Attempting to End Political Conflicts by Eliminating Diversity

In a recent video, renowned mediator and peacemaker Ken Cloke discusses political discourse.

Over the years, I’ve heard people and groups comment on efforts by others to “erase” their existence or the existence of a particular group of which they are a member. Cloke refers to such “erasure” as “eliminating diversity.” In particular, he says the following in that regard:

“ Conservatives are trying to stop political conflicts by eliminating diversity.”

He explains that diversity is a necessary element of political conflict. Therefore, by working toward “eliminating diversity,” they “eliminate” the political conflict, from their perspective. In particular, Cloke says the following in that regard:

“ There are three elements of a political conflict. First, there has to be diversity, meaning differences…. Second, there has to be inequality…. Third, the presence of an adversarial win/lose process for deciding whose alternative views of the future are going to get implemented.”

Cloke also explains that working toward “eliminating diversity” is an aspect of fascism and stems both from fear and “a low tolerance for ambiguity.” Cloke explains it as follows:

“ There is a wonderful quotation from Umberto Eco, who fought against Mussolini at the end of WWII. He wrote an essay called Eternal Fascism. In it, he defines fascism as ‘the simplification of language to the point that complex thought becomes impossible.’…

In addition to domination by excluding groups of people who have a problem from having a voice in how to solve it and in otherwise participating, there is a psychological reason why democracy is frightening to people who are afraid of each other. They lack the skills to handle somebody else’s culture and somebody else’s ideas…. There is an effort to destroy the complexity…. Fascism is a kind of conflict resolution project.

When countries talk about immigrants, it’s about ‘us’ against ‘them.’ The same is true of Christians against Jews, men against women, heterosexuals against homosexuals. In each one of these cases, what we’re looking at is for permission to treat some group of people badly. As soon as you obtain such permission, you move on to the next group and then the next group…. There are groups of people over whom domination is acceptable, based upon history.

On some level, sexual harassment is about repression [a means of erasure]. It is also a form of domination. This is why we find that military forces engage in acts of rape and sexual harassment whenever the conquer another country. It’s one of the ways in which they show their domination.”

This morning, I read about the most recent diversity elimination effort.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear titled Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence that was published by the New York Times on October 21, 2018:

“ The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of sex in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing sex largely as an individual’s choice — and prompting fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

‘Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,’ the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. ‘The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.’

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

‘This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,’ said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.”

In an article titled “Male or female? It’s not always so simple: UCLA researchers are studying the biological origins of sexual orientation and gender identity” that was published in the UCLA Newsroom on August 20, 2015, Veronica Meade-Kelly states as follows:

“ People often are unaware of the biological complexity of sex and gender, says Dr. Eric Vilain, director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at UCLA, where he studies genetics of sexual development and sex differences. ‘People tend to define sex in a binary way – either wholly make or wholly female – based on physical appearance or by which sex chromosomes an individual carries. But while sex and gender may seem dichotomous, there are in reality many intermediates.’

Understanding this complexity is critical; misperceptions can affect the health and civil liberties of those who fall outside of perceived societal norms, Dr. Vilain says. ‘Society has categorical views on what should define sex and gender, but the biological reality is just not there to support that.’”

Interestingly enough, Yale Law School published an article by Kenji Koshino titled The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure on January 1, 2000.  The following is an excerpt from that article:

" [B]isexuals (under any plausible definition of bisexuality) are much less socially and politically visible than homosexuals…. This is not a reflection of the fact that there are fewer bisexuals than there are homosexuals in the population, but is rather a product of social erasure….

Both self-identified straights and self-identified gays have [an interest] in bisexual erasure....

The first investment monosexuals have in bisexual erasure is an interest in stabilizing sexual orientation. The component of that interest shared by both straights and gays is an interest in knowing one's place in the social order: both straights and gays value this knowledge because it relieves them of the anxiety of identity interrogation. Straights have a more specific interest in ensuring the stability of heterosexuality because that identity is privileged. Less intuitively, gays also have a specific interest in guarding the stability of homosexuality, insofar as they view that stability as the predicate for the 'immutability defense' or for effective political mobilization. Bisexuality threatens all of these interests because it precludes both straights and gays from 'proving' that they are either straight or gay. This is because straights (for example) can only prove that they are straight by adducing evidence of cross-sex desire. (They cannot adduce evidence of the absence of same-sex desire, as it is impossible to prove a negative.) But this means that straights can never definitively prove that they are straight in a world in which bisexuals exist, as the individual who adduces cross-sex desire could be either straight or bisexual, and there is no definitive way to arbitrate btween those two possibilities. Bisexuality is thus threatening to all monosexuals because it makes it impossible to prove a monosexual identity.

The second interest monosexuals have in bisexual erasure is an interest in retaining the importance of sex as a distinguishing trait in society. Straights and gays have a shared investment in this because to be straight or to be gay is to discriminate erotically on the basis of sex. Straights have a specific interest in preserving the importance of sex because sex norms are currently read through a heterosexual matrix: to be a man or a woman in contemporary American society is in part defined by one's sexual attractiveness to the opposite sex. Gays also have a particular interest in sex distinctions, as homosexuality is often viewed as a way to engage in complete sex separatism-that is, as a means of creating single-sex communities that are bonded together erotically as well as socially and politically. Bisexuality endangers all of these interests because it posits a world in which sex need not (or should not) matter as much as monosexuals want it to matter. Indeed, bisexuals and asexuals are the only sexual orientation groups that have at least the capacity not to discriminate on the basis of sex in any aspect of their lives.

The final interest that monosexuals have in bisexual erasure is an interest in defending norms of monogamy. Both straights and gays share this interest, as the dominant ethic of contemporary American society favors dyadic relationships. Straights may have a particular interest in this insofar as the form of nonmonogamy associated with bisexuals has been connected to HIV infection, with bisexual 'promiscuity' acting as a bridge (phantasmatically if not actually) between the 'infected' gay population and the 'uninfected' straight population. Gays may have a particular interest in monogamy insofar as they seek to assimilate into 'mainstream' society. Bisexuality threatens all of these interests because bisexuals are often perceived to be 'intrinsically' nonmonogamous.

Thus, along at least three different axes, both gays and straights have distinct but overlapping interests that are threatened by the concept of bisexuality. It is thus unsurprising that both of these sexual orientation groups collude in bisexual erasure."

On October 10, 2018, Judge Reed O’Connor engaged in similar erasures as explained in the following excerpt from an article by Delia Sharpe and Jedd Parr titled ICWA is under attack again which was published in the October 12, 2018 edition of the Los Angeles Daily Journal:

"The Indian Child Welfare Act, and potentially tribal sovereignty, suffered a significant setback last week when a federal court held the landmark legislation unconstitutional....

Passed by Congress in 1978, ICWA was designed to reverse decades of culturally biased and abusive practices that led to one-third of all tribal children being forcibly removed by the government from their families and tribal communities - a substantially higher removal rate than any other group.

Over its 40-year history, ICWA has survived numerous challenges, including a case recently before the U.S. Supreme Court where the court declined to rule ICWA unconstitutional. Despite this history, the decision from the Northern District of Texas held ICWA invalid on multiple grounds, characterizing it as a race-based statute in violation of the equal protection clause as well as the Tenth Amendment's prohibition against commandeering.

The case is part of an ongoing national campaign by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative organization based in Arizona, which for several years has pursued anti-ICWA litigation in various courts across the country. Interestingly, its late namesake, the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) voted in favor of the ICWA in 1977, and ICWA;s author, retired Sen James Abourezk (D-SD), is adamant that Goldwater, his friend and colleague, would be opposed to the institute's Anti-ICWA efforts if alive today....

In passing ICWA, Congress specifically found that Indian children are best served by placement, if possible, in homes which keep them connected to their extended family and their tribes. This position is supported today by numerous child welfare organizations....

The holding that ICWA is a race-based statute, rather than a statute based on a parent's or child's political status as a citizen of a federally recognized tribe, could open the door for all federal legislation involving Indian tribes to be undone. Indian Health Services and similar programs could disappear. Tribal lands, owned by the federal government and held in trust for tribes, could be sold off or opened to oil, gas, or minerals extraction - a factor reportedly in consideration in the recent and controversial reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument. Even tribes' status as sovereign entities is potentially at risk.

From Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, to social services advocates, to tribes nationwide, the ruling has generated a wave of support for ICWA, and to vows to defend the 40-year-old law which has helped reverse decades of culturally abusive practices."

In an article titled Trump Invokes ‘All Lives Matter’ Logic to Erase Jews from Holocaust that was published by the Advocate on January 29, 2017, Lucas Grindley said the following:

“ The White House confirmed it purposely excluded Jewish people from its statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday.

Now we know for sure: Jews were purposely omitted from the White House’s official statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday. 

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN that Jewish people weren’t mentioned because, ‘despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.’

That explanation from the Trump administration sounds familiar to anyone who paid attention to the so-called alt-right’s campaign to belittle Black Lives Matter. They invented ‘All Lives Matter.’

To those peddling in this slogan, it was unfair to focus on police killing black people because others had been killed, in other ways, and no one deserves ‘special’ attention. The subsequent ‘Blue Lives Matter’ slogan claims it is unfair to give attention to black people killed by police so long as police are also killed in the line of duty….

When the official White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews, some assumed it was a terrible oversight. Turns out it wasn’t.

The White House made the decision not to list those who were persecuted by Nazis, including gays and lesbians, and instead labeled them all as ‘innocent people’ killed by ‘Nazi terror.’ The CEO of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called that ‘puzzling and troubling’ even before Hicks confirmed it was intentional.

It’s disturbing because history is factual, as pointed out by John Podhoretz for Commentary magazine in response to the Hicks comment on CNN.

‘No, Hope Hicks, and no to whomever you are serving as a mouthpiece,’ wrote Podhoretz. ‘The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups—Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others. But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews. There is no ‘proud’ way to offer a remembrance of the Holocaust that does not reflect that simple, awful, world-historical fact. To universalize it to ‘all those who suffered’ is to scrub the Holocaust of its meaning.’”

Republicans did the exact same thing following the Orlando massacre at a gay nightclub. Consider the following excerpt from an article by James Richardson titled Republicans, Start Saying ‘Gay’ When You Talk About Orlando that was published by Time Magazine on June 14, 20016:

“ Nearly 35 years to the day before a lone gunman would enter a gay nightclub in Florida and butcher dozens of innocents in the deadliest mass shooting in America’s bloody history, the federal government’s public health institute documented five cases of a rare lung infection that would quickly spiral to claim the lives of 25 million.

Then, just as now, Republican condolences have been chilling. Indeed, as conservatives broadly lament the tragedy only to gracefully sidestep the acute animus that bore it, they continue in a shameful tradition of indifference to the lives, and disproportionate suffering, of gay men and women.

The horror and breadth of the incident—some 49 perished as another 53 were injured, clinging to a life that will forever bear the scars of hate—commanded a response, just as the deaths of nearly 7 mission AIDS victims compelled President Ronald Reagan to begin addressing the crisis in earnest, some four years after those first documented cases in 1981.

The symmetry is startling: just as Republicans of the Reagan era for years took shelter from the subject of AIDS, today’s partisans have notably whitewashed the sexuality of the Orlando victims.

Say it, damn it: they were gay, and for it they were marked for death by a radical Islamist terrorist. Now, that’s not to say the victims were singularly defined by their sexuality—indeed, they were sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, friends and lovers—but to blur their identity is to willfully disrespect their memory and their fight to live authentically and freely.

Silence is no conservative ethic, and yet it continues to tether our pained present to the shameful stigmas of our past. With sparse exception, many Republicans pointedly refused to utter the word 'gay' in the hours that followed the massacre. It was almost as though they feared their own sexual orientation would shift with the utterance—gay!

Men and women were slaughtered. Not for their nationality. Nor for their creed. But because they were gay. And still GOP leaders hide behind broad and bland references to 'victims and their families,' apparently a sophist euphemism for queer….

Today’s Republican Party is older and whiter than any period in its 162-year history. Today’s electorate, though, isn’t: it’s young, it’s diverse. And it’s also just a little gay.

Courting diverse communities is no longer a whimsical coincidental strategy for Republicans, but a singular, imperative one. That means actually addressing those communities. That means actually identifying them—yes, saying the word gay.

It took years of suffering, of healthy young men spoiling into half-living cadavers, for Republicans to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic. Their silence took a fatal toll. Don’t allow the same to happen with Orlando.”

The Trump Administration engaged in similar “erasures” by removing questions pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity from the 2020 Census. Such “erasure” was explained as follows by Glenn Garner in an article titled Trump Administration Omits LGBTQ People from 2020 Census that was published by Out Magazine on March 28, 2017:

“ Expectations that the 2020 census might start including LGBTQ subjects were raised and then quickly dashed on Tuesday after the U.S. Census admitted that it had ‘inadvertently’ included ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity,’ in a long-awaited report outlining new categories for the survey. In response, GLAAD's CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, branded the move as a ‘systematic effort on behalf of the Trump administration to erase LGBT people.’

Last year, various federal agencies urged the Census Bureau to include sexual orientation and gender in their data as it was crucial to their role in enforcing the law. The survey, which has been conducted every ten years since 1790, includes a wide range of questions designed to gather data on everything from languages spoken to household plumbing facilities. The current census, however, only allows for a snapshot of same-sex households, but Democrats in Congress had pushed for more specific questions around sexual orientation and gender identity to improve results. The logic was simple: With more focused questions law makers would be better equipped to ensure appropriate legislation to improve the lives of LGBTQ citizens.

Although the Supreme Court, in 2013, struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way for the census to change the way it tracks same-sex households, the White House has sent yet another powerful signal that it considers LGBTQ concerns as frivolous. 

Meghan Maury, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force released a statement:

‘Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need? We call on President Trump and his Administration to begin collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data on the American Community Survey as soon as possible and urge Congress to conduct oversight hearings to reveal why the Administration made the last-minute decision not to collect data on LGBTQ people.’”

Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE), commonly known as reparative therapy, conversion therapy, or ex-gay therapy exist to “erase” diversity with regard to human sexuality.

For example, the following is an excerpt from an article by Sam Brinton titled I Was Tortured in Gay Conversion Therapy. And It’s Still Legal in 41 States. that was published in the New York Times on January 24, 2018:

“ In the early 2000s, when I was a middle schooler in Florida, I was subjected to a trauma that was meant to erase my existence as a newly out bisexual. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries who believed that the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy could ‘cure’ my sexuality.”

Along those same lines, consider the following excerpt from an article by Michael Majchrowicz and Mary Katherine Wildeman titled 'Taught to hate myself’: How gay conversion therapy in SC is thriving that was published in the October 2, 2018 edition of The Post and Courier:

“ Unflattering portrayals of conversion therapy have found their way into popular culture. Two films this year, ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ and ‘Boy Erased,’ chronical the plights of teenagers forced into the therapy….

Bob Jones University, a Christian liberal arts college in Greenville, takes the official position that homosexuality is immoral and same-sex attractions can be repressed over overcome….

Being gay, Mitchell Reid was told, made him an outcast amount men and a deviant in the eyes of God. Twice, he considered taking his own life.

Throughout his three decades in conversion therapy, counselor after counselor promised what they hailed as a breakthrough cure-all: a road map to heterosexuality.

‘You feel your soul is distorted and evil and broken because of something you can’t change. What do you do?’ Reid said. ‘You do everything you can to change yourself. That’s why I went into all these therapies.’

Conversion therapy, also called reparative therapy, is designed to suppress or eradicate a person’s LGBTQ identity. The practice has flourished for decades, despite legislative efforts to stamp it out.

Still, the movement has ardent supporters who are convinced these practices can cure sexual attractions or behavior they view as a sin and a moral affliction. UCLA researchers estimated earlier this year 57,000 teenagers across the nation will receive conversion therapy from a religious figure before they turn 18.

Though some states have banned the practice, such policies don’t apply to faith-based counselors or religious organizations, which has emboldened the movement. Particularly in the Deep South.

South Carolina has never introduced legislation to curb or end conversion therapy. In fact, the state is home to one of the nation’s most expansive networks of ex-gay ministries and counseling practices.

Over the course of seven months, The Post and Courier identified 22 of these ministries, churches and practitioners across the Southeast. At least nine of these groups operate in South Carolina.

Reid, 58, never felt close to piecing together why he wasn’t attracted to women. The counseling sessions, he said, offered varied rationalizations: He’d disengaged with his masculinity because he wasn’t close enough to his father; he’d become too close with his mother; he had repressed traumatic memories.

‘I had been hoodwinked,’ Reid said. ‘Not only was I spiritually abuse, it was emotional abuse.’…

Mitchell Reid, for instance, spent most of his adult life in counselors’ offices and church basements trying to erase a part of himself that felt natural – the part of himself he was told for three decades was an abomination that could be changed through prayer.

Months after his final counseling session, he gathered three decades’ worth of ex-gay readings he had amassed in his home. One by one, he tossed them into a fire. ‘A burnt offering to God,’ Reid called it.

I had been lied to my whole life by people and a church that should have been my support, instead of my greatest pain and hurt and abuse,’ he said.

Seven years after he stopped trying to change his sexuality, Reid still believes in God. A God who won’t condemn him for living openly as a gay man.”

On January 29, 2017, I posted the following commentary on my personal Facebook page, when I shared the information on the Trump Administration’s erasure of Jews from the Holocaust and gays from the Orlando Massacre at the gay nightclub:

“It's the same when responding to "Black Lives Matter" with the slogan "All Lives Matter."

This is a very distinct pattern, and I pick up on patterns.

Patterns exist for a reason. In this case, the reason behind the pattern is the erasure of the actual victims, and thus the erasure of the actual perpetrators and the hateful motives underlying such tragedies….

As occurred during in Nazi Germany, it has to do with those viewed as "inferior."…

Holocaust survivor, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate and author Elie Wiesel said, 'No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.'”

When people say we should be “color blind” to a person’s race, when the research clearly demonstrates such a thing is not humanly possible, people, are “eliminating diversity.” When people say that gays and lesbians shouldn’t shove their sexuality in other people’s faces by disclosing that they are gay and lesbian, they are “eliminating diversity” by eliminating the appearance of diversity.

Of course, this doesn’t make the diversity that actually exists disappear; however, it does result in the elimination of protections for members of historically marginalized groups.

As Cloke explains, because "conservatives are trying to stop political conflicts by eliminating diversity, everyone competes to be part of the dominant group." This is why many LGBTQ people remain in the closet, for example. Ta-Nehisi Coates also explained self-erasure regarding racial differences in her article titled I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye: Kanye West Wants Freedom--White Freedom that was published in The Atlantic on May 7, 2018. In that article, she states as follows:

“ This was 1982, and Michael Jackson was God, but not just God in scope and power, though there was certainly that, but God in his great mystery; God in how a child would hear tell of him, God in how he lived among the legend and lore; God because the Walkman was still uncommon, and I was young and could not count on the car radio, because my parents lived between NPR and WTOP. So the legends were all I had—tales of remarkable feats and fantastic deeds: Michael Jackson mediated gang wars; Michael Jackson was the zombie king; Michael Jackson tapped his foot and stones turned to light. Even his accoutrements felt beyond me—the studded jacket, the sparkling glove, the leather pants—raiment of the divine, untouchable by me, a mortal child who squinted to see past Saturday, who would not even see  Motown 25 until it was past 30, who would not even own a copy of  Thriller until I was a grown man, who no longer believed in miracles, and knew in my heart that if the black man’s God was not dead, he surely was dying.

And he had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown, and we would forget his pharaoh’s nose, forget his vast eyes, his dazzling smile, and Michael Jackson was but the extreme of what felt in those post-disco years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of black men on album covers smiling back at me in Jheri curls and blue contacts and I think of black women who seemed, by some mystic edict, to all be the color of manila folders. Michael Jackson might have been dying to be white, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a black god dying to be white?

Kanye west, a god in this time, awakened, recently, from a long public slumber to embrace Donald Trump. He hailed Trump, as a ‘brother,’ a fellow bearer of ‘dragon energy,’ and impugned those who objected as suppressors of ‘unpopular questions,’ ‘thought police’ whose tactics were ‘based on fear.’ It was Trump, West argued, not Obama, who gave him hope that a black boy from the South Side of Chicago could be president….

The planks of Trumpism are clear—the better banning of Muslims, the improved scapegoating of Latinos, the endorsement of racist conspiracy, the denialism of science, the cheering of economic charlatans, the urging on of barbarian cops and barbarian bosses, the cheering of torture, and the condemnation of whole countries. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible....

When I heard Kanye, I felt myself back in communion with something that I felt had been lost, a sense of ancestry in every sample, a sound that went back to the separated and unequal, that went back to the slave….

There’s nothing original in this tale and there’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity. But for black artists who rise to the heights of Jackson and West, the weight is more, because they come from communities in desperate need of champions. Kurt Cobain’s death was a great tragedy for his legions of fans. Tupac’s was a tragedy for an entire people. When brilliant black artists fall down on the stage, they don’t fall down alone. The story of West 'drugged out,' as he put it, reduced by the media glare to liposuction, is not merely about how he feels about his body. It was that drugged-out West who appeared in that gaudy lobby, dead-eyed and blonde-haired, and by his very presence endorsed the agenda of Donald Trump….

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that  we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. 'He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,' T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a 'free thinker,' and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and  fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas....

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a 'choice' echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Guilianism; and West’s desire to 'go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides' is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a 'travel ban,' which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world....

Maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of 'I,' but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home."

While conservatives may be able to erase diversity from history by re-writing it and cause those those who look think and act differently to repress their diversity in order to try and fit in in an effort to be accepted, they can never actually eliminate diversity, regardless of how hard they try. As long as humankind survives, there will always be people who don’t look, think and act the same. As Cloke explains, "the sources of chronic conflict will endure for as long as groups of people who have a problem are excluded from having a voice in how to solve it." Therefore efforts to eliminate diversity as a result of fear, a low tolerance for ambiguity, and a lack of skills needed to handle somebody else’s culture and ideas can never be successful, although such efforts cause a great deal of harm.

Cloke explains it in more detail as follows:

“ A great many of the difficulties our society is facing today stem from the fact that we don’t have the courage to talk about the truth pertaining to our history and what it is that’s actually going on. Truth emerges through dialogue. There are two reasons for the dialogue to take place. One involves something substantive that people can talk about with each other that makes a difference to them. The second reason involves the development of skills needed for democracy. Regardless of the outcome of an issue, people feel that they can talk to each other about issues on which they disagree without it ending with screaming and yelling. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are both trying to get people to talk about difficult issues in such a manner.

Lots of the difficulties we are facing stem from the fact that we don’t have the courage to talk about the truth, about our history, and what it is that’s actually going on.”

Here's to hoping we gain such courage, and sooner than later!