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and other contributors to Holocaust denial and goes on to say that K-12 instruction “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”23 Thus, just as the UCV and UDC worked to ban books deemed counter to their preferred narrative of the Civil War while filling the void with their own approved histories, so too has the Florida Board of Education excluded works that question the morality of existing racial power structures while limiting what Florida teachers may discuss in their classrooms.
In the mid-twentieth century, some Florida politicians invoked the threat of communist subversion in their efforts to resist racial desegregation and the expansion of civil rights, an existential threat to legal white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) led the charge, using McCarthy-style tactics to attack civil rights activists, especially those affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When the FLIC, better known as the Johns Committee after its chairman, State Senator Charley Johns, failed to slow the advance of Black civil rights in the law, the committee expanded its search for cultural and political subversives to Florida’s universities. Taking advantage of the so-called Lavender Scare, a nationwide panic over homosexuality and its alleged affinities with communism, the Johns Committee reframed their anti-civil rights crusade as an attempt to root out homosexuality from Florida schools and public life.24
The Johns Committee found a useful ally in September 1961 when Jane Stockton Smith of Tampa complained to the Dean of the College of Basic Studies at the University of South Florida (USF) that the textbooks her son, Skipper, brought home were anti-religious and emphasized sex and evolution. In an interview that year she identified several specific books that she found obscene, communistic, and “one-sided,” including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and The True Believer by philosopher Eric Hoffer, a book about mass movements that challenge the status quo.25 Smith was instrumental in bringing a Johns Committee investigation to USF. She participated in what the Tampa Tribune described as an “unorganized parents’ group” alarmed by what Smith claimed were “reams of evidence to concern every citizen” and USF course readings that she alleged to be pornographic and anti-religious. USF students were reportedly questioned about “political ideologies expressed on campus and about sex predominance in required reading assignments.”26
In 2011, students taking a documentary film class at the University of Central Florida (UCF), created a documentary about the Johns Committee. Simply titled, “The Committee,” the film features interviews with two North Florida survivors and one investigator from the Committee’s attempt to root out LGBTQ teachers and students from state universities. In their research, they found that over 200 students and teachers were expelled or fired from Florida universities as a result of the Committee’s anti-LGBTQ efforts.27 After receiving permission from Lisa Mills, one of the course instructors, I included this award-winning documentary in my exhibit, played on a loop through a computer monitor positioned on a small table below the related images of documents and newspaper clippings. As of this writing, “The Committee” remains available for streaming online via PBS.
Florida libraries could also be complicit in the Lavender Scare by censoring materials in their own collections. A letter written in 1960 to then Director of FSU Libraries, Orwin Rush, asked that an intern working with the FSU Graduate School’s Institute of Human Development be permitted to check out some books on homosexuality and clinical problems related to his work which were held “under restriction” at the library.28 (Fig. 6) I did not find archival evidence that described the exact form of these access restrictions, but this kind of “protective storage” may still exist in some libraries. My colleague at FSU Libraries, Norman “Trip” Wyckoff, confirmed that Strozier Library still had a locked cabinet of restricted books in the early 2000s, though at the time of my exhibit it no longer existed and it was unclear when it had been removed. I remembered a similar locked cabinet at Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, my previous place of employment, which in the 2010s included, among other titles, the coffee table book Sex, by Madonna, and a book about foraging for psychedelic mushrooms.
The exhibit ended with the Johns Committee’s anti-LGBTQ crusade, but the parallels between today’s wave of book bans and Jane Stockton Smith’s “parents group” and its alliance with the Johns Committee are easy to see. While today’s Florida State Legislature has been an active participant in censorship, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, Moms for Liberty, has also played a key role. As an organization, Moms for Liberty has made book challenges one of their signature issues, providing resources on their website such as book reviews of disfavored titles and lists of their own approved book publishers, seeming to take a page directly from the playbook of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In addition to these resources, Moms for Liberty links members to the Leadership Institute’s “School Board Activism” training course, “designed to equip conservative leaders with tools and tactics to influence education,” alongside TurningPoint USA’s School Board Watch List, which purports to identify school board members who “support anti-American, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts.”29 Moms for Liberty also has ties to the Republican Party, evidenced by both the activities of the group’s founders and by the list of speakers that have attended their conferences, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and their endorsement of Donald Trump in 2024.30 As in the 1960s, local activists today have found support from powerful political players in the state and at the national level, fueling a coordinated effort to exert power over their communities by controlling access to reading materials and deciding which stories can be told in books and in school curricula.
It may be too soon to apply historical analysis to Moms for Liberty and the current book banning movement. However, when compared to my exhibit’s three major episodes of book banning in Florida history, we might conclude that the reactionary forces of the 2020s are responding to a similar social crisis and are seizing an opportunity to assert control. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement destabilized the ideological status quo of the nation, peeling back the veneer of multiculturalism to reveal persistent and often deadly racial disparities and discrimination in American society, especially in health care, labor conditions, and in the criminal justice system. The wave of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that followed in corporate and educational settings, however superficial they may have been, may have signaled to some conservative forces the opening of a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was among the first political leaders to reframe COVID safety precautions and DEI trainings as infringements of individual liberties.31 Moms for Liberty amplified this message with demands that their individual parental rights be allowed to override pro-social institutional rules like school vaccination requirements and masking in classrooms. The policy solutions coming from these reactionary forces go well beyond banning books and suggest a broader ideological motivation. For example, at the same time that the state legislature imposes content restrictions on teachers and librarians in public schools and libraries, and as the book banners demonize librarians and teachers as groomers and pornographers, they are also in league with one another to expand school voucher programs to shift more public funds into private schools in the name of individual choice and personalized learning.32 Is the contemporary book banning movement part of an effort to delegitimize and defund public education and public libraries altogether? These preliminary ideas require further study, but it does seem clear that Moms for Liberty and their political allies are using the same tactics as Florida book banners of the past in order to control cultural institutions like schools and libraries and to impose their ideology on the rest of civil society.
Looking back, I think my first solo exhibit was successful in examining the motivations of Florida’s book banners and revealing the continuities of censors’ goals throughout Florida history. In this regard, the director of the History Department’s public history program was very complimentary of the exhibit design and content. Student engagement, on the other hand, was somewhat limited. The location wasn’t ideal for attracting attention; that space in the library wasn’t getting a lot of traffic in part because of service changes to the Starbucks café in the library. I only recorded about a dozen links to the QR codes, most of which came from the link to the prison book ban database. The location also made conducting observations in the space impractical, so I was not able to see how passers-by engaged with the exhibit. Had the exhibit been in view of the circulation desk, it might have been easier to unobtrusively see if students were stopping to engage with the content. That said, the exhibit was a hit with some of the faculty and I was asked to integrate both the exhibit and its subject matter into information literacy sessions for three different courses. Thus, the exhibit did serve as a vehicle for outreach to teaching faculty and generated three instructional opportunities.
In November 2023, I relocated and took a new position as Head of Research & Instruction at the Monroe Library of Loyola University New Orleans. When we celebrated Banned Books Week at Loyola in September 2024, I was able to draw upon my experience with the “Against Liberty” exhibit. The disruption of Hurricane Francine shortened our planning time, so we were not able to mount a full-scale historical exhibit similar to “Against Liberty,” but we augmented a traditional display of commonly banned books in the library lobby with a few examples of historically challenged books and accompanying exhibit labels for context. In addition to some examples I reused from the FSU exhibit, I added Monroe Library’s copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which I found gathering dust in the stacks. Our copy was published in 1948, the last edition printed. The Church formally abolished the Index in 1966, though not as a move to exonerate the forbidden books, but rather to shift responsibility to individual readers to avoid immoral reading.33
Once again, the historical content seemed to create more opportunities for engagement with faculty than with students. The more successful initiative with students was a pop-up trivia table set up in the quad outside the library building, an initiative of Dr. Julia Miller in our Teacher Education program. The spread of commonly challenged children’s and young adult fiction on the table attracted plenty of attention from students walking by who recognized some of their favorite books. Once engaged, we asked them trivia questions about challenged books and music, largely drawing examples from the last 50 years. Students were surprised at some of the books on the table and examples from the trivia questions.
In conclusion, the success of my exhibit at FSU and the more recent activities at Loyola depended on the audience. I will include historical context in future banned books exhibits, but I am also convinced that this needs to be paired with some other interactive modes of engagement to capture students’ attention and start a conversation. While the standard Banned Books Week exhibit may draw attention to individual titles that students recognize, librarians and teachers must find ways to engage students in questions about who bans books and why. By recognizing the motivations of censors, students and educators together may more effectively resist attempts to limit access to information and a quality education. Understanding the historical context of book banning is also critical for librarians. Our work as educators and culture bearers will always be implicated in struggles for cultural dominance, and we must be prepared to defend ourselves and our values in this and future culture wars.34 We must find ways to refuse the authoritarian agenda of the book banners. Recognizing the political agendas and methods of potential book banners will help us to create library policies and procedures that remain responsive to our local communities while discouraging coordinated, bad faith assaults on our staff, collections, and the freedom to read.
Many thanks to my publishing editor, Jaena Rae Cabrera, and my peer reviewers, Ian Beilin and Niki Fullmer. This project was substantially improved in response to their insightful feedback. Special thanks to Dr. Laura McTighe, whose collaboration was critical to starting the exhibit project, and to Mimi Bilodeau, who found the “defaced” book that sparked so much inspiration. Thanks to history professors Dr. Katherine Mooney, for her input on the exhibit’s historical content, and Dr. Jennifer Koslow, for her expertise in exhibit design. I also want to acknowledge everyone at FSU Libraries who helped me assemble the original exhibit at FSU: Rachel Duke, Emory Gerlock, Devon McWhorter, Laura Pellini, and Dan “Brew” Schoonover. Special thanks to my wife, Sarah Withers, who inspires me every day and also helped me during final installation of the exhibit.
American Library Association, “Banned Books Week Display Ideas,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/display.
American Library Association, “Censorship by the Numbers,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers.
Committee, The. “About the Film,” https://thecommitteedocumentary.org/.
Florida Department of Corrections, “About the Florida Department of Corrections,” https://fdc.myflorida.com/about.html.
Florida Department of Education, State Board of Education, “Required Instruction Planning and Reporting,” Florida Administrative Code Rule 6A-1.094124, https://www.flrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?id=6A-1.094124.
Florida Division of Historical Resources, “Caroline Mays Brevard,” https://dos.fl.gov/historical/museums/historical-museums/united-connections/women-in-history/caroline-mays-brevard/.
Moms for Liberty, “School Boards,” https://portal.momsforliberty.org/resources/other-topics/school-boards/.
Prison Policy Initiative, “Florida Profile,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html.
Bailey, Fred Arthur. “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1992): 1–17.
———. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1991): 507–33.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Braukman, Stacy Lorraine. Communists and Perverts under the Palms the Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.
Brevard, Caroline Mays. A History of Florida, by Caroline Mays Brevard, with Questions, Supplementary Chapters and an Outline of Florida Civil Government by H. E. Bennett. New York: American Book Company, 1904.
Burkholder, Joel M., Russell A. Hall, and Kat Phillips. “Manufactured Panic, Real Consequences: Why Academic Librarians Must Stand with Public and School Libraries.” College & Research Libraries News 85, no. 6 (June 7, 2024): 254-57. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.6.254.
Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Crockett, Hasan. “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (July 2001): 305–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/1562449.
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Friedman, Jonathan, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Sabrina Baêta. “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN America, September 19, 2022, https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/.
Giroux, Henry A. “Educators as Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Fascism.” Policy Futures in Education 22, no. 8 (November 1, 2024): 1533–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103241226844.
Graves, Karen. And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Knox, Emily J. M. Book Banning in 21st-Century America. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Lenard, Max. “On the Origin, Development and Demise of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.” Journal of Access Services 3, no. 4 (July 26, 2006): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1300/J204v03n04_05.
Meehan, Kasey, Jonathan Friedman, Sabrian Baêta, and Tasslyn Magnusson. “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor.” PEN America, September 1, 2023, https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/.
Meehan, Kasey, Sabrina Baêta, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Madison Markham. “Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves.” PEN America, November 1, 2024. https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/.
Paulus, Carl Lawrence. The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2017.
Poucher, Judith G. State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee’s Assault on Civil Liberties. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014.
Schoeppner, Michael A. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. Studies in Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695404.
Scott, Julius Sherrard. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. London: Verso, 2018.
Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Second edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Smith, John David, and J. Vincent Lowery. The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.
Vose, Robin J. E. The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.
Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles : Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28th, 1829. Second edition. Boston: David Walker, 1830. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.69015000003166.
Weitz, Seth. “Campus of Evil: The Johns Committee’s Investigation of the University of South Florida.” Tampa Bay History 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2008). https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory/vol22/iss1/5.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944].
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FYI, this post is a little more NSFW than usual with the language.
Usually I think McMansions are kind of funny. Sometimes, I even like them. If I didn’t like them at least a little bit, I don’t think I’d be running this blog for a solid eight years and counting. Some McMansions are so strange and so fascinating in their architectural languages (it’s never just one language) that they test the boundaries of what residential architecture can do on an individual and often ad hoc level. Others so cogently and often whimsically express various cultural fascinations and deeply entrenched American ideas of what prosperity looks like (read: neuroticisms), that, as a sociological text they remain unrivaled.
But some (many!) McMansions are, to put it bluntly, evil. And it is these McMansions that reveal the ugly truth beneath the ugly architecture: that the McMansion is a manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible, and that it does so in a country besieged by brutal and inescapable income inequality. In our present political moment characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is pro-social in nature (and nature itself), I figured it was my duty to show my readers a house that embodies these sentiments, one we can all use to assuage some of our perceived powerlessness by way of mocking the shit out of it.
There are a lot of fake White Houses in the US. Most of them can be found in or around the area of McLean, Virginia, the ground zero of DC blob sickos whose job it is to mete out the ratio of lethality and economy for weapons manufacturers. This one, however, is in Indiana, outside of Evansville. It was built at the apex of theme park mindset in architecture (1997) and is on the market for $4.9 million dollars. However, don’t be fooled by this opening exterior shot. It takes literal drone footage to show how unhinged this house actually is. In reality, the White House facade is akin to the light dangling from an anglerfish, luring the unsuspecting victim in…
Completely NORMAL amount of money at play here!
There are some images historians (if there are any left) will look back upon and say, such a phenomenon truly would not be possible without an abundance of cheap oil and derivative products. Fortunately, in the immanent post-neoliberal chobani yogurt solarpunk utopia, this house will be converted into a half ruin garden (though this will take some time with all the plastic) half public spa complex. A better world is possible, but only if we imagine it.
Pro tip: there’s a way of saying “wow it’s so big” that can land as the most devastating insult in the rhetorical lexicon.
I’ll be real, the armchair thing is a new one for me, too.
(Rise and grindset voice): Inside you are two lions. Both of them are hungry for prosperity and success. Let’s get this bread, king.
Not to do gender here, but compared to the rest of the house, this is a “my wife got her way” room if there ever was one.
Fixer Upper was basically 9/11 for “architectural foam trappings” and “color.” Look what they took from you…
Honestly, what a great juxtaposition. This is what that book The Machine in the Garden was all about. (No it’s not.)
Half of this post tbh:
Well, that’s it for this extremely upbeat and positive McMansion Hell post in this extremely positive and upbeat time we are living in. Join us soon for the concluding part 2 of the Neuschwanstein Castle series, especially if you like beautiful, psychosexually crippled swan boys (real and fictional) and kitsch theory.
Only one person, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has ever served more than two terms as president of the United States. This is for two reasons.
First, prior to Roosevelt’s election to a third term in 1940 there was a longstanding American tradition that presidents not serve more than two terms.
This tradition was established by the decisions of early presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison not to seek a third term. This tradition was later adopted by other presidents.
Second, after Roosevelt died in office in 1945 during his fourth term, Congress and the people of the United States decided to turn the long-standing tradition that presidents should not serve more than two terms into a part of constitutional law.
This was done through the passage and ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1951.
The key provision of the 22nd Amendment reads as follows: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
The intent is clear. No one is supposed to serve more than two full terms as president.
The only way someone can serve more than two terms is if they served less than two years in a previous term in which they weren’t elected president.
Here’s an example: If a vice president becomes president during the final year of a term because the president died, that vice president could still run for two terms. But that exception is still meant to bar anyone from serving more than a total of 10 years as president.
It is worth understanding why the two-term tradition was considered so important that it was turned into constitutional law the first time it was violated.
Commentators often cite George Washington’s decision not to seek a third term as president as establishing the two-term tradition. Political scientist and term limit scholar Michael Korzi gives a lot more credit to the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was outspoken in favor of the two-term tradition. As Korzi notes, this was, in part, because “Jefferson saw little distinction between a long-serving executive in an elective position and a hereditary monarch.” In other words, a president without term limits is too much like a king.
Jefferson saw a president who was willing to break the two-term tradition as power hungry, and he hoped that the American people would not elect such a president. This led him to write in his autobiography in 1821 that “should a President consent to be a candidate for a 3d. election, I trust he would be rejected on this demonstration of ambitious views.”
Jefferson also worried that without term limits, presidents would stay in office too long into their old age and after they had lost their ability to govern effectively. This led him to write that without term limits, there was a danger that “the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard.”
Subsequently, presidents tended to abide by the two-term tradition. And in the few cases where presidents decided to seek a third term, their own parties would not give them the nomination.
That remained true until Roosevelt ran for, and won, both a third and a fourth term as president during World War II.
Roosevelt’s violation of the two-term tradition prompted Congress and the states to turn the tradition into a formal matter of constitutional law.
A major concern motivating the amendment was the same one that motivated Jefferson: to prevent a president from becoming a king. Multiple members of Congress identified the same concern during congressional sessions in the 1940s.
Sen. Chapman Revercomb from West Virginia stated that power given to a president without term limits “would be a definite step in the direction of autocracy, regardless of the name given the office, whether it be president, king, dictator, emperor, or whatever title the office may carry.”
Similarly, Rep. Edward McCowen from Ohio said that the 22nd Amendment would be “a great step toward preventing a dictatorship or some totalitarian form of government from arising.”
And Rep. John Jennings Jr. from Tennessee stated that only by adoption of the 22nd Amendment “can the people be assured that we shall never have a dictator in this land.”
Congress passed the 22nd Amendment on March 21, 1947. It took less than four years for the necessary three-fourths of the states to ratify the amendment, which became law on Feb. 27, 1951.
In the 1980s, political scientist Juan Linz identified that presidential systems are less stable than other forms of democracy, such as parliamentary systems. The difference seems to be that presidential systems concentrate more power in the hands of a single person, the president. This makes it easier to remove the checks and balances that democracies depend on.
As scholars have noted, violation of presidential term limits and other methods of increasing executive power are a common form of democratic backsliding – state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions that sustain a democracy.
Law professor Mila Versteeg and her colleagues have shown that in recent years presidents around the globe have used various tactics to try to violate presidential term limits. These tactics include trying to amend their country’s constitution, trying to get the courts to reinterpret the constitution, finding a replacement leader who the former president can control once out of office and attempting to delay elections.
They note that most of the time when a president’s attempt to violate term limits fails it is “because the attempt encountered widespread popular resistance.” They conclude that this finding implies that “broad resistance movements” may be the best means to prevent violation of presidential term limits.
Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Democrats have been under intense pressure to find an effective way to challenge US President Donald Trump without control of either chamber of Congress or a de facto opposition leader.
They may have just found one. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker took the Senate floor on Monday evening in Washington to give a speech lambasting Trump’s actions. He didn’t stop talking – aside for the occasional question from a fellow Democrat – until Tuesday night, 25 hours later.
So, how common are these types of speeches in the US Congress, and what’s the point?
Booker’s speech set a new record for the longest continuous speech in the Senate, surpassing Senator Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour speech in 1957 to try to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
This was during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during the second world war. The army was the great desegregation force in the 1940s, and Eisenhower, as president in the 1950s, was strongly in favour of civil rights.
In 1957, Congress was going to pass a civil rights bill that would make it harder for officials in southern states, in particular, to prevent Black people from voting. So Thurmond, the South Carolina senator and fierce proponent of segregation, launched what was (until today) the longest speech in Senate history to oppose it.
Thurmond’s speech was a filibuster, an extended speech in the Senate to attempt to delay or block a vote on a bill or confirmation. Thurmond, however, was unable to stop enactment of the bill.
Senators engage in filibusters when they know they’re going to lose, especially when it’s a piece of legislation they really dislike or disagree with. Because they can’t stop the passage of the bill, they use the filibuster to call attention to their opposition to it. The intention is to rally the troops and say, “I’m standing with you, even if this vote goes the other way”.
In 2016, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who represents the state of Connecticut where the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place, launched a nearly 15-hour filibuster to force the Republican Senate leadership to allow votes on two gun control measures.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz also spoke all night – 21 hours in total – against Obamacare in 2013. It wasn’t all focused on health policy; he filled the time by reading the children’s book, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss.
Booker’s speech was not technically a filibuster – he wasn’t holding the floor to talk against a specific bill, as Thurmond was. He was giving time to his Democratic colleagues to just control the shape of the general debate about Trump.
Senators use speeches like this when they’re losing on a issue, and Booker feels the Democrats are currently losing to Trump. They have been unable to stop any of his executive actions, so they feel they need to cut through in some way to reach the American people.
Trump has been “flooding the zone” from the moment he took office in January with hundreds of policies and executive actions – and he has been extremely successful at it. These actions cut across so many areas, it’s been very hard for the Democrats, on any given day, to pick out the top things to fight against.
Because they don’t have control of the House or Senate, and there is no opposition leader, there is no single, principal Democrat who can stand up day by day and say, “This is what happened, this was what the threat to the country is, this why we’re opposing it and this is the way we’re going to attack it”.
Trump is controlling the narrative and the media environment. And the Democratic leadership has been unable to counter it, even though, at the grassroots level, Democrats and many others who voted for Trump are really angry.
As Booker put it during his speech:
Moments like this require us to be more creative or more imaginative, or just more persistent and dogged and determined.
There comes a certain point in a human drama that transcends partisanship when you’re looking at someone speaking from the heart, speaking their convictions and you can come to respect them.
Booker ran for the presidency in 2020 and ultimately yielded to Joe Biden, and I expect we’ll hear much more from him in 2028 when the next presidential election occurs. He is most likely going to run again.
Bruce Wolpe receives funding, as a non resident senior Fellow, from the United Statses Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He served for ten years on the Democratic staff in the US House of Representatives.
Thirty years ago in Israel, advocating for genocide could land you in prison.
In April 1994, an Israeli rabbi named Ido Alba published an article that read, in part, “In war, as long as the war has not been decided, it is a commandment to kill every non-Jew from the nation one is fighting against, even women and children. Even when they do not directly endanger the one killing them, there is concern that they may assist the enemy in the continuation of the war.”
An Israeli court convicted Alba for incitement to racism and encouraging violence and sentenced him to four years in prison.
Now the legal system is ignoring similar rhetoric.
In December 2023, following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which resulted in the killing of approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers and migrant workers, Rabbi Moshe Ratt, who’s seen as a public intellectual among Israeli West Bank settlers, composed a long post on Facebook.
In it, he noted that in the past, some people may have struggled with the morality of destroying an entire people, including women and children. Now they don’t. Obliquely referring to the Palestinians, he added, “Some nations have descended into such depths of evil and corruption that the only solution is to eradicate them completely, leaving no trace.”
More recently, on Feb. 24, 2025, Nissim Vaturi, one of the deputy speakers in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, called for killing all Palestinian adults in Gaza.
Ratt’s and Vaturi’s words went unpunished. In fact, genocidal rhetoric like theirs – in which the entire destruction of a people is proposed – has become more common in Israel.
As a scholar of Israeli society, I’ve written about how calls for the eradication of Palestinians didn’t simply emerge out of the violence on Oct. 7, 2023.
They date back to the 1930s, and have gained steam – and more public acceptance – as prospects for peace fell apart in the 1990s, existential anxiety among Israelis has grown, and religious Zionists have gained more political power in the 21st century.
Calls to eliminate the Palestinian presence date to before Israel’s official founding in 1948. When Zionist immigration to the region began at the end of the 19th century, less than 10% of the population was Jewish. The native, largely Muslim population represented a fundamental obstacle to establishing a Jewish state.
The founding fathers of Zionism openly discussed ideas for relocating Palestinians, which were usually envisioned as voluntary. These notions are not entirely unlike U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to transfer Palestinians from Gaza to other countries.
Attempts to dispossess majority indigenous populations are usually violent themselves, however, and almost always run up against resistance. For example, clashes took place between British colonists and Native Americans in the 17th century, between Dutch colonists and South African tribes in the 17th century, and between Han Chinese and Tibetans in the 20th century. In that same vein, conflict between Zionist settlers and Palestinians has existed from the outset.
Repeated violence and attacks can fuel existential anxiety among settlers, along with fantasies of achieving “permanent security” or absolute safety against future threats. Among Jewish Israelis, the collective memory of persecution – culminating in the genocide of European Jews during the Holocaust – has added another important layer to the longing for permanent security.
In Israel, there’s also a history of biblical justifications for violence and genocide. This sort of rhetoric has waxed and waned over time; it’ll often exist on the margins in times of relative peace, but move into the mainstream during periods of violence and existential anxiety.
Most of the forerunners of modern Zionism saw themselves as secular. Nonetheless, they adopted major Jewish symbols and treated Jewish tradition and religious texts as a source of inspiration, even as they didn’t ascribe them legal authority.
This created an opening for political leaders to use biblical texts to promote political goals.
The Bible contains some explicit narratives of annihilation. The most well known is the story of Amalek, a nomadic people identified in the Book of Deuteronomy as the archenemy of the Israelites. In Chapter 25, Moses commanded the Israelites to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” A related commandment involves the annihilation of the Seven Nations of Canaan, which inhabited the “promised land” when the Israelites conquered it. In Chapter 20, the Israelites are commanded: “You shall not leave a single soul alive. Completely destroy.”
Throughout Jewish history, these edicts and stories have generally been interpreted as historical accounts or as metaphors, not commands to commit genocide.
However, settlers of lands occupied by indigenous peoples – not just in Israel, but in other countries, too – have deployed these texts to condone mass violence. For example, in colonial America, Puritan settlers justified massacres of Native Americans by comparing them with Amalek.
During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Israeli army education officers distributed texts to soldiers that read, “In biblical times, Saul exterminated all of Amalek, men and women, youth and elderly, and even sheep and cattle.” The materials also noted that “biblical Joshua was commanded to annihilate the nations of the land and was forbidden to make any treaties with them.”
During that war, Israel uprooted an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. Israeli forces and civilians killed thousands who attempted to return over the ensuing years.
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, this sort of religious justification for wiping out the Palestinians returned to the margins.
But another development would fuel genocidal rhetoric.
Decisive military victories during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, also known as the Six-Day War, involved the Israeli conquest of holy sites in the West Bank. Many religious Zionists perceived the military victories as miraculous.
For religious Zionists, the state of Israel is a sacred endeavor. They’ve generally been less interested than secular Zionists in adhering to international norms and taking geopolitical considerations into account when pushing for the settlement of contested territories.
After 1967, religious settler movements were emboldened. Groups such as Gush Emunim pushed the government to settle the newly occupied territories, which included the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For these religious Zionists, the settlement project is not simply a land grab: Settlers are taking land that the Bible has promised to them.
In 1980, Israel Hess, who then held the official position as rabbi of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, wrote in the student bulletin, “In a war between Israel and Amalek, it is a commandment to kill and annihilate infants and babies. And who is Amalek? Anyone who launches a war against the Jews.” These words triggered public backlash and prompted protests from several secular Zionist politicians.
In the 1990s, calls for widespread violence were largely marginalized, since there was hope for a political compromise with the Palestinians.
After these talks failed, however, the rhetoric and ideas of religious Zionists continued to migrate to the political center, particularly during and after the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. Taking place from 2000 to 2005, the uprising involving a series of suicide attacks in Israeli cities profoundly shocked the Jewish Israeli public, spurring the reemergence of deep existential anxiety.
With no peaceful solution for the conflict on the horizon, Israeli and Palestinian figures who viewed politics through a theological framework kept accumulating power.
In 2014, Ayelet Shaked, then a member of the Knesset and later the minister of justice, shared an article on social media that read, “The Palestinian people declared war on us, and we have to fight back … and in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, with its old men and women, its cities and villages, its property and infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, the dean of Quranic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza said in a 2015 television interview, “All Jews in Palestine today are fair game – even the women.”
As each side retaliated against the other, annihilation started to sound like a reasonable solution – a process that historian Yoav Di-Capua has termed “genocidal mirroring.”
This mirroring does not imply a symmetry. Israel, with its superior military capabilities, has a significantly greater capacity to inflict harm on Palestinians.
The government formed in Israel following the 2022 election was unprecedented. For the first time in the nation’s history, the government depended upon ultranationalist religious factions, such as one called Jewish Power. The party has three official rabbis who advise its politicians. One of them, Dov Lior, is a prominent advocate of the idea that Palestinians are Amalek. Another, Yisrael Ariel, has written that the Torah’s commandment “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to non-Jews.
When the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks reignited Israelis’ deep-seated fears of annihilation, calls for indiscriminate revenge grew louder.
As Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of a military program for religious students in Jaffa, said in March 2024:
“If you don’t kill them first, they will kill you. The terrorists of today are the children of the previous operation whom you kept alive, and the women are those who produce the terrorists … Do not try to outsmart the Torah. The Torah tells you: ‘Do not keep alive any soul,’ so you should not keep alive any soul.”
Some secular Israelis joined in. Danny Neuman, a former football star and television commentator, said on TV in December 2023, “I am telling you, in Gaza, without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”
Kinneret Barashi, a lawyer and a television host, tweeted in February 2025, “Every trace of the murderous mutations in Gaza must be erased, from the delivery rooms to the last elderly person in Gaza.”
These statements coincide with a grim reality on the ground. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli retaliation in Gaza has cost the lives of more than 64,000 Palestinians. Public health experts estimate that the obliteration of infrastructure and corresponding starvation, lack of access to medical care and spread of infectious diseases, could bring the death toll to the hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, large swaths of the Israeli public appear to support the mass expulsion of Palestinians and condone the concept of genocide in the abstract, according to a recent poll I commissioned through the Israeli polling firm Geocartography.
In the representative sample of Jewish Israelis who were polled from March 10-11, 2025, 82% supported the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, while 56% endorsed the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens. By comparison, according to a 2003 poll, only 46% supported the “transfer of Palestinian residents of the occupied territories,” and just 31% supported the “transfer of Israel’s Arab citizens.”
Moreover, in my poll I relayed a story from the Book of Joshua, in which the ancient Israelites conquered the city of Jericho and killed all of its inhabitants.
When I asked respondents whether the Israeli army, when conquering an enemy city, should act similarly to the Israelites when they conquered Jericho, 47% of respondents said they should.
Tamir Sorek previously received funding from the Fullbright Program and the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation.
I teach history in Connecticut, but I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, where my interest in the subject was sparked by visits to local museums.
I fondly remember trips to the Fellow-Reeves Museum in Wichita, Kansas, and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. A 1908 photograph of my great-grandparents picking cotton has been used as a poster by the Oklahoma Historical Society.
This love of learning history continued into my years as a graduate student of history, when I would spend hours at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum learning about the history of human flight and ballooning. As a professor, I’ve integrated the institution’s exhibits into my history courses.
The Trump administration, however, is not happy with the way the Smithsonian Institution and other U.S. museums are portraying history.
On March 27, 2025, the president issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which asserted, “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Trump singled out a few museums, including the Smithsonian, dedicating a whole section of the order on “saving” the institution from “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Of course, history is contested. There will always be a variety of views about what should be included and excluded from America’s story. For example, in my own research, I found that Prohibition-era school boards in the 1920s argued over whether it was appropriate for history textbooks to include pictures of soldiers drinking to illustrate the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.
But most recent debates center on how much attention should be given to the history of the nation’s accomplishments over its darker chapters. The Smithsonian, as a national institution that receives most of its funds from the federal government, has sometimes found itself in the crosshairs.
The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 thanks to its namesake, British chemist James Smithson.
Smithson willed his estate to his nephew and stated that if his nephew died without an heir, the money – roughly US$15 million in today’s dollars – would be donated to the U.S. to found “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
The idea of a national institution dedicated to history, science and learning was contentious from the start.
In her book “The Stranger and the Statesman,” historian Nina Burleigh shows how Smithson’s bequest was nearly lost due to battles between competing interests.
Southern plantation owners and western frontiersmen, including President Andrew Jackson, saw the establishment of a national museum as an unnecessary assertion of federal power. They also challenged the very idea of accepting a gift from a non-American and thought that it was beneath the dignity of the government to confer immortality on someone simply because of a large donation.
In the end, a group led by congressman and former president John Quincy Adams ensured Smithson’s vision was realized. Adams felt that the country was failing to live up to its early promise. He thought a national museum was an important way to burnish the ideals of the young republic and educate the public.
Today the Smithsonian runs 14 education and research centers, the National Zoo and 21 museums, including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was created with bipartisan support during President George W. Bush’s administration.
In the introduction to his book “Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects,” cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin talks about how the institution has also supported hundreds of small and large institutions outside of the nation’s capital.
In 2024, the Smithsonian sent over 2 million artifacts on loan to museums in 52 U.S. states and territories and 33 foreign countries. It also partners with over 200 affiliate museums. YouGov has periodically tracked Americans’ approval of the Smithsonian, which has held steady at roughly 68% approval and 2% disapproval since 2020.
Precursors to the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the Smithsonian took place in the 1990s.
In 1991, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which was then known as the National Museum of American Art, created an exhibition titled “The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920.” Conservatives complained that the museum portrayed western expansion as a tale of conquest and destruction, rather than one of progress and nation-building. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the exhibit represented “an entirely hostile ideological assault on the nation’s founding and history.”
The exhibition proved popular: Attendance to the National Museum of American Art was 60% higher than it had been during the same period the year prior. But the debate raised questions about whether public museums were able to express ideas that are critical of the U.S. without risk of censorship.
In 1994, controversy again erupted, this time at the National Air and Space Museum over a forthcoming exhibition centered on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50 years prior.
Should the exhibition explore the loss of Japanese lives? Or emphasize the U.S. war victory?
Veterans groups insisted that the atomic bomb ended the war and saved 1 million American lives, and demanded the removal of photographs of the destruction and a melted Japanese school lunch box from the exhibit. Meanwhile, other activists protested the exhibition by arguing that a symbol of human destruction shouldn’t be commemorated at an institution that’s supposed to celebrate human achievement.
Republicans won the House in 1994 and threatened cuts to the Smithsonian’s budget over the Enola Gay exhibition, compelling curators to walk a tightrope. In the end, the fuselage of the Enola Gay was displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. But the exhibit would not tell the full story of the plane’s role in the war from a myriad of perspectives.
In 2019, The New York Times launched the 1619 project, which aimed to reframe the country’s history by placing slavery and its consequences at its very center. The first Trump administration quickly responded by forming its 1776 commission. In January 2021, it produced a report critiquing the 1619 project, claiming that an emphasis on the country’s history of racism and slavery was counterproductive to promoting “patriotic education.”
That same year, Trump pledged to build “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live,” with 250 statues to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
President Joe Biden rescinded the order in 2021. Trump reissued it after retaking the White House, and pointed to figures he’d like to see included, such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Betsy Ross, Sitting Bull, Bob Hope, Thurgood Marshall and Whitney Houston.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with honoring Americans, though I think a focus on celebrities and major figures clouds the fascinating histories of ordinary Americans. I also find it troubling that there seems to be such a concerted effort to so forcefully shape the teaching and understanding of history via threats and bullying. Yale historian Jason Stanley has written about how aspiring authoritarian governments seek to control historical narratives and discourage an exploration of the complexities of the past.
Historical scholarship requires an openness to debate and a willingness to embrace new findings and perspectives. It also involves the humility to accept that no one – least of all the government – has a monopoly on the truth.
In his executive order, Trump noted that “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn.” I share that view. Doing so, however, means not dismantling history, but instead complicating the story – in all its messy glory.
The Conversation U.S. receives funding from the Smithsonian Institution.
Jennifer Tucker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The original tall poppies bloomed in the garden of Tarquin the Proud, last king of Rome. To communicate that his enemies should be defeated by killing their leaders, he is said to have decapitated the tallest flowers with a stick.
Two and a half thousand years later, “tall poppies” are those among us who rise above the horde through the excellence of their achievements or the boldness of their ambition.
Sometimes tall poppies are celebrated, as an array of tall poppy awards attests. Other times they are scorned for their arrogance and envied for their success. Too big for their boots or britches, they must be cut down to size.
Aversion to tall poppies is said to be particularly strong in Australia and New Zealand, where the idea of a “tall poppy syndrome” was invented in the 1980s. A tendency to drag down those who set themselves above others, the syndrome supposedly reflects values of equality, humility and the storied “fair go”.
But what are the effects of the tall poppy syndrome? What does it tell us about Antipodean cultures? And are we uniquely averse to those who stand out from the crowd?
Effects of the tall poppy syndrome on work performance and leadership have been studied extensively.
In a New Zealand study of prominent entrepreneurs, nearly all reported encountering the syndrome. “If you do achieve something and stick your head up a bit further,” one said, “people will try to chop you down to size.”
Dealing with negative responses to success drove some entrepreneurs to adopt specific coping strategies, like staying under the radar and taking pains not to flaunt their success.
Tall poppy syndrome doesn’t merely bruise enterprising egos, it can also adversely affect business decisions. The NZ study found public attacks can discourage entrepreneurs from starting or growing a business and from persevering after setbacks.
Athletes also report being targets. Some attacks simply reflect anonymous online spite, but tall poppy attitudes also drive aggressive behaviour. One Australian study found that high performing student athletes were often victims of bullying.
Harvesting tall poppies may be common in Australia and New Zealand, but there is little evidence that it is unique to us.
In Japan, the saying “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” captures the idea that people should not be conspicuously different.
The Law of Jante expresses a similar sentiment in Scandinavian countries. Despite being fictitious, invented by Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose, its ten rules dictate that “you’re not to think you are anything special” and “you’re not to imagine yourself better than we are”, among other humbling commandments.
These examples are subtly different from each other: the Japanese version presents being different as undesirable; the Nordic version identifies being better or special as undesirable traits.
In the more collectivist Japanese context, avoiding displays of individuality helps to preserve social harmony and avoid conflict. In the more individualist Scandinavian context, the key concern is maintaining social equality. The Law of Jante levels out a society where individuality is highly valued but expressions of personal superiority are not.
These variations show that aversion to tall poppies can express two distinct values in different cultural settings: conformity via collectivism, and equality via egalitarianism.
Values researchers think of egalitarianism in terms of a cultural dimension called “power distance”. Cultures high on this dimension value social hierarchy and accept inequalities. Low cultures prefer more equal social arrangements.
Australia tends to score relatively low on power distance, with Scandinavian countries and New Zealand lower still, as well as scoring high on individualism. In this “horizontal” form of individualism, people are meant to strive to be distinct without desiring special status. It is therefore no surprise to find the tall poppy syndrome in these countries.
Values in the United States also tend to be highly individualistic, but higher in power distance than in Oceania, a combination known as “vertical individualism”. Vertical individualists also value being distinct from others, but are more comfortable with inequality and with raising themselves above others.
As this contrast suggests, Americans favour rewarding tall poppies more strongly than Australians. This aligns with the ethos of the “American Dream”, a cultural narrative that champions ambition and status-seeking, and the full-throated celebration of personal success.
In our age of self-promotion, with social media sites devoted to not-so-humble bragging, have we become immune to the tall poppy syndrome? Are we becoming more comfortable about standing out, or does egalitarianism remain a powerful obstacle?
Research finds no increase in levels of narcissism in Australia, in contrast to some evidence of rising levels in the US. By implication, Australians are not becoming more willing to elevate themselves above others. Whether their attitudes to people who do so has changed remains to be seen.
More importantly, we should ask if, in times of high and rising inequality, less egalitarianism is something to hope for. No one wants successful athletes to be lashed by public envy – but if the tall poppy syndrome reflects a commitment to social equality, perhaps a complete cure would be worse than the disease.
A culture that attacks its tall poppies risks discouraging ambition and innovation, but one that overlooks inequality may lose sight of the collective good. Ultimately, the challenge lies in finding a balance between celebrating individual excellence and maintaining the egalitarian spirit that fosters fairness.
Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Most of us like to believe we would have opposed the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. We may even like to imagine that we would have bravely fought for the resistance to Nazism in the 1940s. But would we? Our ability to take a stand may be put to the test as authoritarianism is increasing worldwide.
All electoral democracies can transform into autocracies. These are governments that restrict political and civil rights, centralise executive power, manipulate elections and minimise the diversity of political views.
In western democracies, a move toward autocracy is often led by would-be strongmen whose focus is to reinstate traditionalist values and nationalism. They typically target the free media, opponents and stigmatised social groups without moral compunction.
Moves to deepen autocracy are always resisted, however. Depending on how autocratic a country is, this resistance will differ. Early in the autocratisation process, resistance is common within formal state institutions. It may be expressed in overt actions, including public statements condemning government actions.
In closed autocracies, however, resistance is exercised more by covert social movements. One reason for this is the personal risk connected to resistance. In Vladimir Putin´s autocratic Russia, for example, political dissenters know they risk being either murdered or imprisoned if they’re caught.
In the United States, on the other hand, where the new administration has taken steps that increase the level of autocracy, dissonant views may effectively be silenced because of fear of retribution. Many people are scared of losing their jobs or having their companies harmed.
The science about the choices made by those who resist autocratic regimes, and the strategies they apply in resisting, is evolving.
Interviews with resisters in Myanmar suggest that personal moral commitments, being compassionate and feeling compelled to act when witnessing violations of rights, are all factors motivating resistance.
These factors are also evident in those who helped Jews survive during the Holocaust. For example, studies suggest that rescuers were more empathic and morally conscious than others. They had essentially been socialised into being ethical in childhood and were also more inclusive of people from other social groups.
People who join resistance groups also tend to be more open to taking risks. That makes sense: the more driven you are by a need to feel safe, the less likely you are to engage in anything that could jeopardise that – even if your moral compass suggests you should.
Beyond resisting autocratic steps, research on moral courage in everyday settings shows that believing you can succeed, that you have the necessary knowledge and skills, is an important predictor for intervention when people witness norm violations, whether this means addressing a perpetrator or protecting a victim.
That said, it’s not all down to individual followers. No autocratic leader can gain power without influencing their followers. The same is true of resistance: resistance cannot exist without effective leadership.
Research suggests that followers are influenced by leaders who create a positive ethical climate, which in turn influences their own ethical behaviour.
For fighting autocracy, one important aspect of this process is to communicate that inclusive moral values, such as universalism (the idea that things like liberty, justice, fraternity and equality should apply to everyone) and benevolence (helping, forgiving, being responsible) are a prominent part of the group’s identity.
For example, when the Danish Jews were persecuted by the Nazis in 1943, representatives of morally-grounded institutions, including bodies representing the Protestant clergy and hospital physicians, started to actively resist the regime. They became effective leaders as they were already in jobs perceived to be morally “committed”, and people trusted their judgement.
Research on nonviolent resistance also shows that strong resistance organisations, and their leaders, tend to embrace diversity among people. And when they are successful, they often include the pillars in society that have the power to disrupt, such as military forces or economic elites.
Research on the underground railroad, the network of activists helping enslaved people escape to the northern states in America or Canada, has shown that influential church leaders played a crucial role. They refused to follow federal legislation that obliged them to help slave owners capture enslaved people that had escaped.
Knowing that ethical role models are taking a stand is important for a resistance movement’s followers. Stanley Milgram gave evidence for this in his much-debated psychological obedience studies, showing that 90% of the participants who had been asked to give others electrical shocks stopped immediately if two assistant teachers stopped first.
In a world where autocracy is on the rise, how can we foster traits in people that promote appropriate forms of resistance?
Teaching others about morally courageous figures can work, but heroism is not the key for all learners. The science suggests a number of other – perhaps surprising – objectives which can move ordinary people to stand up for democracy. In particular, educational initiatives that boost contact between different groups may be useful.
To be able to resist autocratic regimes, and help people who are persecuted under them, we ultimately need empathy for people who are different to ourselves. There’s plenty of research showing that white people who move to more diverse areas, within cities, for example, become less racist.
So perhaps the more time we spend with people who are unlike us, the more we are growing our potential as resistance fighters.
We may also want to boost our self-efficacy, or self-confidence. One technique is to repeatedly expose ourselves to situations that evoke fear, but which force us to act courageously, such as standing up to bullies. This is a crucial part of ethical police training, for example.
Learning about moral values can also help build confidence. Educators who are given the challenge to teach good moral behaviour can do this effectively by focusing on universal principles – rather than those that are based on culture or social class – such as treating others how we wish to be treated.
These are building blocks for a group identity which favours empathy with all and expectations of good behaviour.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On April 2, United States President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping new “reciprocal tariff” regime he says will level the playing field in global trade – by treating other countries the way (he claims) they treat the US.
First, Trump’s plan will impose a “baseline” 10% tariff on virtually all goods imported into the US, effective April 5. Then, from April 9, 57 countries will face higher “reciprocal tariffs”.
These vary by country, according to a formula based on individual trade deficits.
On face value, the new tariff regime might sound like a simple solution for fairness. If a particular country was taxing American imports with a 50% tariff, it might seem fair for the US to tax their imports at 50% as well.
But appearances are deceiving.
These new “reciprocal” tariffs ostensibly aim to eliminate the US trade deficit by making imports more expensive so that Americans buy less from abroad until imports equal exports.
But the Trump administration hasn’t directly matched specific foreign tariffs. Instead, they’ve opted for a crude formula based on bilateral trade deficits between the US and each specific country. Those aren’t the same things.
Read more: New modelling reveals full impact of Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs – with the US hit hardest
A country has a trade deficit when the total value of everything it imports from somewhere else exceeds the value of what it exports there. A trade surplus is the opposite.
Trade deficits and surpluses – the balance of trade – can be calculated between specific countries, but also between one country and the rest of the world.
Tariffs are different things altogether – taxes a country charges on imports when they cross the border, paid by the importer.
Read more: What are tariffs?
Trump’s new reciprocal tariffs have been calculated by taking the US trade deficit with each country, dividing it by total US imports from that country, then halving the resulting ratio and converting it into a percentage.
For example, in 2024, the US imported approximately US$605.8 billion from the European Union, but exported only $370.2 billion, resulting in a trade deficit of $235.6 billion.
Dividing the deficit by total imports from the EU gives a ratio of 39%. The White House interpreted this figure as the EU’s trade “advantage” and subsequently imposed a “discounted” 20% tariff on EU products – roughly half of 39%.
This same calculation led to a 34% tariff on China, 26% on India, 24% on Japan and 25% on South Korea. More export-dependent developing countries, including many in Southeast Asia, face some eye-wateringly high reciprocal tariffs.
Trade experts swiftly criticised the methodology behind the tariffs. James Surowiecki, a financial journalist, labelled it “extraordinary nonsense”.
While the use of economic formulas in the corresponding US Trade Representative document might give it an appearance of being grounded in economic theory, it is detached from the rigours of trade economics.
The formula assumes every trade deficit is a result of other countries’ unfair trade practices, but that is simply not the case. To see why, we need to understand why Trump’s obsession with trade deficits is wrong.
Why does Trump detest trade deficits? He appears to think of the national balance of trade like a business or household’s finances.
Under Trump’s logic, if more money is leaving the “account” than coming in, that’s bad business. A $200 million trade deficit would mean the US is “losing” – with money and jobs being siphoned away.
Trump argues other countries have been taking advantage of America by running up big trade surpluses and “hollowing out” US industry. He has long argued that America’s massive deficits indicate unfair trade deals, foreign protectionism, and even a threat to national security.
The trade gap is not money simply being drained overseas by allegedly rapacious foreigners. Rather, it represents the exchange of value.
American consumer behaviour is a significant driver of the US trade deficit. As a consumption powerhouse, the United States sees its residents and businesses spending vast sums on imported products ranging from iPhones and TVs to clothing and toys.
Many of these are actually produced by US companies but made overseas. Moreover, those US companies licence foreign factories to produce these goods, and the intellectual property revenues earned make up a huge US surplus in services trade.
But services trade does not feature in the formula. This shows the singular obsession with tangible things, or goods trade. Yet in most supply chains it is the services components that yield the most value.
Back on the goods side, when the US economy is robust and people have disposable income, imports naturally increase. Ultimately, while trade deficits indicate economic dynamics, they are not inherently negative nor do they signify economic weakness.
Rather, they often reflect a nation’s economic structure and consumer preference for diverse global products. After all, Australia has run trade deficits for decades, including with the US, and is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
The formula used to calculate the reciprocal tariffs is highly misleading. Responsible policy makers would take account of many other factors in their calculations.
Among other variables, the US Trade Representative formula fails to consider strong US consumer demand for imports. It also overlooks the US government’s gigantic fiscal deficit. This requires it to borrow money from overseas, pushing up the value of the US dollar. This strong dollar supports US purchases of imports.
In other words, the US runs large trade deficits not primarily because other nations have high trade barriers but largely because Americans need to fund their debts and want to buy lots of imported goods. The misleading formula places the blame entirely on an ill-conceived notion, and we are all going to pay the price.
Peter Draper receives funding from the European External Action Service and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, for project-specific work connected to trade policies. He is affiliated with the Australian Services Roundtable (Board Member); the International Chamber of Commerce (Research Foundation Director); European Centre for International Political Economy (non-resident Fellow); German Institute for Development and Sustainability (non-resident Research Fellow); and Friends of Multilateralism Group (member).
Vutha Hing receives funding from Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia. He is affiliated with Trade Policy Advisory Board, Royal Government of Cambodia.
Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the ACRLog team. Violet is a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library. She is the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a wiki designed to encourage collaboration in library metadata. Violet is passionate about critical cataloging, zine librarianship, and promoting the mental health of library workers.
On February 18, the Library of Congress (LC) sent an email announcement through its regular channels about a special list of revisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This list contained 45 proposed revisions to LCSH relating to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” These revisions would change the LCSH for Gulf of Mexico to America, Gulf of, and would change the LCSH for Mount Denali back to McKinley, Mount (Alaska).
Geographic names in LCSH generally follow the form of name decided on by the US Board on Geographic Names, a body under the Secretary of the Interior. (This relationship is laid out in the LC Subject Heading Manual instruction sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings.) The Board on Geographic Names takes its cues from the State Department, taking into account which countries the US has recognized.
It was not surprising that LC would follow the example of the US Board of Geographic Names, as that’s standard operating procedure. What wasn’t standard was the speed at which this revision was pushed through. Although the special list was backdated to February 13th, no one was notified of these revision proposals until the morning of February 18th, and the deadline for submitting comments was the same day, February 18th. This meant that catalogers had less than 24 hours to respond to these proposals, and our international colleagues in earlier time zones had no opportunity to respond to these proposals. The regular procedure for revisions to LCSH includes a three week comment period, which provides the chance to point out errors or potential conflicts. The proposed changes to the Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley headings were fully implemented in the authority file in mid-March.
Those of us who regularly propose revisions to subject headings know that the turnaround time for those proposals is usually a few months, and can take six months or longer for more complex revisions. For those of us who remember the more than five years of LC dragging its heels in making revisions to the Illegal aliens LCSH, the speed at which this change occurred was astonishing.
We don’t know if LC was quietly given instructions to revise these headings by Congress members, or if LC leadership independently decided they wanted to show fealty to the Trump administration and avoid political pushback. Either way, the decision to not just implement these terms but to fast track the changes negates the principle that LCSH should represent the most commonly used terminology to ensure the discoverability of resources. By making these changes, LC has pushed the responsibility of reflecting common usage onto every single library using LCSH, which now must make the decision of what headings to use in their catalog (that is, if they have the capacity to locally revise headings in their catalogs—not all libraries have the technological or staffing capacity to do so).
Without any formal directives announced, I believe we can reasonably label LC’s actions as anticipatory obedience, the concept developed by historian Timothy Snyder describing actions aligning with perceived expectations before explicit directives are given. We can imagine why LC might have made that decision. In a February New York Times opinion piece, The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, M. Gessen describes some of the arguments for compliance with authoritarian requests, including the idea that one must pick one’s battles, or that not complying is not worth risking people’s jobs.
Still, the fact remains that these domineering name changes are now reflected not only in many US catalogs, but in library catalogs across the world. Power has been taught that even if they’re not looking very closely, the Library of Congress will change its vocabularies to reflect the capricious whims of the president, no matter how euphemistic or jingoistic.
In the 1930s, future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish wrote about the rise of anti-communism: “The real struggle of our time was not between communism and fascism but the much more fundamental struggle between democratic institutions on the one side and all forms of dictatorship, whatever the dictator’s label, on the other.” Does our current Librarian of Congress have as much strength of conviction?
The post Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress first appeared on ACRLog.
We support the American Library Association’s (ALA) statement opposing the Trump administration’s executive order calling for the elimination of library funding. At only 0.003% of the federal budget, the library funding yields an enormous return on investment by helping our nation’s 125,000 libraries and museums serve their communities.
Eliminating IMLS would have a profound negative effect on the support and growth of those institutions, particularly in terms of funding, innovation, capacity, and community services. This harm would disproportionately impact smaller, rural communities as well as historically underserved communities, limiting access to critical resources supporting teachers, students, job seekers, families, seniors, and community organizations throughout the United States of America. As an organization focused on library leadership, infrastructure, and futures, Core believes that libraries are an investment that make communities and our nation stronger.
“IMLS provides immense value to U.S. communities by supporting education, preserving culture, promoting digital innovation, contributing to economic growth, enhancing social cohesion, and fostering community access to services.” says Core President Angie Ohler. “It helps ensure that libraries and museums can continue to serve as vital resources that benefit individuals and society as a whole.”
The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) provides significant value to U.S. communities in several key ways:
Core joins ALA in calling on all Americans who value reading, learning, and enrichment to reach out to their elected leaders to object to the gutting of the IMLS and Show Up for Our Libraries at library and school meetings, town halls, and everywhere decisions are made about libraries. Core believes in building libraries and library professionals. You can help us build that future too by becoming a supporter of the American Library Association and supporting Core.
One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the Public Citizen blog offers an extreme example of this blight. Here’s the summary of what happened:
When Julien Coallier sent a series of DMCA takedown requests contending that various print publications of Shakespeare’s plays, and YouTube videos of performances of those plays, infringed his purported copyright in those works, it should have been treated as a bad joke. After all, Shakespeare’s plays were published more than 400 years ago, and it is hard to imagine the[m] as being anything but public domain. Yet not only did YouTube take the demands seriously, it blew off those takedown targets who filed counter-notifications and who asserted their right to publish plainly public domain material.
There are several issues here. One concerns the cavalier manner in which YouTube dealt with this situation – sadly, by no means an isolated incident. As the Public Citizen post explains, one of the video takedown victims was John Underwood, who had posted on YouTube videos of Shakespeare performances by a local non-profit group called Shakespeare by the Sea. When he received notice that two of his videos had been removed because a takedown notice sent by Coallier, Underwood followed the DMCA rules, and sent a counter-notice. He not unnaturally assumed that would resolve such a clear-cut case, not least because Shakespeare by the Seas assured him that it had not relied on Coallier’s claimed version of the Shakespeare plays for their performances. But YouTube ignored the official DMCA procedures and refused to acknowledge Underwood’s counter-notice, or even forward it to Coallier. This was not a one-off: other targets of Coallier’s take-down had also had their counter-notices ignored by YouTube. So Underwood contacted Coallier directly:
In multiple emails, Coallier declined to explain why he thought Underwood’s videos copied Coallier’s “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays, despite being asked repeatedly. Instead, Coallier told them that Shakespeare is not in the public domain because he had been able to register a copyright in so-called English-language “translations” of every one of Shakespeare’s plays. Coallier also claimed that he can charge a five percent royalty on every performance.
This brings us to the second issue: how could the US Copyright Office grant Coallier’s copyright registration? The author of the Public Citizen post, Paul Levy, went to the trouble of obtaining copies of the copyright registration, and found that only two of Coallier’s “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays had been submitted:
Apparently, it was on on the strength of these two “translations” that the Copyright Office granted a registration of Coallier’s copyright in three dozen “translated” plays – tragedies, comedies and histories – without receiving copies of any of the other works in which the Copyright Office was potentially granting a monopoly.
As to what Coallier’s translation amounted to, Levy sent a copy of the Coallier’s work to a Shakespeare expert, Jan Powell:
It was Powell’s opinion that the translation was such a mess that no reputable Shakespeare company would perform a script based on Coallier’s work. In addition to the fact that Coallier’s scripts did away with the iambic pentameter that is the glory of Shakespeare’s plays, she found his “translation” to be a garbled mess.
Following the intervention of Public Citizen, YouTube suddenly started to respond. It accepted Underwood’s counternotice and forwarded it to Coallier, who did not sue Underwood for alleged infringement, as he could have done. Not content with seeing off this abuse of the DMCA takedown system, Public Citizen is going further:
This week, in concert with the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic at Stanford Law School, we have sued Coallier seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, and seeking relief for a DMCA wrongful takedown. Corey Donaldson of the Los Angeles area firm of Ferguson Case Orr Paterson is co-counsel in the case. In addition to securing relief for Underwood, we hope to spur the district court to invoke 17 U.S.C. § 411(b) to suggest to the Copyright Office that it reconsider its registration of Coallier’s copyright.
That’s good news, but it is utterly absurd that so much effort was required to deal with a situation that should never have arisen. The copyright in these “translations” of Shakespeare should never have been granted, not least because only two of the plays were submitted, and yet registration was granted for all the rest of them sight unseen. And YouTube should have followed the rules of the DMCA, which is in any case already strongly biased in favor of those alleging copyright infringement. As Levy concludes:
We also hope that YouTube will consider whether DMCA takedown notices should have to pass the laugh test before they are effected, and consider also how it responds to DMCA counter-notifications. Although I am grateful to the YouTube lawyers who responded so promptly to my inquiries, the system is not working as it should. Many YouTube content creators are hobbyists and amateurs, and do not have the same ability to reach a YouTube lawyer. Abuse of the DMCA for cheap censorship by bad actors who would never file a copyright lawsuit over their claims has long been noted (for example, this post from EFF, which sent Underwood to me for help). It should not take a request from a lawyer to get YouTube to follow the DMCA and counternotices seriously.
This extraordinary saga of takedown notices for performances of Shakespeare show that 27 years after it was passed, the DMCA is still not fit for purpose. The companies like Google that are tasked with implementing it often do so in the most desultory way. There is an underlying assumption that claimed infringements are valid, an injustice compound by an arrogant indifference to the rights of ordinary citizens who find themselves caught up in a complex copyright system that is stacked against them.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
“You’re next,” said a Russian historian I interviewed in 1993 about the Soviet Union’s collapse in late 1991. I was an American student in St. Petersburg, and he was referring to the United States.
His argument was informed by a pseudo-scientific demographic theory that would eventually find favour in the Kremlin, but more remarkable to me then was the hopefulness with which he spoke.
If this man is still alive, he must be feeling vindicated. America’s current retreat from its engagements around the world — from gutting USAid to abandoning European allies — constitutes a surrender of power comparable in living memory only to Mikhail Gorbachev’s unilateral withdrawals from Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and elsewhere between 1988 and 1991 — right before the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Accompanying both foreign policy about-faces, we can’t miss profound shifts in the two states’ ideological foundations.
Gorbachev justified his “restructuring” or perestroika by invoking the Soviet Union’s founding father, Vladimir Lenin. He did so, however, by observing that the historical Lenin had pragmatically modified policies according to circumstances. That called into question the mythological Lenin — an infallible hero whose virtues could not be questioned.
The Russian-born American anthropologist Alexei Yurchak argues that Lenin was the Soviet system’s “master signifier.”
As long as his sacredness remained unquestioned, referring to Lenin could legitimize a range of policies and actions. Viewing Lenin through a historical lens, however, called his sacredness into question. It consequently became impossible for Soviet citizens to agree on what policies and actions were legitimate. This crisis of meaning allowed chronic political, economic and social problems to suddenly to become devastating.
America’s master signifier is its Constitution, reverentially enshrined in Washington, D.C., rather like Lenin’s body is in Moscow. Under President Donald Trump, however, violations of the Constitution have become routine, and the federal government’s legislative branch has shown little will to guard its powers from executive encroachment. Like Lenin under Gorbachev, it seems that the sacred centre of America’s political system has become destabilized.
As a written contract, a constitution is easier to interpret than the thoughts of a dead man. Lenin’s advantage, however, was that he could embody traits considered virtuous in the Soviet system. Where could Americans look for that same type of guiding light?
For most of American history, it was George Washington — the first president who swore to uphold the Constitution.
As a hero of the Revolutionary War, Washington could have become king.
Army officers, frustrated at the central government’s weakness after the war under the Articles of Confederation, considered a coup d'état. Washington — the army’s commander in chief — could have led the overthrow (as Oliver Cromwell had or Napoleon Bonaparte would).
Washington refused, and after British capitulation in 1783, he relinquished his command to Congress.
In 1789, after the Constitution was ratified as a legal solution to the problems of confederation, Washington was unanimously elected president. After two terms, however, he rejected suggestions that he stand for a third.
He frequently stressed the importance of habit in human affairs and reasoned that, if he clung to power, Americans might not get accustomed to peaceful and regular rotation of office. By retiring, he transferred much of the reverence that had accrued to him onto the Constitution.
Washington’s birthday falls on Feb. 22, and Americans began observing it while he was still alive. In 1879, U.S. Congress made the day a federal holiday, an occasion for celebrating the example of selfless public service and respect for the rule of law that “the father of his country” had embodied.
So it remained until 1971.
In that year, the Monday Holiday Act went into effect. Adopted in 1968 at the behest of the business lobby, which saw in three-day weekends an opportunity for sales, the act moved Washington’s birthday commemoration to the third Monday in February.
Since many states also celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and the new date fell between his and Washington’s, some began calling it “Presidents’ Day.” When nationwide advertisers and calendar-makers adopted the term in the 1980s, it came to seem official.
The name change, of course, eroded the holiday’s connection to Washington, and insofar as it remained more than a shopping day, it came to be associated with all the presidents, effectively cheapening it. Though the federal holiday officially remains “Washington’s Birthday,” few Americans know that.
The shift happened to coincide with a wave of revisionist historiography that pointed out Washington — a slave-owner — was not perfect.
All historiography is revisionist in the sense that historians revise existing interpretations on the basis of new evidence. For those who wanted an untainted idol, however, it appeared either that Washington could no longer fit the bill or that historical facts had to be massaged.
Ever since, historical assessments have tended to get lost in culture wars, where neither side can accept a real person with both reprehensible and admirable traits.
In the Soviet Union, however, most citizens found it difficult to think historically about Lenin because, under the conditions of dictatorship, open public debate based on factual information about him had been impossible.
Dictatorship depends on mythological thinking that worships heroes and does not expose contradictions between official pronouncements and reality. In the early 1990s, Russians failed to establish the rule of law for a similar reason: they could not overcome the habit of mythologizing, which made them prioritize personality over policy.
The personality they chose as independent Russia’s first president — Boris Yeltsin — lacked Washington’s respect for the rule of law.
Read more: The wild decade: how the 1990s laid the foundations for Vladimir Putin's Russia
Thanks to Washington, the U.S. got off to a better start. But by abandoning the widespread commemoration of his historically exceptional deference to the rule of law, Americans have have lost an opportunity to practise historical thinking in the public sphere.
Not only has mythological thinking encroached, but it is now even possible for a president to style himself as a monarch and to emulate Napoleon, as Donald Trump has.
The Constitution — America’s master signifier — has lost its ability to unite citizens around a shared sense of meaningfulness.
Will Washington’s country be next?
James Krapfl does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In a radio discussion on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, a journalist asked me which year these schemes started in the UK. I felt thrown by the question. It assumed that the broad array of initiatives associated with DEI, including policies, training programmes, themed events and staff networks, had an inception date. I responded, as I often do: “It’s complicated.”
DEI schemes are facing significant challenges. In the USA, president Donald Trump has used executive orders to terminate initiatives across federal agencies. Some private companies, including those with headquarters in the UK, have also seized on this moment to cut these commitments.
Critics may argue the objectives of DEI schemes have gone too far and mutated into a dogmatic belief system.
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly, for them, a line was crossed. Perhaps it was when senior civil servants urged their teams to recognise “white privilege”, when employers introduced changes to reflect colleagues’ neurodiversity or when policies began acknowledging trans and non-binary people?
As a researcher and writer on DEI, I find myself pushed into a corner. Aware that comments like “It’s complicated” do not create a snappy soundbite, I feel coaxed into defending all these schemes. Even though my work has long argued that many approaches do nothing to address entrenched inequities in organisations (for example, poor working conditions, low pay and precarious employment – problems not unique to minority communities).
Even worse, they can give the illusion of action, preventing more worthwhile initiatives from taking place.
But there is an opportunity to reimagine DEI in the workplace, ensuring that potentially transformative schemes are not abandoned because of political winds. That may also mean choosing not to defend schemes that were never fit for purpose.
To help shepherd in this new era, it is essential to focus on how organisations categorise and count workers. In most UK workplaces, employees are invited to disclose information about their sex, race, sexual orientation, disability, religion and other characteristics in their human resources record. This data is used to give insights on diversity across roles, calculate pay gaps, design recruitment schemes and for other targeted initiatives.
Data about workers’ identity characteristics – and the contours of categories that determine who counts – is the fuel that powers DEI schemes. For individuals who fall between category cracks, a data-first approach was never going to represent their lives and experiences in a meaningful way and always force them into boxes not of their choosing.
Focusing attention on categories and counting, I believe there are three principles that need to inform the future of DEI schemes.
Let’s be honest, DEI schemes were never perfect. As a knee-jerk response to movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter, many companies introduced initiatives that could never deliver all that they promised.
Noble objectives such as visibility and inclusion routinely failed to counter the risks that come with bringing people into historically hostile and exclusionary organisations. For example, initiatives that support women into careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) lose all value if they fail to change work cultures, meaning that women continue to leave the sector at a higher rate than men.
Data is everywhere in conversations about DEI – whether it’s the proportion of women in senior leadership roles or the number of survey responses from disabled employees. It can have a huge impact, but we need to temper our faith that data alone can remedy the stickiest DEI challenges.
Overoptimism in data embeds a belief that all aspects of a person’s identity in the workplace can and should be counted. Organisations need to consider what their schemes expect from workers, as inviting people to share information affects some staff more than others. For example, trans workers are forced to reveal themselves in the data to ensure they are not counted in the “wrong way” or, when choosing to withhold sensitive information, find themselves unfairly labelled as duplicitous.
However, archaic HR systems and other data-gathering technologies are often ill-designed to deal with experiences that are complex, fluid and overlapping. While many aspects of the workplace have radically changed during the past 15 years, employers’ approach to the collection of identity data has remained relatively static.
In the process of categorising and counting workers, DEI schemes partly alter understandings of what it means to see yourself as a member of a minoritised community.
For example, designing the category “Black British” then collecting data about “Black British” workers partly constructs what experiences are understood to count. People put themselves into the category expected of them. While these categories can create a sense of community, they also impede the actions of individuals who go against stereotypes and pursue careers “outside the box”.
As US historian of science Theodore M. Porter observed, counting practices “create new things and transform the meaning of old ones”. In other words, efforts to count what happens in the workplace are always going to be partly shaped by who does the counting.
The interplay between DEI schemes and practices of categorising and counting forces many workers into providing data that testifies to their existence and the harms they experience in the workplace. However, data does not always change the minds of decision-makers. Too often it can be discarded as anecdotal or biased because those collecting it shared life experiences with their research subjects.
What comes next needs to be anchored in solidarity across shared struggles. DEI schemes are not a special dispensation nor bending to a lower standard, but above all else they are about ways of working that empower everyone to excel.
Kevin Guyan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
