November 28, 2019 9.41am GMT

In the near future, global warming is expected to create millions of climate refugees, and individuals and organisations are already searching for ways to help them. Some ideas are obvious, such as improving conditions in refugee camps.

But there are also more high-tech projects such as using algorithms to forecast where displaced people will travel to. Such forecasts are crucial. They can help support organisations prepare in the right places, they can evaluate current policy (by assessing a counterfactual “what if” scenario) and they can also help predict refugee populations in remote or dangerous areas where there is little empirical data.

So we can predict where climate refugees will go, right?

No. Despite bold and excitable claims that refugee forecasting is largely resolved, we are not convinced. As computer scientists who work on this exact problem, such claims seem like a painful example of running before we can walk.

Almost four years ago, we started to research how people fled from armed conflicts. Many people were displaced due to the Arab Spring and the Syrian War, but little work had been done to predict where they could end up.Africa’s Sahel region contains many of the world’s most climate-vulnerable people. mbrand85 / shutterstock

With our colleague David Bell, we created a tool that could help, and published our work in Nature Scientific Reports. Our tool represents every person as an independent agent, and then uses simple rules-of-thumb derived from scientific insights – for instance “people tend to avoid travelling through mountains when it is raining” – to determine when they will move next, and to where.

This is different from “machine learning” approaches, which use historical data to “train” the algorithm to generate rules and thus predictions. So, for example, machine learning might be given this sort of data: “the number of people that arrived in a refugee camp close to a mountainous area in a conflict that occurred perhaps many years ago, or more recently but in a different country.” The main issue is that historical data used for machine learning is always quantitative, and never is about the conflict that the simulation is directly developed for.

To see how our method worked in practice, we tested our tool against UNHCR data from three recent conflicts in Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mali. Our tool correctly predicted where more than 75% of the refugees would go.Network models for (a) Burundi, (b) Central African Republic and (c) Mali. Conflict zones (red circles), refugee camps (dark green circles), forwarding hubs (light green circles) and other major settlements (yellow circles). Suleimenova et al (2017)

We have since applied our analysis to refugees fleeing conflict in South Sudan, as part of the HiDALGO project. In this study, forthcoming in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, we also looked at how policy decisions like border closures affected the movement of refugees into neighbouring countries, such as Ethiopia or Uganda.

We found there was indeed a link – closing the Uganda border in our model causes 40% fewer “agents” to arrive in camps after 300 days, and that effect lingers even after we reopened the border on day 301. Our tool correctly predicted where 75% of the refugees would actually go in real life.

But doing a correct “retrodiction” in these historical cases does not mean that you can do a forecast. Forecasting where people will go is much harder than predicting a historical situation, for three reasons.A school in Uganda for refugees from war in South Sudan. Roberto Maldeno / flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

1. Every model makes assumptions. For instance, a model that forecasts where refugees go might makes assumptions about their mode of transport, or the likelihood that they stay overnight in a place where violence has previously occurred. When forecasting, we need to know what happens when we give these assumptions a little shake (we examine this in the VECMA project). The less evidence we have for an assumption, the more we need to shake it and analyse how our model responds. Machine learning models generate implicit (and ill-justified) assumptions automatically when they are trained – for example, chosen destinations correlate with the stock value of company X. In agent-based models, these assumptions come from physical factors like the presence of mountains or armed groups, and are explicitly testable.
2. Forecasting one thing requires you to forecast many other things as well. When we forecast how people escape conflict, we must forecast how the conflict will evolve. And that could depend on future market prices, weather/climate effects, or political changes, all of which would need forecasting too. To be clear: we did not require any of these models when we validated our predictions against a historical situation, so we are building new models just to make forecasts possible.
3. Forcibly displaced people are usually fleeing from unexpected and disruptive events. Here the data upon which the machine learning algorithms are “trained” is incomplete, biased or often non-existent. We argue that agent-based models are more effective because they do not need training data, and benefit from understanding the processes that drive forced displacement.

So we have not cracked it.

Yes, forecasting is hard. We do not yet know where climate refugees and other forcibly displaced people are going. We still need huge supercomputers just to forecast next week’s weather.

So it pays to be suspicious of the idea that refugee forecasting is already solved, especially if linked to claims that the “next frontier” for computer scientists is in (controversially) extracting data from vulnerable refugees who are often unaware of the privacy and security risks. Given how hard it remains to predict where the millions of climate refugees will go, the “next frontier” is still the last frontier.

Source Link: https://theconversation.com/climate-refugees-why-we-cant-yet-predict-where-millions-of-displaced-people-will-go-119414

The absence of Native perspectives in American history books and classrooms has been remarked on for over 50 years. Will it ever change?

Nick Martin November 28, 2019

In a December 1862 letter to the Senate, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 39 Sioux citizens. In 1851, the Santee Sioux had ceded the land known as Minnesota to the United States in a pair of treaties, in exchange for a constant supply of services and wares to be provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Like countless treaties signed by the U.S., the agreements were not honored. Corruption consumed the BIA, and basic food items were subject to price gouging. And so, on the brink of starvation in the early winter of 1862, several hundred Sioux raided white towns and villages, looking for the rations that the government had stolen from them and that the colonizers had previously refused to trade with them.

If one is to believe the historians, Lincoln’s decision to impose 39 death penalties for the Sioux Uprising was one of delicate political balance: He had to kill enough Native resisters so as to stifle any future uprisings but not so many that he provoked another. Thirty-nine was the number he landed on after reviewing the transcripts, down from the 303 execution requests made by the military leaders in Minnesota. His letter to the Senate simultaneously served as both the largest mass execution order and the largest clemency order in U.S. history. Ultimately, 38 Sioux were hanged by the neck until death for having the gall to try to keep their people alive. As they stood atop the trap door, with nooses waiting to deliver the final snap, the condemned men spoke their names and cried out “I’m here! I’m here!”

Ten months later, Lincoln signed another letter. This one was a proclamation: As of October 3, 1863, the president, hoping to bring a symbolic sense of calm and joy to a nation torn in two by the still-raging Civil War, declared the fourth Thursday in November to be “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” Never mind the true history of the day Lincoln sought to memorialize, which, aside from its first peaceable but fragile iteration, had twice commemorated the slaying of Wampanoags in battle. Like the 38 Sioux, that was lost to the past: All that mattered was what the living told themselves and their children.

If you grew up going to public school in this country, you probably don’t recall much, if anything, about Lincoln’s execution order. In the long run, it was hardly exceptional for the U.S., save for how many Native lives it doomed, and even that figure was dwarfed by an endless number of massacres and “battles,” carried out by the military, private companies, and citizens. It was business as usual for a young nation with imperialist desires, with a touch of faux mercy to make it go down smoother for a president who would preside over the forced removal of the Navajo and Pueblo people and the Sands Creek Massacre of 1864. In truth, Lincoln, like many who would follow him, was not so different in practice from the more notoriously Native-hating Andrew Jackson: another chief executive who cared little for or about the Indigenous people he shared a continent with. But American textbooks only have room for so many villains.

It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.

Just a little over 100 years after Lincoln signed the first Thanksgiving proclamation, these words by Felix Cohen appeared quoted in the opening to the 1969 Kennedy Report on Indian Education. The report was helmed by Senator Ted Kennedy and serves as a bedrock document in the Native education and political communities: For the first time, possibly ever, it signaled that major U.S. political players were finally paying attention to the erasure of Native communities from the American mosaic. As part of the report, a review of 100 educational texts taken from public schools across the country came to the belated conclusion that Native people were viewed as little more than “subhuman wild beasts in the path of civilization.”

While I was reporting last year on North Carolina’s decision to close down the High Plains Indian School and integrate my tribe, the Sappony, in 1963, I heard directly from family members about how such slanted curricula affected Native students’ experience. My uncles and aunts told me stories of the other kids at school asking them if they had scalped anyone or if they carried tomahawks, and of discriminatory treatment doled out by teachers and administrators to Sappony children, whose only crime was having skin that was a little darker than their own.

In the 50 years since the Kennedy Report was published, Americans have barely moved an inch when it comes to demanding an accurate historical or contemporary view of Native people be taught in public schools. And this has had a marked effect on Native children forced to listen to their histories being twisted to fit a narrative of deity-ordained land theft and warfare. Writing on this in 1985, Lee Little Soldier found that Native students still often felt “trapped between their birthright and the dominant society, losing touch with the former, but not feeling comfortable in the latter.”

But almost more important than the need for Native children to see themselves properly represented is for those who will have a say in how these curricula are established (in other words, the white-run PTAs and local administrative boards) to correct their own understanding of American history. They also need to accurately perceive the present, realizing that Native communities and individuals exist everywhere, from the reservation to the city to the suburbs. Only by engaging with these communities, including them in the lesson-planning process as living societies rather than mythical figures, can the American school system begin to teach its children how not to exclude and appropriate Native history.

This point was underlined in a 2006 article in the Phi Delta Kappan by Bobby Ann Starnes. While Starnes was relatively well educated on Native history, she found when she began teaching at a predominantly Indigenous school system that all of her knowledge had been historicized—she had no idea of what it meant to actually converse with and teach and befriend Native people, teaching history in a way that has moral weight in the present. “What seem like small matters of word choice,” she wrote, “are important (e.g., did Indians wage war or resist aggression?).” 

Recent years have seen small steps toward delivering teachers and students the overdue updates required to teach these new lessons. The National Educators Association now makes available materials on how to teach Thanksgiving in a historically accurate and culturally sensitive manner. Signed in December 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act, President Barack Obama’s replacement for No Child Left Behind, required states and local educational agencies to consult with tribes and tribal organizations as they developed their state lesson plans, should they hope to obtain Title I grant funding. Charter schools established to teach history through a Native lens have sprouted with increasing popularity in cities such as Denver and Oklahoma City and Seattle. (As a case in North Carolina recently showed, there are drawbacks to this approach.) But half a century after the federal government declared the country’s biased Indigenous history lessons an educational crisis, these partial measures feel shockingly insufficient.

Fall is a brutal time of year to be Native. Halloween brings “Sexy Indian Princess” costumes. Native American Heritage Month almost inevitably comes with fumbles that undercut the purpose, even without a president trying to squeeze “Founding Fathers” into the month as well. And then there’s Thanksgiving. Even in 2019, principals and teachers deem it appropriate to dress their children up as Natives and celebrate “an annual Pow Wow,” and then post pictures on social media, before being yelled at and quickly deleting their appropriative efforts to whitewash history. Nor are the stereotypes and questionable attempts at representation limited to rural schools, as Saturday Night Live’s recent skit with Will Ferrell, Fred Armisen, and Maya Rudolph dressing up as the relatives of Matoaka (commonly known as Pocahontas) and rambling off a series of shallow punch lines again showed.

Native children have never had the pleasure of seeing themselves and their people adequately acknowledged in their teachers’ lesson plans. Thanksgiving is handled with satin gloves for the sake of the white children. They can learn the name of the chief who sat with the pilgrims of Plymouth, but not that those same pilgrims mounted his son’s head on a pike above their town and left his body to publicly rot. To acknowledge the true history of Thanksgiving would only be the first step, a slippery slope to a nation daring to utter the word “genocide” when thinking about its foundations. It would be a screeching slam of the guitar in the middle of a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” It would be the truth.

Source Link: https://newrepublic.com/article/155837/thanksgiving-another-reminder-america-forgot

A brain implant helped restore his sight after a tragic car crash

Tyler, a transgender guy, is one of two playable characters in the forthcoming Xbox game “Tell Me Why.” Image: Microsoft/DONTNOD Entertainment

Harmful, erroneous stereotypes attached to Asian women played into Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuse of Rowena Chiu, she said.

Rowena Chiu was interviewed on the “Today” show on Sept. 9, 2019.Nathan Congleton / NBC

Rowena Chiu’s Weinstein allegation highlights the issue of race in sexual assault

Decades after Rowena Chiu alleges she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, she wrote an op-ed article for The New York Times, opening with words that may have felt pointed or shocking to some, but gut-wrenching and all too familiar to many Asian women.

“Harvey Weinstein told me he liked Chinese girls,” wrote Chiu, who is British Chinese. “He liked them because they were discreet, he said — because they knew how to keep a secret. Hours later, he attempted to rape me.”

Race sits at the core of Chiu’s story. Harmful, erroneous stereotypes attached to Asian women played into Weinstein’s alleged abuse of her, according to Chiu. Race also comes into play through specific Chinese cultural values and taboos that made it notably difficult for Chiu, a former Miramax employee, to process and eventually speak out about what had happened to her, she told NBC News.

“I really strongly believe that it took me much longer than the other victims to think, ‘Am I prepared to live with the repercussions of speaking out?’” Chiu said. “It took me a full two years. People are like, ‘Why did it take you that long?’ and I always feel like my answer should be, ‘How did I come to that position so quickly?’ Because to think of myself as an Asian person and a really terrified individual in October 2017, it’s really a big journey to come in just two years.”

Weinstein has denied the attempted rape took place, instead claiming he had a consensual “six-month physical relationship” with her.

According to her account, however, Chiu was pressured into signing a nondisclosure agreement after she attempted to report the alleged attack. Miramax declined NBC News’ request for comment, and Weinstein did not return NBC News’ request for comment.

Chiu, who was raised in a conservative Christian and Chinese household in a predominantly white area outside London, was uncomfortable with speaking about her experience when a New York Times reporter, Jodi Kantor, initially approached her in 2017 — but not solely because she had signed the agreement.

Silenced by the ‘model minority myth’

Shame and saving face are concepts deeply woven into several Asian cultures, in particular when it comes to how women are socialized to avoid acts that may be perceived as bringing shame to themselves or their families. As Asian American psychology researcher Stanley Sue points out, there’s even specific language for the notions.

“‘Haji’ among Japanese, ‘hiya’ among Filipinos, ‘mianzi’ among Chinese, and ‘chaemyun’ among Koreans are terms that reveal concerns over the process of shame or the loss of face,” he said.

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, explained that given the culture of shame in the Asian diaspora, Chiu’s act of speaking out is tremendously significant.

“On the outside, Asian American women might look like we’re successful, but the level of shame and isolation that comes with experiencing stigma is so deep, like mental health issues and dealing with violence,” she said. “More Asian American women deal with violence than will let on, whether it’s sexual violence or physical violence or emotional violence, because we are told not to talk about it, we are told not to disrupt, or we don’t know where to go for resources.”

There’s an additional layer of scrutiny when it comes to Asian immigrant families. Choimorrow explained that those from immigrant families are often told “from a very young age to assimilate, don’t bring attention to ourselves” as a means of survival in the new country.

Chiu understands this. “They talk a lot about the legal constraints of speaking out but I think it hasn’t centered around a lot of the personal constraints. I would say for me, personally, those were a lot stronger,” Chiu said. “I hadn’t talked to my family, I hadn’t talked to my husband, I hadn’t talked to my sister, I hadn’t talked to my network of friends. No one from that time in my life in ‘98 knew what really happened to me.”

Chiu eventually detailed her experience in “She Said,” the book by Kantor and Meghan Twohey that was published in September.

By contrast, many of her former Miramax colleagues were ready to speak about their experiences with Weinstein when Kantor and Twohey approached them two years ago. Chiu underscored that she was raised to be someone who didn’t speak up, avoided calling attention to herself and never talked back. That presented an especially difficult dilemma when dealing with the trauma and confiding in loved ones about it.

“These are things that are perpetuated when we internalize the model-minority stereotype,” Choimorrow said. “This is what happens when our community internalizes the model minority myth and says, ‘Yes, we have to be those people to get ahead and be successful.’

“It’s not bringing shame to the family, it’s, ‘You are embarrassing us and bringing us shame in front of white people, in front of mainstream America.’”

To this day, Chiu’s parents have not spoken to her about the assault. She has noted, though, that she’s received a great deal of support from the Asian community.

“[White men] expect obedience and submission but if you’re from ‘model minority’ parents who don’t want to make a fuss, you’re in double danger,” Chiu said. “Because you don’t feel like you can stick your neck out or be an unpleasant person.”

She added: “You’re raised as someone who can be nice.”

‘He’d never had a Chinese girl’

In addition to that context, Chiu also found herself surrounded by executives, filmmakers, producers and others in the entertainment industry. She said she was often the only Asian person in the room in the early portion of her career. Looking back, she remembers that racially charged quips and jokes were common. Oftentimes the remarks were well intentioned but the incidents only served to highlight the industry’s lack of cultural and racial sensitivity.

The night Weinstein allegedly attempted to rape her was the first time the then-assistant encountered overt racism while on the job, she said.

In her written account in The New York Times, Chiu described the way Weinstein weaponized her race, diminishing her to a two-dimensional, exotic trope.

“My ethnicity initially marked me as different and inferior: He assured [then-colleague Zelda Perkins] that he wouldn’t harass me because he didn’t, as I remember it, ‘do Chinese or Jewish girls,’” Chiu wrote. “Then later, he turned around and defined me in terms of sexual exoticism, telling me, just before he tried to rape me, that he’d never had a Chinese girl.”

It wasn’t the first time Chiu had heard the “I’ve never had a Chinese woman” line, she said. Like many Asian women living in the West, Chiu said it wasn’t an uncommon comment directed at her in London bars when she was younger. Regardless of who spoke that line or the version they used, she believed the underlying purpose was the same: dehumanization.

“Guys would come up to me and say, ‘I’ve always fancied an Asian woman,’ which is very similar to what Harvey Weinstein said to me,” Chiu said. “What you’re actually saying, but you may not be conscious of, is: ‘Hey, I know you’re an inferior race and I’m doing you a favor by fancying you. There’s a blonde woman I could be talking to but I’m talking to you instead.’”

‘Geishas and prostitutes with hearts of gold’

Experts said the fetishization of Asian women that permeates both barside catcalls and Weinstein’s alleged comments to Chiu is rooted in a toxic mix of imperialism, discriminatory immigration legislation and problematic representations onscreen.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans imagined the East or the “Orient” as exotic and immoral, Catherine Ceniza Choy, professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told NBC News. As European and American colonizers expanded into Asia, they perpetuated ideas of Asian women as attractive, available and submissive, cementing this characterization through postcards and photographs.

Legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration, further exacerbated the prevalence of stereotypes by “codifying the foreignness of Asians in America,” Choy said.

And Hollywood didn’t help much with dismantling stereotypes, either, she added.

“Twentieth-century popular culture, especially the stereotyping of Asian women in Hollywood films as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, geishas and prostitutes with hearts of gold, furthered the reach of these one-dimensional fantasies in more contemporary times,” Choy said.

Chiu noted that not only were Asian women portrayed as sex workers, they were “highly submissive sex workers.”

“The way that they were sexually submissive to a dominant white male, that was an enormous sexual stereotype,” Chiu said of the film industry, where Weinstein was a leader for years. “Whether or not one believes it directly translates into real life, I think dominant white men, who come from that sort of cultural hegemony, absorb those stereotypes consciously or unconsciously.”

Choimorrow agreed. The stigmas attached to Asian women have come at a cost to their safety and equity in sexual situations and beyond, she said.

“The stereotypes play into the culture and assumption about what men feel like they can do with women; objectify and use women at their disposal and at their pleasure,” she said.

According to the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence, from 21 to 55 percent of Asian women in the U.S. report experiencing intimate physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. The range is based on a compilation of studies of disaggregated samples of Asian ethnicities in local communities. In comparison, 33 percent of women in the U.S. experience sexual violence.

‘Not just a rapist… also racist’

That’s why Weinstein’s alleged invocation of Chiu’s race is not negligible, Choimorrow said, describing the disgraced film executive as “not just a rapist, he is also a racist.” Based on Chiu’s account, Weinstein allegedly targeted Chiu specifically because she is an Asian woman, she added.

“By not talking about the racialized experience of her story, you are erasing the racism that played into her situation. This is often what women of color deal with,” Choimorrow said. “We are often forced to choose or not think about one aspect of our lives.”

While Chiu’s account of her experience was covered by numerous outlets, the majority highlighted the chronological events of the traumatic night Weinstein allegedly tried to attack her during the Venice Film Festival in 1998. Very few directly address Chiu’s race at any angle. For the most part, her Asianness is glossed over, or mentioned as an aside.

Perhaps outlets wanted to portray her as an “every-girl,” an “ordinary person who just graduated university with student debt who went up against the most powerful man in Hollywood,” Chiu said. In doing so, the intersectionality of her experience is neglected, according to Choimorrow.

Since coming out with her story, Chiu has spoken about it in front of audiences and with television hosts, exposing more of the issues she grappled with around her alleged assault. But given the dynamics at play surrounding her race and gender, she still worries.

“We don’t know how many silent Asian voices are out there,” she said.

Chiu stressed that sexual assault survivors should only come out if they are comfortable with doing so. In her own experience, “the dread and fear of coming out was worse than the actual coming out,” she said.

“I feared a lot of judgment from my community, from my family, from my culture that didn’t play true,” she said of her journey. “Because in the end, the monsters in your imagination are bigger.”

CORRECTION (Nov. 11, 2019, 10:18 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated where Catherine Ceniza Choy is a professor. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, not the University of California, Los Angeles.

——Kimmy Yam

Kimmy Yam is a reporter for NBC Asian America.

Source link:  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/rowena-chiu-s-weinstein-allegation-highlights-issue-race-sexual-assault-n1077876

World events often move fast, but it is hard to match the pace and power of change in 1989.

It culminated in one of the most famous scenes in recent history – the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The wall came down partly because of a bureaucratic accident but it fell amid a wave of revolutions that left the Soviet-led communist bloc teetering on the brink of collapse and helped define a new world order.

How did the Wall come down?

It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.

East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by loosening the borders, making travel easier for East Germans. They had not intended to open the border up completely.

The changes were meant to be fairly minor – but the way they were delivered had major consequences.

Notes about the new rules were handed to a spokesman, Günter Schabowski – who had no time to read them before his regular press conference. When he read the note aloud for the first time, reporters were stunned.

“Private travel outside the country can now be applied for without prerequisites,” he said. Surprised journalists clamoured for more details.

Shuffling through his notes, Mr Schabowski said that as far as he was aware, it was effective immediately.

In fact it had been planned to start the next day, with details on applying for a visa.

But the news was all over television – and East Germans flocked to the border in huge numbers.

Harald Jäger, a border guard in charge that evening, told Der Spiegel in 2009 that he had watched the press conference in confusion – and then watched the crowd arrive.

There were emotional scenes as East Berliners entered the West

Mr Jäger frantically called his superiors, but they gave no orders either to open the gate – or to open fire to stop the crowd. With only a handful of guards facing hundreds of angry citizens, force would have been of little use.

“People could have been injured or killed even without shots being fired, in scuffles, or if there had been panic among the thousands gathered at the border crossing,” he told Der Spiegel.

“That’s why I gave my people the order: Open the barrier!”

Thousands flowed through, celebrating and crying, in scenes beamed around the world. Many climbed the wall at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate, chipping away at the wall itself with hammers and pickaxes.

A turbulent year had reached a climax.

Why did the Wall come down?

After World War Two, Europe was carved up by the Soviet Union and its former Western allies, and the Soviets gradually erected an “Iron Curtain” splitting the East from the West.

Defeated Germany was divided up by the occupying powers – the US, UK, France and the USSR – with the eastern part occupied by the Soviets. East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, became the Soviet Union’s foothold in Western Europe.

But Berlin was split four ways, with British, French and American zones in the west of the city and a Soviet zone in the east. West Berlin became an island surrounded by communist East Germany.

The wall was eventually built in 1961 because East Berlin was haemorrhaging people to the West.

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union faced acute economic problems and major food shortages, and when a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine exploded in April 1986, it was a symbolic moment in the impending collapse of the communist bloc.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the comparatively young Soviet leader who took power in 1985, introduced a reform policy of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).

But events moved far faster than he could have foreseen.

Revolutionary wave

Reform movements were already stirring in the communist bloc. Years of activism and strikes in Poland culminated in its ruling communist party voting to legalise the banned Solidarity trade union.

By February 1989, Solidarity was in talks with the government, and partially free elections in the summer saw it capture seats in parliament. Though the Communists retained a quota of seats, Solidarity swept the board wherever it was allowed to stand.

Poland’s Solidarity movement was successful in partially free elections

Hungarians, too, launched mass demonstrations for democracy in March. In May, 150 miles (240km) of barbed wire were dismantled along the border with Austria – the first chink in the Iron Curtain. Hungary’s 1956 revolution was brutally suppressed by the Soviets, but this was succeeding.

By August, the revolutionary wave had truly re-ignited on the fringes. Two million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – then part of the Soviet Union – held one of the most memorable demonstrations of the so-called Singing Revolution when they formed a 370-mile (600km) human chain across the Baltic republics calling for independence.

Many East Germans were overcome by emotion as they crossed into Austria

In the heat of August, Hungary opened it borders to Austria in the west, allowing East German refugees an escape.

The Iron Curtain was buckling.

Czechoslovakia, whose push for liberalising reform had been brutally suppressed in 1968, provided another means of escape. East Germans could travel to the neighbouring socialist nation without restriction, and began to flood the West German embassy there by the hundreds, eventually being evacuated to the West by train.

• Czechs still shiver from Soviet 1968 invasion

East Germany ended up closing its border with Czechoslovakia in October to stem the tide.

But by then the revolution had spread to East Germany itself.

East Germany rebels

It began with demonstrators rallying for freedom in the centre of the city of Leipzig.

On 9 October, within days of East Germany celebrating its 40th anniversary, 70,000 people took to the streets.

There were calls for free elections from West Germany, and talk of reform from East Germany’s new communist leader Egon Krenz. No-one knew the fall of the Wall was weeks away.

In late October parliament in Hungary, which had been among the first to hold mass demonstrations, adopted legislation providing for direct presidential elections and multi-party parliamentary elections.

And then on 31 October, the numbers demanding democracy in East Germany swelled to half a million. Mr Krenz flew to Moscow for meetings – he recently told the BBC that he had been assured German reunification was not on the agenda.

Find out more about East Germany, 1989

• ‘Cut the Iron Curtain’: Germany’s 1989 freedom picnic
• The Leipzig march that KO’d communism
• The story of Tunnel 29: The man who escaped East Germany but went back

On 4 November, a month after the East German protests had begun, around half a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin.

Three days later, the government resigned. But there was no intention to give way to democracy and Egon Krenz remained head of the Communist Party and the country’s de facto leader.

He would not be there long. Five days later, Mr Schabowski gave his world-changing press conference.

Why didn’t the Soviets use force?

Earlier in ’89, Beijing demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who had called for democracy in China were crushed in a major military crackdown.

The USSR had used its military to put down rebellions before. So why not now?

Within the Soviet Union itself, it did, killing 21 pro-independence protesters in the Soviet republic of Georgia. But elsewhere in the communist bloc, they did not.

In a break with Soviet policy, Mikhail Gorbachev decided against using the threat of military might to quell mass demonstrations and political revolution in neighbouring countries.

“We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine,” foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov told US television. “He has a song, `I (Did) It My Way.’ So every country decides on its own which road to take.”

A new chapter in European history

On 3 December, Mr Gorbachev and US President George HW Bush sat side by side in Malta, and released a statement saying the Cold War between the two powers was coming to a close.

More than half a million people gathered in Prague for this November 1989 demonstration as Czechoslovak communism was overthrown

The 1989 wave of revolutions was not over yet.

Student demonstrators in Prague clashed with police, triggering the Velvet Revolution which overthrew Czechoslovak communism within weeks.

In Romania, demonstrations ended in violence and saw the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. A new government took over as the ousted leader fled his palace and angry crowds stormed it.

The Romanian revolution was the only one in Eastern Europe that year that saw bloodshed

He and his wife Elena were captured and executed on Christmas Day. More than 1,000 people were killed in unrest before and after the revolution, setting Romania apart from the largely bloodless events elsewhere.

Postscript to 1989

And the Soviet Union itself?

In 1990, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia took advantage of their new-found political freedoms to vote out their communist governments and make moves towards independence. The Soviet Union was falling apart, but Mr Gorbachev made one last ill-fated attempt to reform it by calling together the leaders of the 15 Soviet republics.

Hardline communists opposed to his reforms pre-empted him, attempting a coup while he was on holiday in Crimea in August 1991 and putting him under house arrest.

The coup was defeated in three days as pro-democracy forces rallied round Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic.

But it was the death knell for the USSR, and one by one its constituent republics declared independence. By the end of the year the Soviet flag had flown for the last time.

原文链接：https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50013048

By Brianna Holt November 1, 2019

TikTok is stoking a pop culture phenomenon rooted in a terrible history.

 

When TikTok launched in 2016, the Chinese app had to carve out a space alongside already popular video-sharing platforms like Instagram, Musical.ly, and Dubsmash. Just two years later, TikTok became the world’s most-downloaded app, surpassing Instagram in 2018.

TikTok is known for its trending internet challenges—like the Haribo Challenge, Fake Travel Challenge, and Raindrop Challenge—with the stunts oftentimes screen-recorded and then posted to other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The Chinese-built app also has created a new wave of internet personas, like E-girls and E-boys. But if TikTok is a place where internet memes with teenage appeal get turned into videos featuring real-life teens, it’s also a place where the phenomenon of white teens perpetuating racist stereotypes is on the rise.

Blackface without the face paint

Videos from TikTok are surfacing all over the internet, oftentimes featuring white teens imitating stereotypical lifestyles or characteristics of black people or other people of color. As they nonchalantly change their accents, use appropriated slang terms, and demonstrate certain mannerisms for comedy, it’s obvious there is a gap in their understanding of, and respect for, different cultures. Videos of mostly young white teens portraying fictitious minority characters for the mere purpose of entertainment aren’t only cringe-worthy, offensive, and weird—they perpetuate racist cliches.

A plethora of young white women like Woah Vicky, who masquerade as black women on Instagram, have made names for themselves on social media for their heightened culture appropriation. It’s not altogether different from what happened to Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who passed as a black woman for years and held leadership positions in black community organizations. While the videos populating TikTok tend not to show teens wearing blackface or blatantly referring to themselves as black people, their stars are taking everything but the burden of what it is to be black in America while simultaneously using black culture as a way to grow their own social following.

A deep-rooted history

The obsession with black culture by white people has been an uncomfortably bizarre phenomenon for decades, but portrayals of black people by white people for entertainment purposes goes back even further. Blackface has many forms, but we typically only associate it with non-black people using makeup to portray a black person. In order to understand how the perhaps non-malicious but also unconsciously racist trend of imitating or pretending to be black on social media, without painting your face, is also a form of blackface, one must first understand the history of blackface and its relationship to white identity.

Emerging in the US in the 1820s, blackface often appeared in minstrel shows that depicted people of African descent in comical forms. After the Civil War, when racial tensions were especially heightened, blackface became crueler than ever and was often performed at “coon shows.” During these minstrel shows, black people were portrayed as lazy, stupid, ignorant, criminal, and hyper-sexual. The impact of these shows has lasted for decades, creating harmful stereotypes widely seen in advertising, propaganda, literature, and film. Jim Crow, which inspired the name given to the Jim Crow laws of the American South, was actually one of the first fictional blackface characters recorded in popular culture, often paired with exaggerated African American jargon, painted-on large lips, and unintelligent behavior.

The cultural dynamics got even more complicated  in the early 20th century, when people from other ethnic groups began using blackface either to exert their social rank over that of black people, or in a bid for acceptance by other white people. It was used by Irish, Italian, and Jewish performers, for example, in order to signal that they, too, were deserving of the privileges of being white in America, and to dissolve their own ethnic tensions. In his book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, cultural historian Eric Lott describes the transformation of blackface as an act that “assuaged an acute sense of insecurity by indulging feelings of racial superiority.” European immigrants needed to prove their whiteness and what better way to do so than showcasing that they were not as low as African Americans?

It was also around this time that white women could be found using blackface as a way to get into show business, oftentimes singing in black dialect and acting like black women in their roles. In some instances, there was an underlying sense of appreciation for black culture by those who put on blackface. Actors and jazz musicians recognized the talent of black artists and aspired to match their aptitude. But they simultaneously mocked them, creating a strange combination of obsession and bigotry.

More recently, when public figures like Virginia governor Ralph Northam and his state attorney general Mark Herring were exposed for  having worn blackface as undergraduates, the internet shamed them and called for the cancelation of their political careers. Meanwhile, when teens on TikTok act as if they are black, with their made-up mannerisms, dialects, and jargon, we call it a trend.

But what is the difference between their portrayal and that of the actors in minstrel shows? Where is the outrage that followed the revelations about the college antics of our elected officials?  All of these groups would mock a community they are not a part of, for their own personal gain or as a form of entertainment.

Social media meets segregation

Is TikTok specifically responsible for the rise in digital blackface? Not exactly. The more likely culprit is mass-media consumption, combined with stubbornly segregated schools and neighborhoods.

According to a report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, in 2016, 40% of African American students in the US were in schools with 90% or more students of color. This isn’t just the legacy of racism in the US South; the UCLA group finds that New York is consistently one of the most segregated states in the nation.

Access to other cultural groups can be found online, of course. However, the access is limited and usually not a direct educational exchange, often inhibiting, rather than cultivating, a deeper understanding of other groups. Many teens learn about other cultures from the media they’re constantly consuming, rather than having real-life relationships and friendships with people who belong to the cultures they’re tapping into. As a result of their real-life segregation paired with their access to social media, not only are young people unconsciously perpetuating racist stereotypes, they’re appearing foolish to millions of people online in the process.

For example, in these two videos (one and two) that have gone viral on social media, several young white people are seen throwing up gang signs, seemingly unknowingly, as a funny trend. It can be assumed that they saw these signs somewhere online, thought they were cool, and taught them to their friends. They may very well know nothing of the meaning or connotation of these signals—context that probably would be provided in a more diverse circle. But who is available to let them know the actual meaning  of what they’re doing, if their schools, neighborhoods, and social circles are not diverse?

More work to do

It’s not enough for us to assume Gen-Z is the most “woke” generation or that their access to different people online will dissolve racism. While many of these teens would never dare paint their face black, and probably would not hesitate to go online and call out someone who did, they clearly don’t see the similarity in their “comical” recorded actions. They may not have ill intentions, but it is apparent that their understanding of racial stereotypes has not evolved.

Moreover, if these young TikTok users believe the stereotypes they see in movies, TV shows, or even on their social media apps are an accurate representation of black people as a whole, then that’s a huge signifier that upcoming generations are not as integrated as we think.

Optimistically, the preponderance of TikTok users obsessed with “acting black” perhaps suggests that black culture is cool, exciting, and something a lot of people wish to be a part of but don’t know how to emulate appropriately. But these teens are making the mocking of cultures a part of their own culture. And even if the intention is not to be racist or harmful, the legacy of blackface ensures that it is.

What’s cancel culture really like? Ask a teenager. They know.

 

Have a ghoulishly good Halloween with these spooky recipes. Find sweet treats, clever appetizers and much more.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

原文链接：

https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/graveyard-halloween-party/