How the left could change the discourse.
Plus an event on how to be more resilient, and more helpful tools on Covid-19.
This is coming two days late, because life. Thank you for bearing with me.
🧑🏽💼U.S. Politics and Racism
While the U.S. left try to figure out why a larger proportion of minorities have voted to reelect their 45th president, Ian Haney López, of UC Berkeley, is eager to share his research on what liberals and progressives are missing about racism in politics.
Here’s the tl;dr version.
The right dog whistles (or, more accurately in 2020, fog horns) to stoke racial anxiety.
The left, justifiably outraged, campaigns on “look at these horrible racists!” Which… convinces no one to vote left — aside from the ones who were already voting left.
Haney López does his research and finds out that the sort of messaging that gets people to vote left goes like this: “The right want you to believe that Black and Brown people are the reason you’re not doing well, but that’s a smokescreen. The reason you’re doing poorly is that they don’t want workers to organise, create coalitions, and fight together to improve their lot.”
A few local campaigns give it a go, and whaddaya know, it works!
I’m mangling this. Lucky for all of us, he and his team put together Race-Class Academy, a site in which they explain their findings to help change the tone of campaigns, so progressives can actually create change. Here’s the first video:
How to use this: Joe Biden’s election was never the end goal. If you want to help shift the conversation and are looking for ways to effect change, you could do worse than follow this course.
🖥 Stress and resilience: a live chat.
This Tuesday we’ll be hosting a live conversation with Judy Moskowitz, of Northwestern, and George Bonanno, of Columbia University. They’re going to be talking about, well, stress and resilience. Because OF COURSE you’re stressed, who isn’t, and everyone needs help coping from time to time. These two have science-backed strategies — I know, they told us! In our preparatory exchanges, one of the most intriguing ideas was the concept of “coping ugly,” — doing what you need to do to get through it, even if it doesn’t seem “correct.” We’ll touch on that. Tune in!
How to use it: sign up here and leave your questions.
💡More enlightening tools
1. Another helpful visual representation, interactive this time.
Pëllumb Dalipi sent me this one. It was made by Die Zeit, taking the El País idea I shared with you a few weeks ago, and making it interactive. Here’s a quick video of me playing with it:
2. A granular evaluation of risk.
This one comes from Lisa Sholley. If you’re looking to get precise, because you’re thinking of a situation in particular, with people of various vulnerability levels, this is where you would go. I did another quick demo here for you as well:
How to use this: use them, share them.