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Jason Aldean has quietly removed Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest footage from the music video for his song Try That In A Small Town.

As reported by TMZ, the video for the country singers track is shorter by six seconds compared to its original upload. The short missing clip is footage from a BLM rally in Georgia, which is projected on a Tennessee courthouse where a Black teenager was lynched in 1927. The original clip was shot by Fox 5 Atlanta.

According to Consequence of Sound, Aldean had previously claimed that there wasnt a single video clip that isnt real news footage within the Try That In A Small Town video. The music video and song have received backlash with many believing they are promoting racism and gun violence.

Lyrics such as:You cross that line, it wont take long/ For you to find out, I recommend you dont / Try that in a small town, and Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day theyre gonna round up / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck are featured within the song, adding to concerns about the tracks true meaning.

Despite the backlash, Try That In A Small Town has become the singers biggest song to date. At his show on Friday, July 21, at Cincinnatis Riverbend Music Center in Ohio,Aldean claimed that the uproar around the song was due to cancel culture.

Its been a long week, and Ive seen a lot of stuff. Ive seen a lot of stuff suggesting Im this, suggesting Im that, he told the crowd. Heres the thing, heres one thing I feel: I feel like everybodys entitled to their opinion. You can think something all you want to. It doesnt mean its true, right?

He added What I am is a proud American. Im proud to be from here. I love our country. I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this bullshit started happening to us. I love my country, I love my family, and I will do anything to protect that, I can tell you that right now.

Despite artists such as Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell speaking out against the song and video, the track went onto achieve the biggest sales week for a country song in over 10 years. It earned the Number Two spot behind BTS JungKooks first solo Number One Seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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Jason Aldean removes Black Lives Matter protest footage from 'Try That In A Small Town' video - NME

The Republican Partys primary race is filling up with candidates crusading against wokeness, particularly in the American educational system. Meanwhile, here in Kentucky (where I live), a rural school district will be forced to reform its anti-discrimination policies after a federal Department of Justice investigation has uncovered serious and widespread racial harassment in the school system, targeting Black and multiracial students who live in the county. Denial about the White supremacy at the heart of American culture and politics has become so deeply integral to conservative politics, its essentially become a kind of spiritual practice. And its bound up with a network of denials that run deeper than American history.

Theres a passage from a letter, written by James Baldwin to his nephew, that I cite in my new book Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living & Dying. I was working on the book in March 2020, and this comment from Baldwin has been haunting me for the past three years since the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since, that is to say, the denial of the value of Black lives coincided with the denial of the gravity of a pandemic.

White Americans do not believe in death, Baldwin wrote. And this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. That which is unspeakable for White Americans, their private fears and longings, are projected onto the Negro, says Baldwin. The fear of death is projected onto the other, who becomes both the emblem and victim of that which is feared. White Americans fear death, but convince themselves that death doesnt happen to them. That they arent the ones destined for death. Death is something that happens to Black Americans.

Black Lives Matter protests were one of the places where people wore masks early in the pandemic facing ridicule from politicians like Donald Trump. Many White Americans like Trump were not convinced that the pandemic, or the risk of death that it carried, was a real threat. Baldwins words speak to us about both of these forms of denial.

But Baldwins words are also reminiscent of a more ancient history of death denial in Christian theology. Its long been the case that many Christians claim death as something meant for their enemies, not something that truly applies to themor at least to those they deem faithful Christians. Instead, Christians expect to live on eternally. Its a view that promises insiders the ultimate reward, and makes enemy lives (already destined for death) that much more disposable. White Americans have, we could say, inherited their denial of the value of Black life (and their disbelief in White death) from the Christian tradition that so many White Americans have turned to (and continue to turn to) for guidance and strength.

Death denial in Christian thought

There is no singular way of interpreting what death is (why it happens, what purpose it serves) within the Christian tradition. Christianity is a diverse tradition that harbors all kinds of potential attitudes towards the reality of death. But one of the most dominant and enduring interpretations of death takes its cue from the apostle Pauls message to the church in Corinth, in which he writes that: the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Paul seems to clearly indicate that death is an enemy of God, and those who follow God.

Death is abstract; its a power, or a force, thats difficult if not impossible to actually conceptualize. It perhaps wouldnt matter how we think about abstract matters like these if it werent also the case that powers and forceslike life and deathare also understood to be embodied by living beings like us. The lines between life and death can divide people and communities, feeding into narratives about who should live and who should die.

Pauls message has often been interpreted to be a declaration that Christianswho are friends and lovers of Godare on the side of life, and the living. Death, which is the enemy force, is not only an evil enemy of God but the ultimate fate of Christianitys foes. These enemies of God are more killable than other Christians, precisely because they were never promised eternal life to begin with. Their lives dont matter and their deaths are inevitable.

The promise that Christians will be lifted up to heaven, to join together with God after their own death, even has its ties to death and violence. In their book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock reflect on how the belief that Christians will join Gods eternity immediately after death (rather than after the resurrection, or even after baptism, for instance) became more commonplace after the Crusades. Pope Urban II promised Crusaders that those who died fighting Jews and Muslims would be assured a quick passage to eternal life with God. This direct route to heaven was forged by martyrs in a war, but soon became a popular route to the afterlife for all Christians.

Christianity has long promoted itself as a universal religiona faith that absolutely anyone can join. But the dividing line between who identifies as a Christian and who doesnt has always been a meaningful one. One has to join, in order to be part of it. In Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity Denise Buell argues that, despite the fact that Christianity is understood to be a universal religion available to all, its clear in ancient Christian texts that theres an ethnic reasoning Christians use to distinguish themselves from Jews, Greeks, and Romans. Despite the fact that Christianitys universal tradition appears to transcend race or ethnicity, the lines between insider and outsider have been actively shaped by a kind of racializing logic.

In Christian anti-Judaism this racializing logic has been especially visible. While it took centuries in the ancient world for the line between Christianity and Judaism to be definitively drawn, this line became a powerfully meaningful one. J. Kameron Carter argues, in Race: A Theological Account, that modern racial imaginations, which draw a sharp distinguishing racial line between White and Black, were aided and empowered by the Christian quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots. The Christian attempt to render itself superior to Judaism generated a differentiating pattern (Jew/Christian) that has given shape to anti-Blackness (White/Black).

In Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, Terence Keel argues that the logic of Christian supersessionism (the idea that Gods covenant with Jews has been replaced by a covenant with Christians, rendering Judaism irrelevant and unnecessary) has fed into a long tradition of racial reasoning in Christianity. Given the deep influence that Christian thought has had on the development of culture and politics, this racial reasoning patterned within Christianity has also influenced patterns of racial reasoning in modern science, about race. And this is just one way in which these Christian views have been secularized.

In other words, theres a long history in Christianity of creating a dividing line between Christian and non-Christian that also serves as a racial line. The line between who is Christian and who isnt doesnt have to be a racial line, perhaps. But it often has been, and it often is. Christian antisemitism is one example. But we can also look to the colonization of the Americas to see how Indigenous people were understood, by colonizers, to be non-Christian in both a racial and a religious sense. The push to convert Indigenous people to Christianity wasnt simply a religious project but also a racial one.

What does this have to do with life and death? One could make the argument (as I do in Sister Death) that it isnt just White Americans who lack a belief in deathwho seem unconvinced that death is a fact that applies to them. Rather, in the history of Christianity we can see an ancient trail of death denial. This Christian view discussed earlier, about whose lives matter eternally and whose lives dont, and about who can be killed with impunity and who cant, may be written into White supremacist views about whose lives matterand whose dont.

It might seem like a leap to make a parallel between these old Christian ideas and the modern American viewpoint that James Baldwin was pointing to. But if we know anything about American history, we know that the colonization of this land and the practices of enslavement that built its economy have been deeply connected towere founded in conversation withChristian theologies.

Erik Ward argues that White nationalism in America today continues to be animated and fueled by the antisemitism that has, for so long, animated Christian imaginations. Is it really such a leap to suggest that death-denial in Christian thought might animate and enable the exceptionalism of a contemporary White supremacy that denies the value of Black life? I certainly dont think so.

The fact of death

James Baldwin saw the White American disbelief in death as a kind of tragedy. We spend our lives imprisoning ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, and nations in order to make ourselves part of something thats permanent and lasting.

Instead, we should rejoice in the fact of death; we ought to earn our death, by confronting with passion the conundrums of life. In the end, he wrote, life is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. And one must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

In denying, or refusing to believe in, the fact of death we may be unable to travel well with all these others who were made by this darkness, and will travel back into it with us. We may be missing our own humanity.

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How Christian Theology Created the Need to Assert that Black Lives Matter - Religion Dispatches

Next week marks a decade since Black Lives Matter began disrupting our lives. The media doesnt mention the group much anymore, mainly to avoid embarrassing evidence of its corruption. But BLM has changed the nation in profound ways, perhaps permanentlyand continues to do so.

This transformation of America was deliberate. The nations newspapers robotically speak of a racial reckoning following BLMs founding in 2013, and especially after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, as if this truly was a movement that forced America to deal with its sins.

In reality, the founders of BLM were hard-boiled Marxists who had been waiting in the wings to revolutionize America for years prior to 2013. Their goal was not the improvement of conditions in black America, but the dismantling of the family, capitalism, and representative democracy.

The media has hidden this truth or lied about it.

Heres what actually transpired: On July 13, 2013, a Florida jury acquitted volunteer neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman of murdering 17-year-old black teenager Trayvon Martin after a scuffle. That day, the Oakland activist Alicia Garza posted a message to Facebook to express her deep sense of grief. The post contained either the assertion Black Lives Matter or Our lives matter. It isnt clear which.

What is clear, however, is that Garzas comrade, Patrisse Cullors, another veteran activist, reacted that night by creating #BlackLivesMatter. Two days later, a third militant, Opal Tometi, reached out to Garza and said, Ive seen this emerging hashtag that Patrisse and you put online a day or two ago. I think we need to build a website and I think we need to elevate it and make sure that were using it across our network and beyond.

The hashtag became a movement in the burning streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

The rest is indeed history. It should be studied as history, with historians carefully unearthing evidence one piece at a time, especially given how widespread the cultural change has been since 2013, and then, more rapidly, since 2020.

Instead, we have hollow incantations such as The Washington Post saying a few months ago, The protests after the murder of George Floyd led to a society-wide rethinking of Americas policies toward black Americans. Or The New York Times just last week intoning how programs to hire and promote minorities have been prominent in corporate America in recent years, especially in the reckoning over race after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

A reckoning suggests that America is finally being held accountable for its evils.

But these diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; along with the equally proliferating anti-racism sessions; the application of critical race theory and gender theory notions in classrooms; and the imposition of environmental, social, and governance practices on unsuspecting shareholders, have thrived because of a falsehood that BLM successfully implanted. That being the self-evidently farcical idea that America is systemically racist and oppressive.

Elites and the administrators of nearly all our cultural institutions reacted to the shock of hundreds of street riots in 2020 by surrendering and swallowing whole that offending fabrication, which by logical extension means that America is in urgent need of a systemic overhaul. People need to be deprogrammed and then reprogrammed by an army of race trainers. Government, schools, and the private sector must enact race-conscious programs and policies.

Except that parents rose up and began protesting these absurdities almost immediately. They elected Glenn Youngkin governor of purple Virginia in 2021 and gave Ron DeSantis an unheard-of 20-point margin in his reelection as Florida governor in 2022.

States have been eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion from their colleges and universities, while others are banning fund managers that practice ESG from managing state pensions. Congress has also started going after diversity, equity, and inclusion. The business of anti-racism training is down. And the Supreme Court reminded us again last week that race-conscious policies are unconstitutional.

There was no widespread and spontaneous reckoning. When Tometi wrote in July 2013 of using our network and beyond to amplify a message, she knew she could rely on an intricate lacework of far-leftist groups to organize protests, as researcher Ariel Sheen has documented.

These organizations included the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and the School of Unity and Liberation, which recruited Cullors and Garza at very young ages to train them in the ideological and practical aspects of Marxism.

Through these, Garza, Cullors, and later, Tometi started attending gatherings of wider networks such as LeftRoots, Left Forum, and the U.S. Social Forum. The last one was created by global Marxists in 2007 for the express purpose of planting a beachhead within the belly of the best.

A year earlier, Venezuelas dictator, Hugo Chavez, had joined American Marxists attending the World Social Forum in Caracas to take the battle home. We count on you, companeros, we count on you! Chavez said, using the term Cuban communists use for comrade. He added that essential to this formula to save the world are the people of the U.S.

Garza, at the age of 26, was on the organizing committee of the first U.S. Social Forum in 2007. As she put it to a USSF gathering in 2010, the USSF was created because she and other activists had been told at global gatherings of the World Social Forum, I need you to go home and talk to your comrades, and your companeros, right? And talk about and figure out what youre going to do to take your foot off our neck.

It was at that first forum that the National Domestic Workers Alliance was founded, and it was the National Domestic Workers Alliance seven years later that sent Garza to Ferguson to organize BLM into a global network.

The country has paid a heavy toll since. Civilian homicides rose by 10% between 2014 and 2019 in localities where BLM protested after Ferguson. According to Gallup, pride in being American among Democrats began a steep decline in 2013, when it was at 56%, compared to 29% today. And America is being turned upside down.

But a reckoning this isnt. The founding we mourn next week looks more like the start of an uprising that was organized within our gates.

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and well consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular We Hear You feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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Reckoning With the Marxists of Black Lives Matter 10 Years Later - Daily Signal

The FBIs primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as threat actors requiring continuous monitoring in 2015.

The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a high severity physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. Its been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts, Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately.

The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence communitys failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureaus broad authorities to surveil social media content authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBIs reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them.

The FBIs $14 million contract to ZeroFox for FBI social media alerting replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown.

In testimony before the Senate in 2021, the FBIs then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn flatly denied that the FBI had the power to monitor social media discourse.

So, the FBI does not monitor publicly available social media conversations? asked Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Correct, maam. Its not within our authorities, Sanborn replied, citing First Amendment protections barring such activities.

Sanborns statement was widely publicized at the time and cited as evidence that concerns about federal government involvement in social media were unfounded. But, as the Senate report stresses, Sanborns answer was false.

FBI leadership mischaracterized the Bureaus authorities to monitor social media, the report concludes, calling it an exaggeration of the limits on FBIs authorities, which in fact are quite broad.

It is under these authorities that the FBI sifts through vast amounts of social media content searching for threats, the report reveals.

Prior to 2021, FBI contracted with the company Dataminr that used pre-defined search terms to identify potential threats from voluminous open-source posts online, which FBI could then investigate further as appropriate, the report states, citing internal FBI communications obtained as part of the committees investigation. Effective Jan. 1, 2021, FBIs contract for these services switched to a new company called ZeroFox that would perform similar functions under a new system.

The FBI has maintained that its intent is not to scrape or otherwise monitor individual social media activity, instead insisting that it seeks to identify an immediate alerting capability to better enable the FBI to quickly respond to ongoing national security and public safety-related incidents. Dataminr has also previously told The Intercept that its software does not provide any government customers with the ability to target, monitor or profile social media users, perform geospatial, link or network analysis, or conduct any form of surveillance.

While it may be technically true that flagging social media posts based on keywords isnt the same as continuously flagging posts from a specific account, the notion that this doesnt amount to monitoring specific users is misleading. If an account is routinely using certain keywords (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter), flagging those keywords would surface the same accounts repeatedly.

The 2015 threat report for which ZeroFox was criticized specifically called for continuous monitoring of McKesson and Elzie. In an interview with The Intercept, Elzie stressed how incompetent the FBIs analysis of social media was in her situation. She described a visit the FBI paid her parents in 2016, telling them that it was imperative she not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland an event she says she had no intention of attending and which troll accounts on Twitter bearing her name claimed she would be at to foment violence. (The FBI confirmed that it was reaching out to people to request their assistance in helping our community host a safe and secure convention, but did not respond to allegations that they were trying to discourage activists from attending the convention.)

My parents were like why would she be going to the RNC? And thats where the conversation ended because they couldnt answer that.

I dont think [ZeroFox] should be getting $14 million dollars [from] the same FBI that knocked on my familys door [in Missouri] and looked for me when it was world news that I was in Baton Rouge at the time, Elzie told The Intercept. Theyre just very unserious, both organizations.

The FBI was so dependent on automated social media monitoring for ascertaining threats that the temporary loss of access to such software led to panic by bureau officials.

This investigation found that FBIs efforts to effectively detect threats on social media in the lead-up to January 6th were hampered by the Bureaus change in contracts mere days before the attack, the report says. Internal FBI communications obtained by the Committee show how that transition caused confusion and concern as the Bureaus open-source monitoring capabilities were degraded less than a week before January 6th.

One of the FBI communications obtained by the committee was an email from an FBI official at the Washington Field Office, lamenting the loss of Dataminr, which the official deemed crucial.

Their key term search allows Intel to enter terms we are interested in without having to constantly monitor social media as well receive notification alerts when a social media posts [sic] hits on one of our key terms, the FBI official said.

The amount of time saved combing through endless streams of social media is spent liaising with partners and collaborating and supporting operations, the email continued. We will lose this time if we do not have a social media tool and will revert to scrolling through social media looking for concerning posts.

But civil libertarians have routinely cautioned against the use of automated social media surveillance tools not just because they place nonviolent, constitutionally protected speech under suspicion, but also for their potential to draw undue scrutiny to posts that represent no threat whatsoever.

While tools like ZeroFox and Dataminr may indeed spare FBI analysts from poring over timelines, the companys in-house definition of what posts are relevant or constitute a threat can be immensely broad. Dataminr has monitored the social media usage of people and communities of color based on law enforcement biases and stereotypes.

A May report by The Intercept also revealed that the U.S. Marshals Services contract with Dataminr had the company relaying not only information about peaceful abortion rights protests, but also web content that had no apparent law enforcement relevance whatsoever, including criticism of the Met Gala and jokes about Donald Trumps weight.

The FBI email closes noting that Dataminr is user friendly and does not require an expertise in social media exploitation. But that same user-friendliness can lead government agencies to rely heavily on the companys designations of what is important or what constitutes a threat.

The dependence is mutual. In its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, ZeroFox says that one U.S. government customer accounts for a substantial portion of its revenue.

Additional reporting by Sam Biddle.

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FBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers Threat Actors - The Intercept

By Scott Frickel and Fernando Tormos-Aponte

Hundreds of scientists protested government efforts to restrict educational access to Western science theories, including Darwins theory of evolution, in June 2023 in India. Similarly, scientists in Mexico participated in a research strike in May 2023 to protest a national law they claimed would threaten the conditions for basic research. And during the same month in Norway, three scientists were arrested for protesting the nations slow-moving climate policy.

As these among many other actions show, scientists today are speaking out on a variety of political and social issues related to their own research fields and in solidarity with other social movements.

We are social scientists who study the relationship between science and society. Through our work, weve noticed more scientists seem empowered to advocate for a wide range of policy issues. Were interested in how the surge in science activism may be changing the norms of scientific research.

With colleagues, we recently reviewed and summarized a growing body of studies examining how scientists are mobilizing for social activism and political protest. We also surveyed 2,208 members of the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network to learn more about scientists political engagement. Here is what we have found so far.

Science activism has long been considered taboo, as many in the field fear that politicizing science undermines its objectivity. Even so, scientist-activists have still managed to shape the U.S. political landscape throughout history. Over the past century, for example, scientists have protested the atomic bomb, pesticides, wars in Southeast Asia, genetic engineering and the federal response to the AIDS epidemic.

More recently, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 triggered a wave of political mobilization not seen in the United States since the Vietnam War era. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change activism, Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, scientists have also mobilized, and science advocacy organizations are playing important roles.

Some groups, like March for Science and Scientist Rebellion, are new and claim dozens of chapters and thousands of members around the world. In addition, older organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists are growing, while once-defunct organizations like Science for the People have reemerged.

Science organizing also happens within universities, graduate student unions and professional associations. These groups use their connections to local communities and larger networks of science professionals to mobilize others in the scientific community.

Many science advocacy groups borrow protest tactics from previous eras, like mass marches and teach-ins. Others are more innovative, including die-ins at medical schools to protest police racial violence and data-rescue hackathons to protect public access to government data.

Some efforts mirror conventional forms of politics, like 314 Action, an organization that supports political candidates with STEM backgrounds. Others are more confrontational, such as Scientist Rebellion, some members of which blocked roads and bridges to demand action on the climate emergency.

Or, science advocacy can look indistinguishable from typical academic practices, like teaching. A new course taught by an MIT physics professor titled Scientist Activism: Gender, Race and Power helps raise student awareness about the political nature of science.

Well need more research to determine how the resurgence of scientist activism is influencing politics and policy. But we can already point to some effects the growth of science advocacy organizations, increased media attention to scientist activism, climate-friendly changes in investment policies at some universities, and more STEM-trained politicians. However, we also expect that impending crises, like climate change, may be driving acceptance of activism within the scientific community.

For example, when we asked scientists how often they should be politically active, 95% of our surveyed scientists answered sometimes, most of the time, or always. Our surveyed population is, by definition, politically engaged. But this near-uniform level of support for political action suggests that the professional norms that have long sanctioned scientist activism may be shifting.

Other findings from the survey strengthen this interpretation. Scientist activism often entails some level of personal or professional risk. But 75% of respondents told us their science-based advocacy had the support of their employers. Most surprisingly for us, respondents were twice as likely to report that activism helped to advance their careers 22% rather than damage them 11%.

Our survey did find, however, that nonwhite scientists are more vulnerable to the risks of engaging in science advocacy. Seventeen percent of nonwhite scientists report negative career repercussions from their science advocacy, compared with less than 10% among white scientists. Yet compared with white respondents, nonwhite respondents are also more likely to engage in science advocacy.

While nonwhite respondents report higher rates of negative career impacts, the percentage reporting higher rates of career advancement from advocacy 31% was nearly double that for white respondents 18%. This difference suggests that science advocacy has deeper career consequences both good and bad among nonwhite scientists. Although they are more likely to be rewarded for this activity, they are exposed to greater risk for doing so.

Two lessons emerge from our research thus far. First, our findings indicate that science activism may be gaining legitimacy within the scientific community. In this context, social media is helping mobilize and raise visibility among younger researchers. These researchers political experiences are informed by the climate justice, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. As this newer generation of science activists moves into the profession, they will continue to shift the cultural norms of science.

Second, because race unevenly structures scientists experiences with activism, science activists can build on their current momentum by embracing intersectional solidarity. This means taking actions to center and engage marginalized groups within science. Intersectional solidarity can deepen activist engagement, enhance and diversify recruitment efforts, and increase its impact on social and ecological change.

Scott Frickel is a professor of Sociology and Environment and Society at Brown University. Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an assistant sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. They wrote this piece for The Conversation, where it first appeared.

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Science activism is surging. This is why | Opinion - Pennsylvania Capital-Star