Editor’s Note:

When the recent PM Trudeau “brownface story” came to be, many people denounced the act citing a variety of sound reasons, and as well, many people believe that people can learn, grow and change their minds and opinions on the topic of racism and realize the cultural misfortunes that are associated with this blatant disregard of the humanity of others.

Others unfortunately, don’t.

On the other side of this disastrous equation, is the big question of the 5 ‘W’s’ – namely - Who, What, Where, When & Why?

Simply put – who is the source?  In the business of the media, the “source” is paramount to any news story, especially one such as this. 

The following is an investigation by Amy MacPherson of Free the Press Canada.*

Dirty Tricks Behind Trudeau Brownface/Blackface Scandal? <article link


Excerpt from the article…

<Given that Time is an American enterprise, it raised suspicion that no Canadian media was approached with the original brownface scandal, to have any knowledge about the prime minister’s former transgression. No parliamentary bureau chiefs, with decades of sources and contacts, were prepared for this extremely damaging exposé. Even journalists hired by the Liberal government, and the Conservative opposition, are scrambling to make sense of how they got scooped by a foreign competitor.

Also given that foreign interference is a major issue in Western elections, it became prudent to examine the Time story with a skeptical lens. Free The Press Canada is an advocate of journalism ethics and periodically lectures on the Canadian university circuit (original / archive), so it undertook this analysis with a view to examining the power and means of foreign influence. With great surprise, the initial investigation of Time magazine led to curious discoveries within the article itself, as well as a web of deceit that surrounds the scandal.

The first issue with the infamous Time article is that reporters didn’t interview the purported source of the Arabian Nights photo, who they named as Michael Adamson. Instead they only paraphrase a disparate explanation regarding how Adamson came to possess this politically explosive evidence.

First they report he was involved with the West Point Grey Academy community, leaving readers to insinuate that Adamson may have participated with the school at the time of Trudeau’s employment. But the magazine follows up with a counter-statement that indicates Adamson only became aware of the offensive yearbook in July 2019, barely prior to the writ dropping for the current federal election. Time further describes Adamson as a “Vancouver businessman”, concealing his profession or any other information that would allow him to be identified and verified, according to Canadian journalism standards.

Oddly, Time addressed its source of the yearbook by name but it spoke on Adamson’s behalf, referring to him in the third-person. At no point does the magazine include a quote from the star of its story, who was apparently concerned enough to bring this matter to the attention of American media. When a source doesn’t wish to speak on the record due to fear of reprisal, it’s standard for a journalist to offer anonymous attribution. But that’s not what Time did. Instead it named Michael Adamson as a token lightning rod, in an effort to validate the magazine’s legitimacy and motive for unleashing the greatest scandal to rock another country’s election – its main economic trading partner, no less.>
…

We encourage everyone to take the time (literally) and read this article that will leave you somewhat mind-blown, and knowing a lot more about what goes on in the business of the media than you may, or may not have wanted to know – but should.

We wish to remind everyone that the GFP and our associates do not condone this type of racist behaviour and realize that all of us - can change for the better.

Our thanks to Amy MacPherson (<Twitter Page) for an outstanding expose regarding this matter.

*Amy MacPherson, Free the Press Canada.

Image: Courtesy of Free the Press Canada (Source: TIME)

BACKGROUND TO THIS DOCUMENTARY PHOTO REPORT: In September, 2012, FRANCIS  UMENDU ODUPUTE, an artist cum journalist with The NIGERIAN OBSERVER, a government-owned newspaper in Benin City, Edo State of Nigeria, began an investigation into an over-populated, poorly maintained and yearly-flooded primary school in a fast developing community he resides with his wife, three children and a ward. He had enrolled his ward in the densely populated public primary school - that was how he got to know more about the school’s problems and became bothered that for the 12th year running, children in this primary school had been suffering from flooding and poor sanitation, water-related diseases, over-crowding and psychological traumas, as the school and indeed their community, Evbuotubu/Iguedaiye, in Egor LGA of Edo State, was alleged to have been neglected and marginalized by successive governments of the State. 
 
Mr. Odupute courageously published a serialized, pro-poor investigative story on the demographic, environmental and WASH situation in Evbuotubu Primary School and the community roads in The Nigerian Observer Newspapers, between 2014 and 2015. The journalist also embarked on few strategic media interfaces and dialogue with Evbuotubu community leaders and youths on the need to increase their cry to the State government.

1. At the basis of all concrete identities: “Muslim,” “Sunni,” “French citizen,” etc., lies a core human being, a capacity for self-making within the objective contexts of natural and social life. Selves are made, identities forged, reproduced, modified, and developed through processes of work and affective-symbolic interaction with other people within and across societies.

Work relations and social interactions are contradictory – they are both creative and alienating, mutualistic and antagonistic, peaceful and violent. When politics loses sight of or ignores for partisan advantage the underlying human capacity for self-making and re-making it fixates on the abstractions. A fixation on the abstract markers of particular identities leads to their reification, and their reification leads in turn to false, quasi-natural explanations of conflict (the problems in the Middle east are the consequence of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ racism is a result of the ‘natural’ inferiority of the demonized race, etc).

Digging beneath the surface identity to the core human activity of identity formation, reveals it as the result (always modifiable) of a process of practical and symbolic labour that unfolds in dynamic interaction with other selves and the objective world. Other selves, the natural world, and the social institutions that mediate the relationship between individuals and nature are themselves dynamic and change in response to changed activities.

Foregrounding this dynamic process and using it as a wedge against the stereotypes of reified thinking is the constructive political role that philosophical thinking can play. While philosophers will also be motivated by concrete political evaluations of the relative legitimacy of conflicting positions, if they are to be active as philosophers, they must ground their political assessments in the deeper understanding of human self-making activity explained above.

What should we call the current era? Post-everything? Or perhaps, the interregnum? Whatever the name it should be given, the current period is characterized by neoliberal trans-nationalization. In addition, U.S. hegemony has been under question since the beginning of this period. In fact, the Empire is no longer U.S.-American and a change in hegemony is in full swing.  Despite what world-systems theorists such as Giovanni Arrighi suggest, the balance does not seem to be tipping toward China. Nevertheless, as Niall Ferguson points out, it is moving toward Chimerica. Furthermore, since the beginning of the global financial crisis, no project has been in sight that could reorganize the active consensus of the subalterns, move perspectives on accumulation one step up the ladder, and provide a position capable of establishing a new world order.

Attempts to secure neoliberal positions through authoritarianism are now facing a new transnational cycle of movements (Candeias 2013). Alongside numerous attempts by Islamist movements, the remaining great powers are sparring for spheres of influence, whether in Eastern Europe or through the appropriation of African resources.  At the same time, the United States is endeavouring to prevent further losses of its room to manoeuvre; Russia is striving to expand its influence through energy and resource policies, and arms trafficking, whereas China has linked its imperial ambitions to the provision of foreign aid.

When I was invited to speak at today's forum, the attacks in Paris against the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher super market had not taken place. In light of the media coverage of what happened in Paris, I feel the need to situate my comments against the backdrop of those events. I hope you will indulge me.
 
Over the past 500 years, rampaging capitalism has expanded ruthlessly across the world, eliminating all impediments to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of those who own and run the system. We are familiar with the attendant results: rising standards of living for a few, accompanied by growing insecurity, impoverishment and degradation of the many.

The contemporary world, run as it is by the forces of capitalism, is characterized by grotesque, ever-increasing levels of inequality and instability.
 
Imperialism and colonialism, which involve the forcible subjugation of the peoples of the global south to the demands of this system, have played an essential part in its growth and sustenance.
  

Protests, riots and police violence in Ferguson (a suburb of St. Louis), Missouri, last August have laid bare “America's racial rift” says The Guardian Weekly.[1] Mainstream opinion-makers have tended to interpret the Michael Brown case and the protests that followed his death in terms of police brutality, racial tensions, and legal responsibility (of the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old African American, Michael Brown), showing these events as specific to American society.

Their significance is however much broader. To capture this broader picture, one has to adopt a method of thinking which does not view Ferguson only empirically. Thinking these events as constituent parts, or outcomes, of a social and economic system is a necessary undertaking to those committed to social justice and emancipation. Such method of thought makes Malcolm X a contemporary of our problems even though his life and work were those of a Black nationalist of the 1960s.

Segregation is a key fact of the racial rift in St. Louis. Reports in the press have underlined that the relations of mistrust and hatred between the police and the local Black community were imbedded in the segregated geography of the city. Vickie Place – where the family of Michael Brown occupies one of these single-family homes built in the 1950s – doesn't look different of the rest of suburbia. But it has a specific place in the social relations and the geography of the city. To the predominantly white police officers who patrol it, Vickie Place “appears to be a forbidding, alien, territory. A land of the other. It might as well be Falluja”, say Observer reporters Rory Carroll and Jon Swaine.[2]