A girl at school felt ill, and had to go home. Of course, we need to establish contact with the family before we release a kid, so I got her to ring home. She rang a contact, showed me the screen on her phone, to let me see who she was ringing, and the word on the screen was one I didn't recognise.
She finished the conversation, and I asked her about the word. Arabic for pappa, she told me (transliterated into the Latin alphabet). So I asked her about the word for mama, and so on. The conversation lasted all of a minute, but it was as if this girl grew a couple of inches -- a teacher was interested in HER background. She left smiling, despite feeling ill.
Arabic is my no means a small language, but it is where I live, and so the same mechanisms this opinion piece describes ("You must change to please us.") are all too often apparent from day to day.
Show a little curiosity, rather. Learn a little from those whose perspactive is different from yours. And above all, respect other people and their backgrounds -- they are as valuable as you think you are.
One would think that with their advocacy of white supremacy, & laws & policies on DEI, abortion, LGTBQ ppl... that Idaho would attract fewer new businesses and visitors:
"It’s official – Idaho has banned “diversity statements” ACROSS STATE GOVERNMENT!
"I’m proud to sign this bill and ensure Idahoans are hired or accepted into college based on merit and hard work."
-ID Gov Brad Little
"For most of my life, American Christians were cheerleaders for democracy. That’s when we were in charge of the democracy.
Today, oddly, many conservative Christians no longer believe in or support democracy. They seem to favor a kind of theocracy or autocracy — so long as they have control. Anything they can’t control is called communism or Marxism, whether it really is or not."
"Large swaths of the church in America today are threatened by pluralism. Democracy implies pluralism, but for the first 200 years of our American experiment, pluralism was held in check by the powerful influence of dominant white Christian men and their enablers."
I just got banned from a self-described #leftist reactionary subreddit, which claims to value pluralism, equality, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights, for pointing out the fact that #Hamas desires to create a fundamentalist sharia law state, quoting its founding charter and the words of its various leaders of the years.
While what #Israel is doing to #Gaza is abhorrent, Hamas is not the cause to champion or defend in any way.
"Stephen Miller thinks America faces a constitutional crisis whenever an entity makes the merest nod toward the importance of a workforce that isn’t just white and male. But the real crisis is Miller himself."
Since 2020, I’ve been at the epicenter of a wide-reaching campaign to intimidate social media platforms into backing away from their investments in safety and security. It worked.
It's easy to tune a lot of these things out. But @yoyoel did a good job of connecting a lot of things together to paint the (rather grim) picture of where we are and where things are going.
For #ThickTrunkTuesday, a second 🧵on the "Social Life of Trees" (borrowing this from Laura Rival). Today it's the #Iroko Tree, as it is known in West Africa, or #Mvule in Uganda - #MiliciaExcelsa. It is a tree I know well from my PhD fieldwork in Edo State in #Nigeria in the early 2000s, and one that is good for thinking through human-nature relations #EnvironmentalAnthropology 1/x
7/x But of course #Iroko has, in fact, been logged extensively for many years, since early colonial days - it was promoted energetically by the colonial forest department as a durable hard wood & became one of Nigeria's 5 most popular timber exports.
So this is a good example of how, in practice, you often have a plurality of different ways of relating to trees or animals in one place - the environnmental anthropologist Brian Morris wrote about this kind of #Pluralism, to me really important.