Judy Goldberg Interviews Arjun Singh Sethi, author of American Hate: Survivors Speak Out

JG: When asked to meet with Arjun Singh Sethi, I was handed his book American Hate: Survivors Speak Out. My immediate response was how off-putting that word “hate” is.

Then I thought, now wait a minute, if we can’t face the harsh truth of hate, how can we make our way to peace?

Invited by United World College USA as a keynote speaker for a conference on diversity, equity and inclusion, Arjun Sethi implores us to reckon with our country’s history of violence and to take on the injustices permeating our communities.

AS: My name is Arjun Singh Sethi. I was born in Virginia. My parents are Sikh Americans. I’m a Sikh American.
I spent most of my life in Virginia and the D.C. area. I knew from the time I was young I was interested in civil rights and human rights.

Sikhs for really time and memorial have been stewards of justice, stewards of civil and human rights.

When I was young, I was also bullied a fair amount so that really encouraged me to speak up for others and develop this kind of interest and really advocate for people who were marginalized and excluded in various ways.

I’m very proud to both practice law, teach law and also write on issues that I care deeply about too.

JG: When you think about and self-identify as a community activist, tell me what that means.

AS: For so long, the folks who have drafted polices, the folks who have passed legislation have been divorced from the communities impacted by those polices, by that legislation.

So much of my recent work has been supporting communities, supporting those who are directly impacted and making sure their voice is included, featured and really informs the policies that govern their lives.

In 2018, I published a book called American Hate: Survivors Speak Out. I spent most of the calendar year of 2017 traveling the country, meeting with people who were targeted by hate violence and the run up to the Presidential election.

The reason I wrote that book was because I was hearing from affected communities that hate was spiking in their lives, but also that they didn’t have an opportunity to tell their stories. The media seemed more interested in humanizing white supremacists, more interested in telling the story of why people hate as opposed to understanding the impact of hate on communities.

I decided to write this book because I wanted to give survivors of hate violence an opportunity to tell their stories. I would meet with survivors across the country. I went to White Fish Montana, Victoria Texas, Tulsa Oklahoma, Washington D.C. because hate in American isn’t an urban problem or a rural problem, blue state/red state problem, it’s an American problem. I met with survivors and worked with them to create a testimonial in their own words. That’s me centering communities and survivors who are impacted by the policies right now.

One is the story of Taylor Dumpson. Taylor Dumpson was the first black woman to ever be elected student body president at American University. The day that Taylor took office, April 1, 2017, nooses are found hanging across the campus of American University.

Taylor has now become a national advocate on issues of mental, on issues of PTSD. She talked in her testimonial about how, after she was not just targeted by the nooses on campus but by vicious cyber trolling online. She suffered and was diagnosed with PTSD. She has become a national advocate on these issues.

She also was able to secure legal representation and sued the Daily Stormer, one of the outlets that targeted her and was able to secure a large monetary judgement against them.

Another story I’d like to share is the story of Khalid Jabara. The Jabara’s are a Christian Lebanese family that fled Lebanon during the civil war in the ‘80s and made a home for themselves in Tulsa Oklahoma.

All was well until a white supremacist moved next door who really terrorized the family. He called them things like “dirty Arabs,” told them to go back to Saudi Arabia. He called them things like “dirty Muslims.” They themselves are not Muslim. He really trolled, targeted and harassed them.

In 2015, the white supremacist next door actually ran over Haifa Jabara, the mother of the family. She was hospitalized. The neighbor was arrested and initially not allowed to post bond because of his history of targeting the family and because he had committed a violent crime against his next door neighbor.

Fast forward, a few months later a new prosecutor is appointed to the case. Defense council makes a renewed motion for bond and it’s granted. The judge granted it with no conditions. The prosecutor didn’t object because he didn’t know the case history. The white supremacist is allowed to return home next door to the family he had terrorized.

Fast forward another few months. The white supremacist literally murders Khalid Jabara. (this is Haifa Jabara’s son) on his front doorstep.

Khalid Jabara actually called the police minutes before he was murdered and told the police, “The man who terrorized the family, the man who ran over my mother is shooting a gun next door. Please arrest him! Please go check out what was happening!”

The police came and they knocked on the neighbor’s door. He didn’t answer. The police came back to Khalid’s doorstep and said, “Sorry, there is nothing we can do. He didn’t answer the door.” Minutes later, the neighbor emerged from his house and murdered Khalid.

If you talk to the Jabaras, they will tell you, had the neighbor been brown, had the neighbor been black, had the neighbor not been white, anything other than white, they would have kicked that door down and they would have protected that family.
When I think about Khalid’s legacy, there are two things that come to mind. One, there is a new library in Tulsa called the Khalid Jabara Tikkun Olam Memorial Library. Tikkum Olam in Hebrew means “repair the world.” This is a place where young people come together to learn about equity, to learn about diversity, to learn about inclusion, to learn about racial history.

We actually don’t have reliable federal data on the number of hate crimes committed annually. There is actually a bill that was introduced in Congress called the Khalid Jabara Heather Heyer No Hate Act. Heather Heyer was the young woman in Charlottesville who was murder at the Unite the Right rally. Heather Heyer’s murder wasn’t reflected in the federal FBI hate crimes data. Imagine that; two of the most horrific hate crimes to occur in the last many years weren’t even reflected in the data. Those are two examples, the Memorial Library that’s dedicated in Khalid’s name and this federal legislation that now bears his name as well.

JG: You’ve given us some examples of once a hate crime has occurred and the survivors are willing to speak out and willing to engage back into the community for the betterment of others, how do the rest of us engage in this? How do we support? How do we take these atrocities into positive steps?

AS: When I took to the road in 2017, I expected and anticipated to find plenty of pain, grief and suffering, and I did. Every survivor with whom I met was resilient and optimistic and was doing their part to make the world a better place, to make sure that people weren’t, in the future, targeted the way that they were. I think every testimonial includes examples.

Anyone can do this. People can talk about racism and hate as public health issues because they are. Black folks are dying prematurely in this country because of systemic racism and injustice.

I think also one of the things that I’ve been encouraging folks to think about is to just organize preventatively. Create local committees, local taskforces that are in place in the event that hate strikes. People don’t realize, if there is a hate crime, who is going to support the survivors?

A lot of times, survivors don’t have health care. They don’t have access to mental health resources. Sometimes they need legal representation. Sometimes the media just shows up at their door and bombards them.

Just making sure survivors have the resources and work that they need, making sure the community organizations on the frontline, organizations that you don’t often hear about because they’re not on the news and their voices aren’t often featured and included. Have the support they need because they are the ones who are always supporting survivors long after the media loses interest, long after politicians lose interest.

JG: How do you keep yourself strong? How do you reinvigorate yourself when the fight is challenging and hard?

AS: There’s something I’ll share here that has been a bit new for me, but it has been awesome. Increasingly it’s history and it’s knowing what people have done before us and the sacrifices that they have made. I’ve always known it. I’ve always known that people have been doing this.

I’ve studied civil rights and I’ve worked with human rights lawyers and I know the history, but I think I’m much more intentionally now engaging with that history, engaging with that past. I find it empowering and I find that it is this sort of inanimate force that connects us all. Increasingly, I’m finding solidarity and comfort in people who have marched, in people who have protested and people who have made sacrifices.

I think we need to push ourselves more. I think that there is more that we can do and more that we need to be doing given what is happening in this country.

While I do take solace and comfort in the fact that people are organizing, people are coming together, I do think it has got to be more sustained. I think it’s also got to be coordinated and tied to a particular agenda, an agenda of equity, an agenda of liberation.

JG: Here you are someone who is concerned about what you are talking about, concerned about racism, hate crimes, discrimination, the injustices that we are seeing mounting in our world today.

What do you do if you’re interested in being more involved?

AS: First, look in your own backyard. I say that because when we are talking about things like racism, hate, misogyny, gender violence and fascism, sometimes they seem like intractable problems and they seem far away, but the fact of the matter is that sometimes there are people in our own families in our own communities who have hateful and biased views. When you see those views being manifested and articulated, take them on!

Two, connect with other people who feel similarly to you. There is always strength in numbers.

Three, find a community organization. I will tell you that there are community organizations across this country who are looking for volunteers. They are looking for financial support. They’re looking, in some cases, for community connections.

Fourth, most people are members of different institutions. Let’s say you are a member of a church, a synagogue, a mosque.
Let’s say you are a member of the PTA or a member of a reading group, you remember your local library interventions. Make sure your library has the newest books on these issues. Make sure they’re on display.

Make sure that your PTA is ensuring that students aren’t being bullied in school and if they are, that they are getting the resources that they need.

Make sure that your workplace has an up to date equity and inclusion policy. You know what? Have them bring speakers to talk about these issues.

Do your part. Everyone has a role in making the world a better place, in making the world a safe place for human beings, for animals, for the environment. Figure out a way to get involved.

Finally, thank everyone who is doing that work. There is a universe of us. There is a large, global community of us who are trying to make the world a better place.

JG: Finding our place and addressing hate crimes in our communities is how we can directly impact lives.

Paul Ingles Interviews Rob Williams, media scholar and teacher

RW: Anytime a for-profit corporate commercial communications entity approaches you and says, “We’re going to give you some free stuff,” for example, free access to Facebook or free access to a blog platform or free access to Snapchat or TikTok or whatever it may be, immediately start waving the red flag because really what’s happening is that WE become the product in that so-called “free” transaction.

What I mean by that is that when we cozy up to for-profit corporate commercial social media platforms and we’re invited to “share” information with our “friends” online - to use two of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite words, “share” and “friends,” - what we’re essentially doing is giving over more and more of our own personal stories in the form of digital data to those for-profit corporations.

They then turn around and do a couple of things with it. They sort it, they store it, they aggregate it. They use it to pitch us products and services we may or may not want. They use it to figure out how we’re networked in with other like-minded or unlike-minded individuals and organizations and all of that is done in the name of “free.”

Rarely do we read what is called the EULA, the End User License Agreement, which we are presented with in long, convoluted legalease every time we put a new social media app on our phone and we’re asked to accept the EULA and we do mostly without question because we want to get on with the business, literally the business of Snapchatting or Facebooking or Tweeting.

That’s the bargain that we make as social media users when we create accounts on these social media platforms. It’s funny, Paul, we talk about them as if they are ours, “My Facebook page, my Snapchat.” No, no, you’re leasing that space actually. You’re leasing that space from Facebook or Snapchat in return for a steady stream of digital data that, by the way, is getting more and more sophisticated by the week.

PI: So what is the threat to our inner peace or our ability to make peace in the world do you think? The reason that I ask that is because I think it turns on the same thing that I mentioned earlier about people and how they think about TV advertising. They say, “It doesn’t affect me.” I’ve heard people say, “I love Facebook so much. I love what it gives me. I’ve got nothing to hide. I don’t care what they do with my preferences.”

RW: Yes, you hear that a lot. You just have to look at the CEOs of these large corporation who A, don’t let their own children anywhere near these platforms and B, do everything they can to protect their own privacy to know that we should be suspicious or at least aware of what’s happening with our data.

To your first question, I believe that each of us are unique and sovereign individuals and to cultivate peace of mind, this is Peace Talks Radio, we need a healthy sense of ourselves and a healthy sense of our place in the world and how we make meaning of our lives.

I think what happens too often with so-called social media, a couple things. One is, social media can be very isolating. We’re all well-versed in individuals with social media platforms on their mobile devices who, in social situations, are much more interested in being on the social media platforms than being present in face to face social encounters. Let’s start there. There is a new term making the rounds. I love it. It’s called “phubbing.” When you and I, Paul, are having a conversation and in the middle of the conversation I pick up my phone and ignore you, I’ve just phubbed you. You’ve just been phubbed. That happens all the time. It happens in people’s private living rooms all the time amongst intimate friends and family members. Phubbing is a reality.

The other more insidious thing, is back to the data transfer. I want to reference a brilliant new book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It was eight years in the making by a woman at Harvard University in the Business School. Her name is Shoshana Zuboff. She has a brilliant verb to describe what happens in this situation. The verb is “render.”

She uses the word “render” in two ways. First of all, when we’re on these social media platforms, we are rendering over the intimate details of our lives in digital binary codes of ones and zeros. We’re rendering over the moment by moment details of our personal flesh and blood lives to these companies. What these companies do, “render” in the second sense, is they render, they chop up, as if you were throwing a beef cow into a slaughterhouse, they chop up or render our very human experiences. They chop them up into these binary codes of digital data, these data points they can then use to sell us back what we say we want or give over these data points to other for-profit, third party provides and companies and governments that can take this information and do with it what they will.

We’re experiencing the rendering of our very humanness in those two ways. We give over ourselves and ourselves are rendered digitally and then these companies chop up or render our digital selves for the purpose of not just selling back to us but also, and this is what Shoshana Zuboff talks about so brilliantly in this book, the goal is the creation of predictive behavioral futures markets.

If Facebook for example can predict the collective future behavior of a swath of its two billion plus users online, that gives Facebook tremendous power over us flesh and blood humans over the long haul.

That’s a really sophisticated concept. I wake up every morning thinking about it because it’s a really brilliant insight that Zuboff gives us when she talks about predictive behavior futures markets. It’s not just about the digitizing of us as individuals and the rendering of us as individuals, but it’s also about the collective, if you will. We as a species, as well as we as individuals, have to contend with the pros and cons of this very strange relationship with these companies and with these governments.

PI: You sent me your book review of that amazing book and some excerpts from it. I think what you were saying and the thing that got me thinking the most was this predictive element. I think somewhere within the synopsis she’s talking about when we lose our ability to be unpredictable. We’re losing something very important about our experience of living and the possibilities of our lives if everything is anchored to our existing preferences and that they know what flips our triggers. And if our triggers keep getting flipped, then we don’t have a moment, a quiet moment as we were talking about earlier, to think about “do I really want that? Is that really what makes me happy?” It takes a little bit away of our will to make a different choice. Is that extending it out a little too far or is that in fact exactly what she’s saying?

RW: I think you said that really brilliantly, Paul. I think that is what she is saying. To put it in the language of human rights for a moment if I may, just to piggyback on what you just said, Zuboff in this book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she lays out three human rights of the digital age that we should all contend with.

Number one is most obviously the right to privacy. As human beings, we should fight for and pursue the right to privacy because it gives us those quiet, contemplative spaces of solitude in which we can cultivate a certain sensibility about ourselves and our possible future selves - to be Jungian about it for just a minute. The less privacy we have, the less opportunity we have to really meditate on who we are and who we might become. We hear a lot about privacy in the narrow sense, but philosophically at a species-wide level, it’s one of the West’s great inventions, the right to privacy. We need that.

The second right she talks about is the right to be forgotten. The illustration of this is for example, if I commit a crime and I do my jail time, I pay my fine, I do my community service, I remand myself back into polite society after doing my time, but this crime will follow me around on the internet for the rest of my life. I may be in a job interview 25 years later and up comes some story about me committing a crime 25 years ago. They won’t hire me. That is an incredible burden to bear. All of us as humans of course make mistakes all the time. The right to be forgotten is this idea, and the European Union is beginning to pass legislation around this, to require digital media companies to let go of our past mistakes online just as we do in the real world.

Finally, the third right, and it’s a powerful one that gets to your earlier point, is what she calls the right to a future tense. The right for us as human individuals to determine our own destinies independent of being nudged or steered or predictably programmed by these more and more sophisticated algorithms that know our digital selves more intimately by the day.
To bring us back to your point about peace and our own inner struggle as humans, we do ourselves no favors if we don’t distance ourselves from our devices and from our screens and from these platforms on a regular basis by which I mean daily. We need to create sanctuaries. We need to create refuges for ourselves daily to give ourselves space from this very powerful technology, something that is so important and central to understanding our digital age and that is the programmed polarization of citizens in this country into like-minded camps.

You and I are both big fans of true community media. In a community, you are pushed to wrestle with other individuals and groups of people who have different ways of doing things and different perspectives on things and different ideas about how the world looks and where it should go and that’s beautiful.

PI: Like a classic New England town meeting in other words.

RW: Exactly. I attend every year. I’m a big fan because that’s when you really see the breadth and depth of your neighbors and the people who live in your town or in your city. What’s happening online, Paul, you nailed it, is we’re being programmed into tribes.

You also see it in the legacy media. MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are going to serve you up anti-Trump propaganda 24/7 whereas over on Fox, they’re going to serve you up pro-Trump propaganda 24/7 and never the twain shall meet. The point being is that these legacy TV news channels have figured out that polarization is a way better business model in the short term than community or genuine debate and discourse and it is killing this very fragile republic. It’s really sad. It’s really about the bottom line.

PI: The packaging is about getting your eyes and your attention for the advertisers. They are creating this like-minded group and they want everybody who is in that like-minded group to be watching them to be able to sell the advertising, but it is put into a package that, as you suggest, bumps up close to being classified as propaganda.

How do we tell the difference and how can we consume it from a place of awareness?

RW: The term “fake news” is a new term for really what is an old phenomenon and that is the phenomenon of propaganda. To be clear, what we mean by propaganda is simply one-sided information published to persuade.

Let’s talk about real news as opposed to fake news or propaganda. Real news has six elements. Number one, real news is storied information. Homosapiens for millennia have used stories to communicate important information.

Real news is story information that is number one, recent, number two, relevant which is to say it’s news that we can use. Number three, it’s reliable which is to say it’s transparently sourced. None of this “sources said,” or “authorities said.” Let’s be clear about where the information is coming from. Recent, relevant, reliable.

Number four, it has a sense of historical context. Number five, it is what I like to say, “hegemonically hip” which is simply to say it foregrounds power relations. Number six, it is harmonious or has multiple points of view.

Recent, relative, reliable, historical, hegemonic and harmonious. If a news story, a purported news story doesn’t meet those six simple criteria, then it is probably not a news story.

What I say to people is rather than take your news faithfully on a channel by channel or network by network or personality by personality basis – “Tucker Carlson always serves it up straight,” or “Rachel Maddow always serves it up straight,” treat each news story on its own terms. If you do this, and it requires a little bit more discernment of course, a little bit more intellectual effort of course, but this is the situation that we find ourselves in. If you can think critically about news on a story by story basis, then we will be in much better shape than we are currently. This is where critical media literacy really comes into play.
There are really good journalists out there who are doing really good work, but a lot of what purports to be news is unfortunately more propaganda, more one-sided. We’ve talked about already why that is so - from a corporate and for-profit business perspective.

I didn’t mention the propaganda model of news yet. Let me mention that briefly. The propaganda model of news comes from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s 1988 book called Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. What we did was bring the propaganda model of news up to speed for the digital age. Chomsky and Herman wrote that book as the internet was just coming online in the late ‘80s. They never really had a chance to revise it. Edward Herman passed two years ago. Noam Chomsky is closing in on 90 if he’s not 90 already.

We spent about one year updating the propaganda model of news for the digital age. That’s where the six elements of a real news story came from.