Mediaboss Marketing

Prince Harry has copped a pasting in the British media for his new job as chief impact officer with Silicon Valley startup BetterUp.

His role, and the companys business model, has been called the latest expression of woke capitalism in venerable conservative magazine The Spectator. Other critics have chimed in, deriding the Prince of Woke Capital for surfing a wave of wokery towards an economic abyss.

Ridiculing people and corporations for being woke is, of course, a relatively easy sport for pundits on the right of the political spectrum. Harrys critics have a point that woke capitalism involves vapid political correctness, even if they are missing its more serious ramifications for social and economic inequality.

First, lets recap the meaning of woke and woke capitalism.

The use of the term woke by African Americans has been traced back at least to the 1920s, though Oxford English Dictionary researchers say its meaning as being alert to systemic issues of injustice and discrimination emerged from the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

It became more widely known with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 (following the acquittal of Florida man George Zimmerman for shooting dead African-American teen Trayvon Martin).

As academics Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland explain in a 2018 article, BLM activists used the hashtag #staywoke to urge fellow African Americans to remain aware of what is going on around you and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware or conscious.

It didnt take long for woke to enter mainstream culture. In 2016 the American Dialect Society declared it the slang word of the year. They defined woke as being conscious, aware or enlightened, especially with regards to matters of social justice and racial inequity.

Read more: Woke washing: what happens when marketing communications don't match corporate practice

In entering the mainstream, though, the meaning of woke was soon distorted. Those on the right of politics co-opted it as a term of derision akin to social justice warrior for people (especially white people) who bragged about their self-righteous positions on political issues.

What started as a serious call to political consciousness was manipulated to become a way of dismissing anyone who professed vaguely progressive views.

This wasnt limited to individuals. Corporations too could be chastised for being woke.

In 2018, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote about the trend of corporations and chief executives aligning themselves to progressive social concerns, such as immigration and gay and transgender rights, while they continued to push their own economic self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks.

The term woke capitalism soon came to express the approach of companies who claim a social licence to operate through their public advocacy on social issues, without affecting the economic status quo.

Read more: Swollen executive pay packets reveal the limits of corporate activism

What has all of this got to do with Prince Harry and BetterUp?

Lets clarify what BetterUp is.

Media reports have described the San Francisco-based company as a startup that provides employee coaching and mental health assistance.

The company itself describes its business as being about changing the world by bringing the power of transformation to each and every person. Announcing the princes appointment, chief executive Alexi Robichaux declared:

Prince Harry will expand on the work hes been doing for years, as he educates and inspires our community and champions the importance of focusing on preventative mental fitness and human potential worldwide.

The title of chief impact officer or chimpo comes from the not-profit sector. Theres no one accepted job decription, but such roles generally involve working to ensure an organisation is actually achieving its stated vision and mission.

How does this apply to BetterUp? Thats unclear.

Remove all the marketing babble and this is a company that exists to make a profit. Its core business appears to be an app selling professional coaching services. Its promise is to make people more positive, engaged, and connected to every part of their lives, both personal and professional.

In reality, the chief impact the prince is likely to have is attracting publicity for the app helping BetterUps bottom line, and Harrys bank balance.

The way in which BetterUp has wrapped its reality in the language of social concern and human progress bears all the worst hallmarks of woke capitalism.

Its business model is all about individual empowerment. This shows no apparent awareness of the need to address systemic social and economic inequities. It would also have us believe we can all make it in that world, if we just get the right mental attitude.

Yet the connection between entrenched economic inequalities and myriad social problems including mental illness are well-documented. As the World Health Organization concludes, mental disorders are shaped by social and economic factors, with inequality being chief among them.

Over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations World Social Report for 2020, income inequality has become worse in most developed countries.

The irony is that Harry epitomises this inequality, and the limitations of meritocracy. He is the very embodiment of unearned wealth and privilege. Would he have gotten this job except for the family he was born into? Unlikely. How much is he being paid to push the idea that anyone can achieve success? BetterUp isnt saying. Nor is he.

So while it easy to agree with criticisms of Prince Harrys new job as an expression of woke capitalism, this cannot simply be dismissed as misplaced political correctness.

Inequality is the problem. Woke capitalism is not the solution.

Excerpt from:
Prince Harrys critics have a point: woke capitalism is no solution - The Conversation AU

I am a pediatrician. It is my job to respond to young peoples needs. I listen and see them as the experts of their own lives. But even within medicine, not everyone does this, and the needs of Black people are systematically ignored. The physical pain that Black people experience is both under-recognized and undertreated, and young people are no exception. In a study of appendicitis management in emergency departments, for instance, Black children were less likely to receive the appropriate pain medication despite reporting the same pain scores as white children.

Emotional pain is even less visible and, therefore, harder to recognize. Adults caring for young people need to trust their expressions of anxiety or feeling unsafe and protect them from harm. But when Black students demand an end to ongoing trauma from police, the adults charged with protecting them often dismiss their voices. Black and brown youth activists have called for police-free schools, citing the disproportionate harm to Black and brown students, including extreme punishment for minor offenses, sexual harassment, and anxiety in the presence of policeall of which is supported by research.

In the 2015-16 school year, Black high school students nationwide made up 31 percent of arrests and referrals to law enforcement but only 15 percent of school enrollment. A 2018 Texas-based study found that increasing the numbers of school resource officers led to a decline in high school graduation and college-enrollment rates for all students. An investigation of the Chicago public schools in 2017 found that school resource officers had little oversight, accountability, or training and put Black students at higher risk of incarceration. As a pediatrician, I aim to see every child thrive by providing the resources they need to succeed within their context. The school-to-prison pipeline has threatened the futures of young Black and brown people for decades, and school resource officers contribute to this crisis.

The killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed brought national attention to the police-free school campaign. A few cities across the country, including Minneapolis; Oakland, Calif.; and Portland, Ore.; ended their district contracts with school resource officers. And the debates continue in districts throughout the country. As I see it, the continuance of school resource officer programs, despite their demonstrated and verbalized harms to Black students, reflects a much larger and problematic issue by extension: as a nation, we have been conditioned to distrust Black young people.

Black children are not given the same grace as white children because adults, including police officers, tend to see them as more mature than they are. According to one study, Black children as young as 5 to 10 years old are no longer viewed as innocent or worthy of protection, but rather as bad.

But they are not bad. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun, an age-appropriate activity, when he was killed by police at the age of 12. Trayvon Martin was 17, wearing a hoodie on his walk home, when, unprovoked, George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood-watch coordinator, approached and then killed him. We see this pattern of criminalization also in public schools. In 2020, 17-year-old Caleb Reed shared his experience of being arrested and held for six hours by a school resource officer. His crime? He left his ID card inside the gym when he stepped outside of a school sporting event. I cant watch the news or scroll through social media without seeing videos of police officers slamming students to the ground. These assaults by police officers in school are tracked on an #AssaultAt map by the Alliance for Educational Justices initiative, We Came to Learn. I counted a total of 12 incidents nationally in 2019. I worry that a return to school with resource officers present will once again make Black students disproportionately vulnerable to arrest.

We need to believe Black children. Believe their hurt. Believe in their innocence. Believe that they deserve to learn from their mistakes without a criminal record. And not hold them to a different standard from their white peers.

In Chicago, where I live, Black students have four times as many police interactions in school as white students. The extent of their arrests and feelings of unsafety has been alarming. As both a physician and Black woman, I felt compelled to get involved, to demonstrate with actions and not just words, that Black lives matter.

During the last year, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow physicians to amplify the voices of Chicagos young people. I texted friends who readily joined the cause. As physicians for police-free schools, we showed up wherever there were conversations: social media, protests, City Council meetings, even one-on-one meetings with school board members. We strategized with youth-serving community organizations, organized presentations for our peers, and co-led a webinar for hundreds of health-care providers in Illinois. Chicagos board of education voted against ending the school resource officer program by only one vote. Yet 17 schools voted to remove SROs, decreasing the districts contract expenditure by $18 million. Chicago public schools also introduced new reforms, such as implementation of school resource officer selection criteria, increased training, compliance monitoring, and research.

Although police may represent security for some, they do not signal or provide safety for Black young people. Their presence in schools as school resource officers amplifies those feelings of unsafety through continued discriminatory treatment on school grounds. To make learning environments truly safe for Black students, equip them with the resources that address the root causes of trauma and free them from the harm of overpolicing, we must invest in behavioral-health staffing and restorative-justice training. In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union released an analysis of 2015-16 federal civil rights data showing that 31 percent of students nationwide attended schools that have school resource officers but no psychologist, nurse, counselor, and/or social worker. Black children, like all children, deserve to be seen, loved, and treated as children.

As we start to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, we see more and more districts across the country discuss how to safely reopen their school buildings. But at this moment, lets not forget that COVID-19 isnt the only thing that threatens school safety. If we really want to make schools safe for Black children, we must remove school resource officers from campuses.

Until we do so, our work for school safety is not finished.

Follow this link:
We Ignore the Pain of Black Children (Opinion) - Education Week

By Shayna Gee

sgee23@mail.ccsf.edu

This years Womens History Month theme is We Keep Each Other Safe. The programming offers a series of 13 free remote events including multiple healthy relationship workshops with Project SURVIVE. The Womens and Gender Studies department, Womens Resource Center, Queer Resource Center, and Associated Students have also organized events.

Beginning February through April, the events embody what it means to keep each other safe. The series included a book event with author and artist Chanel Miller, an Anti-Imperialist Feminist Leadership event with combat veteran and activist Brittany DeBarros, a Workplace Rights Workshop with Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, and many more.

Project SURVIVE is City Colleges sexual violence prevention and healthy relationship promotion program that has been operating for more than 25 years. They train and pay peer educators on multi-layered topics.

In a recent event on healthy relationships, peer educators Hold, Diamund White, and Michael Rosenthal facilitated a Zoom workshop. The presenters jotted down community answers describing what healthy relationships look like surrounding a graphic of a heart with the text Healthy Relationships in the center.

The presenters also role-played a date scenario between two people who had differing power dynamics. The moderator took time to debrief the role-play, asking the presenters how they felt playing their character roles and addressing autonomy and accountability. Overall, the scenario taught what a healthy interaction includes.

Part of Project SURVIVEs philosophy states that, We can learn and share strategies to keep ourselves and each other safer, but rape is never a victims fault.

After the roleplay scenario, presenters and the audience brainstormed risk reduction strategies that can be used before and during a date. Project SURVIVE provided many resources for the audience including a healthy relationship handbook and a handout titled Protect Yourself and Your Friends. In addition, they have a club that meets every Monday where students can drop in, build community, and share space.

In a White House brief on March 17, the House of Representatives passed the expired reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a law that protects domestic abuse and sexual violence victims, with a bipartisan vote of 244-172. The reauthorization of VAWA can aid funding for campus programs such as Project SURVIVE.

Project SURVIVEs commitment to social justice is united to Womens History Month, which celebrates all women, in which many historical as well as current movements have been led by women of color.

Womens History Month programming kicked off with an event honoring Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson was a prominent figure of the 1969 Stonewall riot which birthed the Gay Liberation Front against police and state repression. Johnsons activism and radical love for trans liberation and justice for people of color revolutionized the movement for the LGBTQ+ community.

The #MeToo movement was created by Tarana Burke, a Black woman in 2006 who wanted to empower marginalized women to reveal the magnitude of sexual harassment and assult. Although the movement has been popularized by white women and has since changed meanings, Burkes Myspace post opened dialogue for sexual assault survivors around the world.

Labor leader, civil rights activists, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) union, Dolores Huerta, organized for workers contracts while directing the first national boycott, the 1965 Delano grape strike.

Huerta attended the University of Pacifics San Joaquin Delta College, where she received an associate degree. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Huerta continues to be a defining leader for immigrants, workers, and the womens rights movement.Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi are radical Black organizers who created #BlackLivesMatter. The project started in 2013 after Trayvon Martins killer, George Zimmerman was set free. Their project now has a global network that centers women, queer and trans people in leadership.

These women and their contributions have laid forth the continual strategic organizing we see today. Importantly, women around the world are leading the workforce as frontline workers during the pandemic. This March 2021 marks one year since San Francisco and the nation went into shelter-in-place.

The once invisible narrative of essential workers has brought to light how important food, agriculture, health care, janitorial, and many more essential service workers are to maintaining our everyday operations and care.

According to the national report from the Center of Economic and Policy Research, from 2014 to 2018, Women make up approximately 64% of frontline workers, despite making up half of all workers. In other reports including the Economic Policy Institute, this percent increased after 2018.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, women make up approxiately 76% of essential healthcare workers. The Mercury News reported a key finding from the National Nurses United, A third of registered nurses who have died of COVID-19 in the US are Filipino, despite Filipino nurses only making up 4% of the nursing population nationwide.

In addition, when examining intersecting identities, Immigrants are overrepresented in Building Cleaning Services and in many frontline occupationsabout one-in-six frontline workers, 17.3% are immigrants, the report said.

Many people are still home, enduring new challenges with heightened social and political uprisings, mostly through digital screens. Women, particularly immigrant women of color have always been and continue working on the frontlines of this pandemic. From cashiers to health care to social service workers, what does protection look like for women and marginalized communities and how can we keep each other safe?

For more information and the list of full events on Womens History Month, visit tinyurl.com/WHMccsf.

Read the original post:
Survival Beyond The Pandemic: Women's History Month The Guardsman - The Guardsman Online

Jury selection is like putting a penny in a gum-ball machine; you have no idea what you are going to get.

At least that is the contention of retired Circuit Court Judge Casey Stengel, of Moline, Ill.

The worlds attention has been focused on the jury selection taking place in the Minneapolis courtroom where Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, is accused of murder in the death of George Floyd. Of course, lawyers do everything they can to eliminate the randomness by trying to pick jurors who they think will vote their way.

I have covered enough jury selections over the years to have become a bit cynical about the process. For one thing, courts are looking for people who havent already formed an opinion on whether someone is guilty or innocent. But who on planet Earth hasnt already watched that video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyds neck and formed an opinion?

When I first started covering trials, I was working as a reporter in Galveston, Texas. An old judge named Ed Harris took me under his wing and explained how courts really work. Harris had served in the Texas Legislature for decades before being elected a judge. One observation he made that seems to hold true is that the smartest person in the jury pool never gets picked.

Daniel Fultz, a criminal defense attorney for Brown, Hay and Stephens in Springfield, Ill., explained it this way, Lets say you have a mostly blue-collar jury and the towns doctor somehow gets on, too. You can just about bet hell be elected foreman, and hell lead the other jurors to a verdict. If one person is going to choose the verdict, you might as well have the judge decide.

During my time in Texas, I got to know a young defense attorney named Robert Hirschhorn. He has gone on to be one of the top jury consultants in the nation. He picked the juries that acquitted William Kennedy Smith, Robert Durst and George Zimmerman. The jury selection strategy in the George Floyd case would be much different than in most trials.

Everythings reversed, Hirschhorn said. In a typical criminal case, the defendant is looking for more liberal jurors. And the prosecution is looking for pro-law enforcement types. But when you have a cop on trial, especially in a high-profile case, everything gets flipped around. That means that the defense is looking for as many White, law enforcement-oriented, conservative jurors, that they can find and they dont want a liberal anywhere near this case. The prosecution wants as many Black jurors as they can get and as many liberal or moderates as they can get.

So what question should a lawyer ask to determine an ideal juror in this case?

Id ask of the last four presidents Trump, Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton who did you like the best? Jurors who say Obama or Clinton are who the prosecution wants and those who say Trump are the ideal for the defense in a cop case, Hirschhorn said.

Jurors arent always as well-informed as one might expect them to be. When I was a young reporter, I had written a story on a murder case where the defendant was being retried after his first trial ended in a mistrial. It seems a witness was a bit too honest in the first trial. A prosecutor asked why he was frightened of the defendant and the man said, Because he has killed before. It was a truthful answer, but not something the judge wanted jurors to hear. Thus, a mistrial occurred.

The day jury selection was to begin in the second trial, a story I had written appeared on the front page explaining why the man was being retried for murder. The judge on the case worried that his jury pool had been contaminated. So, each potential juror was brought into the courtroom alone and questioned about what they remembered reading in the newspaper that morning. One older woman sat primly on the witness stand and was grilled by the lawyers. The interrogation by the defense lawyer went like this:

Maam, did you read the Galveston Daily News this morning?

Did you read a story about a jury being selected for a murder trial?

Well, yes but I only read the first sentence of the story.

At this point the defense attorney nearly snarled, You knew you were being called today for jury service in a murder trial and you saw a story on the front page of the newspaper about jury selection for a murder trial and you expect us to believe you only read the first sentence of the article? How can that be, maam?

The woman shifted uncomfortably on the witness stand and explained: I got to the courthouse early and saw the newspaper machine out front. I started to read the story through the little window in the machine, but I didnt have a quarter to buy the paper.

Reeder is a veteran statehouse journalist in Illinois and a freelance writer.

Read the original here:
Reeder: Jury selection an imprecise art | Opinion | telegraphherald.com - telegraphherald.com

Scott Reeder| Special to the Rockford Register Star

SPRINGFIELD Jury selection is like putting a penny in a gumball machine; you have no idea what you are going to get.

At least that is the contention of retired circuit judge Casey Stengel of Moline.

The worlds attention is focused on the jury selection taking place in the Minneapolis courtroom where Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, is accused of murder in the death of George Floyd.

Of course, lawyers do everything they can to eliminate the randomness by trying to pick jurors who they think will vote their way.

I have covered enough jury selections over the years to have become a bit cynical about the process.

For one thing, courts are looking for people who havent already formed an opinion on whether someone is guilty or innocent.

But who on planet Earth hasnt already watched that video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyds neck and formed an opinion?

When I first started covering trials, I was working as a reporter in Galveston, Texas. An old judge named Ed Harris took me under his wing and explained how courts really work.

Harris had served in the Texas Legislature for decades before being elected a judge. He often ate shelled peanuts in his chambers, took afternoon naps on the bench and could never remember if crack was made out of cocaine or heroin. (He shared that bit of confusion with me after Id seen him sentence dozens of people for possession of crack cocaine.)

But one observation he made that seems to hold true is that the smartest person in the jury pool never gets picked.

Daniel Fultz, a criminal defense attorney for Brown, Hay and Stephens in Springfield, explained it this way, Lets say you have a mostly blue-collar jury and the towns doctor somehow gets on too. You can just about bet hell be elected foreman and hell lead the other jurors to a verdict. If one person is going to choose the verdict, you might as well have the judge decide.

During my time in Texas, I got to know a young defense attorney named Robert Hirschhorn. He has gone on to be one of the top jury consultants in the nation. He picked the juries that acquitted William Kennedy Smith, Robert Durst and George Zimmerman.

The jury selection strategy in the George Floyd case would be much different than in most trials.

Everything's reversed, Hirschhorn said. In a typical criminal case, the defendant is looking for more liberal jurors. And the prosecution is looking for pro-law enforcement types. But when you have a cop on trial, especially in a high-profile case, everything gets flipped around. That means that the defense is looking for as many white, law enforcement-oriented, conservative jurors, that they can find and they don't want a liberal anywhere near this case. The prosecution wants as many Black jurors as they can get and as many liberal or moderates as they can get.

So what question should a lawyer ask to determine an ideal juror in this case?

Id ask of the last four presidents Trump, Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton -- who did you like the best? Jurors who say Obama or Clinton are who the prosecution wants and those who say Trump are the ideal for the defense in a cop case, Hirschhorn said.

Jurors arent always as well-informed as one might expect them to be.

When I was a young reporter, I had written a story on a murder case where the defendant was being retried after his first trial ended in a mistrial.

It seems a witness was a bit too honest in the first trial. A prosecutor asked why he was frightened of the defendant and the man said, "Because he has killed before."

It was a truthful answer, but not something the judge wanted jurors to hear.

Consequently, a mistrial occurred.

The day jury selection was to begin in the second trial, a story I had written appeared on the front page explaining why the man was being retried for murder.

The judge on the case worried that his jury pool had been contaminated.

So, each potential juror was brought into the courtroom alone and questioned about what they remembered reading in the newspaper that morning.

One older woman sat primly on the witness stand and was grilled by the lawyers.

The interrogation by the defense lawyer went like this:

"Ma'am, did you read the Galveston Daily News this morning?"

"Yes."

"Did you read a story about a jury being selected for a murder trial?"

"Well, yes but I only read the first sentence of the story."

At this point the defense attorney nearly snarled, "You knew you were being called today for jury service in a murder trial and you saw a story on the front page of the newspaper about jury selection for a murder trial and you expect us to believe you only read the first sentence of the article? How can that be, ma'am?"

The woman shifted uncomfortably on the witness stand and explained: "I got to the courthouse early and saw the newspaper machine out front. I started to read the story through the little window in the machine, but I didn't have a quarter to buy the paper."

Previous column: Dr. Seuss controversy shows nostalgia can be tricky

Previous column: Animal doctors say TV doesn't portray the job right

Scott Reederis aveteranstatehouse journalist. He works as a freelance reporter in the Springfield area.Scottreeder1965@gmail.com

Go here to read the rest:
Why Scott Reeder is cynical about the jury selection process - Rockford Register Star