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Published: 1/21/2022 7:01:31 AM

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Critical Race Theory is an academic concept that began as a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s. As an educator of over 28 years, I first heard of CRT the way most people did: a couple of years ago, via the news.

Recently, CRT has become a hot-button issue in the ongoing culture wars. And because of this, it has been wrongly conflated with many other concepts, such as culturally-relevant teaching. For example, if I ask myself, have I thought about all of my students, their various cultures, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, experiences, and made a space for them in my classroom so that they can be successful? then I am not practicing Critical Race Theory, Im just being a good teacher.

Not only is CRT not being taught in NH primary and secondary schools, CRT also does not say what some people think it says. It does not, for example, teach that all white people are racist or that all people of color are oppressed. Its central tenets are that race is a social construct, and that racism is not only a product of our inherent biases but also something that may be found in our legal system.

An example of this would be the redlining of neighborhoods in the 1930s, which resulted in banks refusing to issue loans to Black citizens. This example is a historic fact, not an opinion.

As a music educator, Im about to begin teaching my second semester drumming class. Over the course of this class, students will learn many styles of drumming from around the globe. My first unit will be an African drumming unit.

Over the course of this unit, my students will learn how to play a variety of African percussion instruments, learn how African rhythms have greatly influenced the popular music they listen to today, and yes, we will delve a bit into the geography of West Africa and answer questions like, why do all these West African nations speak various European languages, as well as their own dialects?

Mentioning the diaspora and its effects on the arc of American music is not Critical Race Theory. And that is my right as an educator in the Live Free or Die state, a state that has only had that motto for the last 77 years. Prior to that, it was Scenic New Hampshire.

(Dan Williams lives in Concord.)

Excerpt from:
My Turn: Conversation on concepts - Concord Monitor

As anti-vaccine activists from across the country prepare to gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, they are hoping their rally will mark a once-fringe movements arrival as a lasting force in American society.

That hope, some public health experts fear, is justified.

Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the movement to challenge vaccines' safety - and reject vaccine mandates - has never been stronger. An ideology whose most notable adherents were once religious fundamentalists and minor celebrities is now firmly entrenched among tens of millions of Americans.

Baseless fears of vaccines have been a driving force among the approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults who have refused some of the most effective medicines in human history: the mRNA vaccines developed against the coronavirus by Pfizer, with German partner BioNTech, and Moderna. The nation that produced Jonas Salk has exported anti-vaccine propaganda around the globe, wreaking havoc on public health campaigns in places such as Germany and Kenya.

That propaganda has also found its way into many reaches of American life. It has invaded people's offices and shaped the daily decisions of school principals. It has riven families and boosted political campaigns. What was once an overwhelming public consensus on vaccine safety is now a new front in the nation's culture wars. It is no accident that some in the anti-vaccine movement are describing Sunday's rally as their first equivalent of the March for Life, the annual antiabortion rally taking place in Washington on Friday.

"Our worst worries have been manifested," said Joe Smyser, chief executive of the Public Good Projects, a nonprofit group that tracks and seeks to combat vaccine misinformation. "These fringe ideas are no longer fringe ideas."

Despite signs from the earliest days of the pandemic that the anti-vaccine movement was advancing its cause by preying on the uncertainty and social division that accompanied the virus, the U.S. public health establishment never mounted a true counteroffensive, Smyser said - a view shared by other public health experts and epidemiologists.

"I think we were really naive," he said. "This movement was allowed to get stronger and stronger with almost no pushback."

The 153 most influential anti-vaccine social media accounts and groups have accumulated 2.9 million net new followers since January 2020, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy organization focused on fighting vaccine misinformation. Imran Ahmed, the center's chief executive, said those gains are especially remarkable in light of social media platforms' renewed efforts to crack down on vaccine misinformation.

Vaccine skeptics notched another victory just last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Biden's vaccination requirement for large employers. (A smaller mandate for workers at health-care facilities that get federal funding was left intact.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who will speak at Sunday's march, said the widening distrust of vaccines is an organic outgrowth of people's firsthand experiences with negative side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. He pointed to the large number of reports of reactions to those vaccines now on file in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 750,000 such reports have been filed from the United States and its territories. But claims of bad reactions in VAERS have not been independently verified, and anyone can make them. Controlled studies of the coronavirus vaccines offer a more accurate picture of how they work, and those studies have repeatedly shown the medicines cause no serious side effects for the overwhelming majority of people who receive them.

Kennedy said the growing number of infections among the vaccinated from the omicron variant of the coronavirus has also eroded public confidence in a key selling point for vaccine mandates - that they stop the spread of the virus to vulnerable populations.

Although the vaccines are markedly less effective at stopping infection by the new variant, early evidence suggests they still confer protection against hospitalization or death.

"I think there's a lot more skepticism," Kennedy said. "You have a product that simply does not work as advertised."

What remains to be seen is whether the movement's success in sowing fear of the coronavirus vaccines can be translated to a broader public rejection of other forms of inoculation, chiefly the immunization of children against diseases such as measles and diphtheria. Casting doubt on such vaccines and erasing school mandates requiring them were the anti-vaccine movement's long-standing goals before the emergence of the coronavirus.

Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health, said it is far too early for the movement to declare victory on those fronts. Arguments that have proved effective against the mRNA vaccines, like questioning their relative novelty and the possibility of long-term side effects, could be less convincing when it comes to established vaccines that many American adults received decades ago without being harmed.

"What will we see when things are somewhat back to normal, and covid doesn't dominate everything every day? Is this going to bleed over into other things, like childhood vaccinations? I really don't know," Smith said. "And that's the fear."

Several pediatricians interviewed by The Washington Post said they are not yet seeing an increase in the number of parents refusing vaccines for their children, but there are worrisome signs.

Deborah Greenhouse, a pediatrician in Columbia, S.C., said she has fielded eyebrow-raising questions from parents. Some, repeating a conspiracy theory that has circulated since early in the pandemic, ask whether the coronavirus vaccine injections will implant microchips in their children's bodies. Others accuse her and other pediatricians of promoting the vaccines for personal profit. One father worried that a coronavirus test swab would give his child cancer.

"This has been the most frustrating time period in my entire career," said Greenhouse, who has been a pediatrician for nearly 30 years.

Greenhouse said she has not seen an uptick of similar concerns about other vaccines among her patients, but worries it could just be a matter of time.

"It's truly frightening for the future," she said.

The scientific case for the full range of vaccines recommended by public health authorities in the United States remains as solid as ever. Research has shown those vaccines - which have all but eliminated diseases that once sickened, debilitated or killed millions every year - to be safe for the vast majority of those who receive them. The 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that claimed a link between a common childhood vaccine and autism, launching the modern anti-vaccination movement, was exposed as fraudulent.

The mRNA coronavirus vaccines have proved to be some of the best ever added to physicians' arsenal. As of October, according to the most recent estimates from the CDC, those who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines and a booster were 40 times less likely to die of the virus than the unvaccinated. There is not yet sufficient evidence to judge the vaccines' exact level of protection against severe outcomes from the omicron variant, but early research in the United Kingdom and South Africa has been promising.

Nevertheless, national surveys show about 1 in 5 U.S. adults remain unvaccinated. Among children ages 5 to 11, who became eligible for the shots in November, fewer than 20 percent are vaccinated.

A November poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found majorities of unvaccinated adults saying they will "definitely not" get a vaccine and are not confident in the vaccines' safety.

Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to reject the vaccines - another ominous sign for public health officials, who worry that resistance to inoculation could become a permanent trapping of political identity.

Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said the enthusiasm ahead of Sunday's rally is a dispiriting reminder of how little has been done to combat the anti-vaccine movement's rise over the past two years.

Topol said he has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, urged federal health officials to do more to counter rampant falsehoods about vaccines.

"Misinformation spreads far quicker and more broadly than truth," Topol said. "The administration does nothing to call them out, and that has left them to continue to grow like a metastasis. They just get bigger and more toxic, and they hoodwink and bamboozle more people who might have been neutral."

Sunday's rally in D.C. could be a case study in the amplification of anti-vaccine views by media sources that threaten to drown out more conventional, evidence-based voices. Organizer Matt Tune said the march's website saw a "huge spike" in traffic after Robert Malone, a physician who has become a prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines, mentioned it on Joe Rogan's popular podcast. (Malone's appearance provoked a condemnatory letter to Spotify, which hosts the podcast, from hundreds of doctors and public health experts.)

Organizers estimate that 20,000 people will attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. D.C. police will be fully activated from Friday, during the annual March for Life, through Sunday, the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.

The march is billed as a protest of vaccine mandates, such as those recently enacted in D.C. and other cities, rather than the medicines themselves. But similar rhetoric - emphasizing individual autonomy rather than untenable scientific ideas - has long characterized the broader anti-vaccine movement, and the march's speakers include movement veterans such as Kennedy and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network.

Other speakers include Malone and former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who in a November appearance on Fox News compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Public employee associations that have formed to protest their employers' vaccine mandates, such as Feds for Medical Freedom and D.C. Firefighters Bodily Autonomy Affirmation Group, are also participating.

"The goal is to show a unified front of bringing people together - vaccinated, unvaccinated, Democrats, Republicans, all together in solidarity," said Tune, an unvaccinated 48-year-old from Chicago. He said he wants the event "to help change the current narrative . . . which is basically saying that we're a bunch of weirdos and freaks who don't care about humanity. And that's not true at all."

About 12,000 people have joined a Facebook group for the rally, with many saying they will stay overnight and eat in Northern Virginia to avoid the District's vaccine mandate. Some commenters on the group's page have compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and urged people not to get tested for the virus. One commenter wrote: "This is an intentional permanent tyrannical dictatorship if they are not stopped by FORCE!!!!!!"

Facebook did not respond to questions about whether the page violates the platform's policies on covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, which prohibit "content calling to action, advocating, or promoting that others not get the COVID-19 vaccine."

- - -

The Washington Posts Dan Keating and Scott Clement contributed to this report.

Read the original post:
Anti-vaccine activists, reveling in their pandemic successes, will rally in D.C. against mandates - The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.

We thought it was hilarious, von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. The whole day we were laughing,

The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolffs epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were more a black Mass than music for a church. A music blogger had called her the high priestess of satanic harmonies, the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track Pills, she sings, I made love with the devil.

We said, This is such a great P.R. campaign, Von Hausswolff said. I mean, the High Priestess of satanic art. Wow!

But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concerts promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.

Soon, there were 100 people blocking the churchs entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that shed hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.

There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe, she said. I wanted to get out. She canceled the show.

In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolffs experience is an example of another tension point in the continents culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.

Cline Braud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. It comes from a well organized minority whore very good at getting attention in the media, Braud said.

One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festivals stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival sites fields with holy water. Hellfests communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site.

Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolffs tour problems didnt end when she left Nantes even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.

Later, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message Satan is not welcome.

Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was very creative. (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)

As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called Singing from the Grave that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.

After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburgs vast Annedal Church. When I reached the lowest note, I couldnt believe my ears, Von Hausswolff said. I felt it through my whole body.

Shes since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instruments capabilities, said that she explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses, and had developed her own musical language. Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. Its fortunate for us that she chose the organ, he said.

In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track Pills in which she sings of satanic lovemaking was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, If youre asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, No.

As much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.

Im not a good Christian and never will be, said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. But Im there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.

She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, I will go there, and I will play my music.

Originally posted here:
A High Priestess of Satanic Art? This Organist Can Only Laugh. - The New York Times

Everybody knows that Percy French wrote The Mountains of Mourne, probably still his best-known song. But it tends to be forgotten that he wrote only the lyrics. As was often the case, those were set to a traditional air, arranged by his now much less remembered musical partner, Houston Collisson.

A Dublin-born Anglican priest, Collisson also scored the operettas they jointly produced in the early 1890s when, as Bernadette Lowry writes in the book mentioned here yesterday (about Frenchs role in Finnegans Wake), they promised to become an Irish Gilbert & Sullivan.

Each also performed solo on occasion and Collisson was once well known in his own right as an impresario. But poignantly, they were to be reunited in death. Both expired in the last week of January 1920: French on the 24th, Collisson on the 31st.

Despite their successes, singly and together, they had both sometimes suffered from the culture wars of the period, In the early 1890s, as Lowry points out, their brand of humour was at odds with the politics of the Parnell split, when Irelands stocks of humour in general were running low.

But a perception that their songs perpetuated stage-Irish stereotypes was also problematic for some.

That was the case in November 1906 when, during a solo tour of Ireland, Collisson endured a long, dark night of the artistic soul in Birr, Co Offaly.

I shall never forget Birr, he wrote afterwards in a memoir. The hall [] was well filled, and my entertainment was going gaily until a gentleman in the gallery, who had evidently been indulging in a little too much John Jameson began to talk.

The talker was eventually removed with the help of a police constable. Then Collisson launched into a song called Wait for a while now, Mary, with lyrics by French, to a traditional air. This triggered an outbreak of hissing from five or six occupants of the gallery, which persisted for the rest of the show.

Hissing seems to have been as bad as it got, but Dr Collisson was nonetheless shocked. He had been completely in sympathy with the revival of Irish music and literature then afoot, he afterwards insisted, and detested the Stage Irishman himself. But he did not accept that he and French were complicit. He wondered if what the Birr protesters had really objected to was his singing with a Dublin accent. To that he pleaded guilty: I was born there, and I cant help it. But he also quoted in full the epic hatchet job on the concert published later in a local paper, which supplied more detail of the charges.

The unnamed reviewer began by summarising the show as one of vulgar insipidity. Then he digressed to deliver a damning critique of the majority in the audience, which had aristocratically graced the hall in opera cloaks and demi-toilettes and clearly enjoyed itself.

If the entertainer had been engaged in the task of amusing children who had not reached a reasonable intellectual standard, then he might have succeeded in his efforts, lectured the critic. That he was successful in pleasing the Castle satellites and shoneens of Birr speaks volumes for their intellectual abilities.

From there the piece went on to lambaste the third-rate one-man shoddy performance itself; the performers sleepy address, interspersed with antediluvian jokes and atrocious attempts at punning; and even his skills on the instrument of torture (the piano).

Apart from one song the reviewer generously declared right enough, the events only saving grace was said to be the hissing of a small section of the audience (described as Irishmen) that disturbed the laughter of the rest (described as the garrison).

This proved that Birr was not entirely shoneen. Summing up for the hissers, the review concluded: The day is gone when we pay our money to go and hear our nationality insulted, and our method of speaking the tongue of the alien ridiculed.

A night later, in Nenagh, Collisson was accosted outside concert by Irish-speaking youths who also hissed and hooted and called him Sassenach. Presumably they could not afford to attend the show, however. The audience there was entirely appreciative.

That Collisson recovered well from his midlands trauma is evidenced by an entry in his diary from two months later, when he attended the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to see a controversial new play.

The culture wars were still raging. And beforehand, he had assumed the audience protests at earlier performances of the Playboy of the Western World to be unfair. But he changed his mind mid-show: Before the second act had terminated I found myself joining loudly in the [] shouts of disapproval.

Go here to see the original:
Houston, we have a problem Frank McNally on Percy French's forgotten collaborator Houston Collisson - The Irish Times

Good afternoon,

Earlier in the month, a social media comment about the installation of speed cameras along an accident-prone section of the I-95 construction zone in Wilmington came with a couple of culture wars references.

Attn snowflakes HOW will this prevent accidents? Will it WOKE me?, he wrote.

Politics aside, there are ample reasons for using the cameras, which were briefly taken out of commission by vandals this month.

The number of accidents has skyrocketed in the construction zone and cleaning up the mishaps is difficult. Enforcement is dangerous for police, and more than one motorist has been stranded in pile-ups.

Granted, speed cameras may have been brought in as money-raising tools in some states. Their use has been confined to school and construction zones in our region.

Delaware tip-toed into speed cameras with last years General Assembly approving their use in the I-95 construction zone with fines are on the modest side (under $100).

In Virginia, motorists speeding through a construction zone can be slapped with a penalty of up to $500.

A strong case can be made for cameras in other Delaware construction zones and highways where speeding is a big problem (sections of Route 1 and I-495 come to mind).

For those tooling along at 90 miles an hour and menacing other motorists, a hefty fine via speed camera would be more than justified. If thats woke, Im OK with that description.

After all, more than one survey has listed the states roads as some of the most dangerous around.

A lapse in heat function

Finally, a note from the motor vehicle site in Georgetown announced on Friday a lapse in heat function. As the issue is being addressed, interior temperatures may be colder than usual. Ill toss that phrase around the next time the heat pump acts up.

Heres hoping you see no lapse in heat or other functions this weekend. Doug Rainey, chief content officer.

See the original post:
'Woke' speed cameras and heat functions - delawarebusinessnow.com