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Nation Institute fellow and independent journalist Sarah Jaffe to address expansion of American activism and need for revolt

by Julie Ciotola on
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Since America’s 2008 financial crisis, independent journalist Sarah Jaffe argued that social movements have gained a new and powerful influence. Fueled by disdain toward capitalism and the state of American politics, she said, citizens no longer accepted complacency, and this surge of emotion gave rise to social movements.

“I was a reporter and when Occupy Wall Street broke, I was there in New York covering it — and nobody really thought it was going to be anything. I didn’t think it was going to be anything,” Jaffe said. “But by the end of it, it was clear this was not insignificant. It was already changing, and other things were taking shape.”

Jaffe, a Nation Institute fellow, traveled the country in pursuit of movements that called for “full-on system change.” Her observations and reporting resulted in her first book, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

But even as a seasoned reporter on social and political movements, Jaffe admits her work is unpredictable.

“You never can tell where a social movement is going to come from,” she wrote in an article for Dissent. “They’re built of a million injustices that pile up and up, and then, suddenly, spill over. I’ve spent years covering movements, trying to explain how one incident becomes the spark that catches, turning all those individual injustices into an inferno.”

At 10:45 a.m. Friday, July 27, in the Amphitheater, Jaffe will lecture as part of the Week Five theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.” As a columnist for The New Republic and New Labor Forum, Jaffe constantly examines nationwide economic and social tensions. At Chautauqua, she said she hopes to demonstrate the connection between acts of dissent and oppressive forces of power.

“I am trying to think about the idea of dissent versus the bigger questions of power,” she said. “One of the things I try to do is bring them together, so the question of dissent becomes a complicated question of power.”

In her book, she acknowledges the outspoken criticism against the American political system that resulted after the 2016 presidential election.

However, she said this dissatisfaction is not new to the country.

“And while the size and vehemence of the protests that came immediately after Trump’s election shocked many, their roots had been visible for years to anybody who cared to look,” she wrote in her book.

As co-host of Dissent magazine’s podcast “Belabored, Jaffe has studied dissent and revolt from a variety of perspectives. While researching her book, she found herself searching for the source of American indignation. From traveling to a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri, to hopping on a bus of student protestors, Jaffe brings her cumulative experiences to help inform Chautauquans.

Jaffe studies movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, which now often make headlines and dominate social media. However, this momentum did not always exist.

“When Occupy Wall Street first took Zuccotti Park, it was laughed off even by those who might have been expected to be supportive — until it began to spread across the country, holding spaces for people to come together and discuss deep-rooted problems that had created the crisis they still felt,” she wrote in her book. “By the time Black Lives Matter seized the stage, it became clear that something was fundamentally changing.”

Despite the differences between various social movements, Jaffe said they are undeniably intertwined. Police violence against African- Americans, she argues, serves to represent larger patterns of inequality present in America’s social and economic landscape.

“Labor struggles have a long, checkered history with struggles for racial justice and particularly against violence,” she wrote in an article for Salon.

What connects American activists, Jaffe said, lies in the fight against dominant and exploitative forces that control the country.

“Concentrated economic power leads to concentrated political power,” she wrote in her book. “Those with the money can buy not just an election, but all the legislating that comes in between; the rich see their policy preferences enacted, and the rest of us see that happen only when our desires align with those of the rich and powerful.”

Despite the current state of America, Jaffe said she has faith in oppressed people and their mission to create a “necessary revolt.” Although the country’s power may be concentrated, citizens can find strength in their common cause.

“I think these movements have common roots and common causes and are often fighting against the same things,” she said. “Broadly, we’re grappling with the question of inequality and how we’ve gotten to this incredibly unequal point in American society.”

Bari Weiss offers the modern-era ‘7 Dirty Words’ needed in society

by Maggie Prosser on
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Bari Weiss, staff editor and writer with The New York Times opinion section, speaks about the dangers of identity politics during her lecture Thursday, July 26, 2018 in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

S-word, P-word, F-bomb, C-word, the other C-word, the mother of all F-bombs and, shamelessly, tits — that’s how George Carlin rocked the 1970s, and how Bari Weiss opened Thursday’s morning lecture on July 26.

The controversial New York Times op-ed writer and editor’s almost-profanity held little shock value for the Amphitheater audience.

“We are living through the obscene era of American history,” Weiss said. “Nothing is sacred, everything can be said and seen. The very notions of decency, of civility, of tolerance, seem almost embarrassing in their earnestness.”

It is a “paradoxical” time, she said; people are taking free speech to its legal limit, but society is pulling on the reins. Divisive issues have become radioactive — touch them and face the risks.

So while Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” have lost their luster and invaded the mainstream, Weiss proposed a new set: the I-word, H-word, the other P-word, E-word, J-word, R-word and D-word.

Imagination, humility, proportion, empathy, judgment, reason and doubt.

These words, while they may seem “square,” pose a threat to society. The threat, Weiss said, is a response to President Donald Trump, who exemplifies callousness like no one else.

“These seven words are words that signify precious ideas that are falling out of fashion or favor, or have purposely been contaminated by those who are making a concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech,” she said.

The first naughty word: imagination.

Weiss presented an address by Abraham Lincoln as a powerful rebuke of identity politics. In his July 1858 address, Lincoln said that, despite lineage, there is a common throughline in all Americans. Weiss read:

“… When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ … That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together …”

Identity politics is grounded in the notion that “we are all locked into the lades assigned to us by birth,” Weiss said.

In this ideology is the haphazardness of genes that “define you and your path — not your ideas, but your identity.”

This, Weiss said, plays into the minefield of cultural appropriation; a crusade raged on a white painter who rendered a dead Emmett Till or a high school student who wore a traditional Chinese cheongsam to prom.

The liberal left is not the mastermind of this war, Weiss said; the members of the far-right dubbing themselves owners of Western culture and their outspoken xenophobia are the co-conspirators of this “frozen understanding of identity.”

“Identity politics is a refutation of the most foundational and beautiful American idea, which is that there is something that binds every one of us together, which transcends our genders, our sexual orientations, our races and our religions,” Weiss said.

Being an American only requires a commitment to a set of ideas, she said. In other parts of the world, these factors (race, gender, ethnicity) confine people, but not in America.

“The antidote to identity politics is imagination,” Weiss said, “a moral and political imagination that allows us to feel the spark of that electric cord, even today.”

The second word: humility.

Weiss considered the case of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series, whose work had become a synonym for racism, she said.

In her 1930s series, Wilder wrote, “There were no people, only Indians lived there,” and “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Her attitudes toward Native Americans led the Association for Library Service to Children to strip her name from its children’s book award.

“Now, anyone who says those things today would likely be chastised, but Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867. … She was, like every single one of us, a creature of her time,” Weiss said. “Yet the arbiters of culture are convinced that she deserves to be censored for 19th-century morals based on morals we hold dear today.”

More recently, Mia Merrill, an art history major, pleaded to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to warn patrons about Balthus’ sexually suggestive painting of a young girl — as Weiss put it, “the dangers of looking at art.” Merrill argued:

“… Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of classification, the Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children.”

Following that logic, Weiss said, most art would be deemed vulgar — in fact, most wings at the Met would be nixed; art across the globe features naked forms, bestiality, orgies, promiscuity, vulvae and taboos, according to art critic Jerry Saltz.

“It is a given that literature and art will offend. That is in its nature,” Weiss said. “Likewise, it is also a given that the cultural and social mores of the past will change. Fifty years from now, which one of us will be erased for the sin of eating animal flesh? … Any number of transgressions that today seem acceptable, tomorrow could become an abomination.”

Modern-day morality isn’t the end game — “Let go a little of our hubris, and lean into humility,” she said.

The third word: proportion.

“You are effing useless. Get the eff out. Eff you. You have created a space for violence, why the eff did you accept this position? Who the eff hired you? You should step down. You should not sleep at night. You are disgusting.”

Those are the profanities Yale University students screamed after a professor suggested, in an email, that Halloween costumes should be outfitted as students see fit. Weiss summarized: the email said, “use your best judgment” when picking a costume.

A similar narrative arose at Evergreen College when two professors questioned “a day of absence,” a day where all the white students were asked to leave campus. They were immediately smeared as racist bigots, Weiss said, and mobs swarmed campus with baseball bats hoping to get a swing at the two.

“The main effect is that these endless accusations of ‘fascism,’ of ‘misogyny,’ of ‘racism,’ of ‘alt-right,’ dull the effects of the words themselves,” she said. “If they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness, of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists, to real misogynists and to real members of the alt-right.”

The ballooning of the use such terms is seeping into social media and cable news, she said, where the Stormy Daniels’ saga is magnified as much as the Helsinki summit.

“This moral flattening, this erasure of moral hierarchy, is a moral menace,” Weiss said. “We need to bring back proportion.”

The fourth explicit word: empathy.

“Empathy sounds squishy; one of those words you’re guaranteed to find in a New- Age word salad,” Weiss said. “But empathy, the ability to understand the feelings of another, is quite serious and it is quite hard work. And it is essential for a functioning culture and politics. We are fast losing this skill.”

Weiss offered herself as an example.

She is strongly pro-choice — she believes a woman’s right to control her body is a fundamental one. Weiss, in fear of Roe v. Wade being overturned, has read about abortion before it was legalized. The journalist Caitlin Flanagan chronicled this in “The Sanguine Sex”:

“A thousand arguments about the beginning of human life will never appeal to me as powerfully as a terrified pregnant girl desperate for a bit of compassion.”

Then Flanagan sympathizes with the beliefs of those who oppose it:

“An ultrasound image taken surprisingly early in pregnancy can stop me in my tracks. In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle.”

After reading this, Weiss said she was uncomfortable by the euphemisms her pro-choice, feminist cohorts spread — that abortion is “like a hip-replacement” or an appendectomy.

“It is fundamentally different,” she said.

Weiss said she now empathizes with “Bible-thumpers harassing women outside of clinics,” which is something, she said, that is difficult to express across party lines.

“We are living increasingly in a culture in which the mere suggestion of listening and hearing the other side implies complicity in some malevolent enterprise,” she said. “This is wrong. … (Empathy) is essential if we are going to rebuild our tribal and broken culture. We need to bring back empathy.”

The fifth word: judgment.

The first time Weiss was called a racist was after she answered affirmatively to the question of whether some cultures are better than others. It was her first year of college. She argued that cultures that mutilate, murder and mistreat their people are inherently worse.

“Everyone loves diversity, but pointing out genuine differences, drawing real distinctions, that is terrifying,” she said. “So, I’ll go out on a limb here and insist that a culture that values the rights of women and girls is better than one that subjugates them. A culture that values the rights of gay people is superior to one that oppresses them. A culture that values the rights of religious minorities is better than one that doesn’t. And a culture that values free speech and thinking is better than one with blasphemy laws.”

In the years since her time at Columbia University, Weiss said she has listened to people “justify the unjustifiable.”

“This says absolutely nothing, zero, about the nature of people born into repressive and closed societies,” she said. “All people are born equal, but culture — thank God — is mutable. … If you can’t discern the difference between Cuba and Canada on markets, between Gaza and Israel on gay rights, between China and the U.S. on freedom of religion, you lack judgment. It is time to bring it back.”

The sixth raunchy word: reason.

“Things feel really bad on a regular basis right now,” Weiss said. “It feels like democracies are on decline, like strong men are on the rise. And if it’s not nuclear war with North Korea that’s going to kill us, well, maybe we’ll all be melting from climate change.”

But there is hope; the looming negativity people are feeling, she said, contradicts the facts.

The average lifetime expectancy worldwide is 70 years old — and that number is higher in democracies; and less than 10 percent of people live in poverty — down 80 percent from 200 years ago, she said. The world has never been more democratic, Weiss said; two-thirds of people live in one.

“Reason, the power of the mind to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic, has given away to feeling, which fuels convenient narratives,” she said, like the gender gap in STEM fields.

Weiss said the common explanation for the gender ratio in science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs is institutionalized, systemic sexism. Even Weiss, herself, admitted this notion initially appealed to her. But she argued that the greater gender equality in an individual society, the greater the gender divide. She said that when given the choice, women will choose not to pursue a career in STEM fields.

Weiss pointed to several other examples, questioning the left’s perception that police brutality is always racially motivated, or the right’s negative view of immigrants’ impact on a country’s economy.

“We need to get the facts straight,” she said, “to let facts inform the stories we tell, rather than the other way around. We need to bring back reason.”

The last dirty word: doubt.

“Doubt is essential for freedom,” Weiss said. “Doubt is essential for the freedom to change our lives when better, truer information comes along. Without doubt, we might still believe that the Earth is at. We might still believe that women don’t deserve the right to vote or that black people and white people shouldn’t be able to marry each other.”

She referred to the Central Park Five, the four African-American men and one Hispanic man charged with the rape, assault and attempted murder of a 28-year-old woman in Central Park. Trump, at the time, pushed for New York to bring back capital punishment.

After serving years in prison, the five were exonerated. However, a now-President Trump still insists the men are guilty — a textbook example of an insecure person, she said.

“(Insecure people) never admit that they are wrong,” Weiss said. “The person capable of doubt, of changing her mind, of rethinking her assumptions, is the truly secured person. … That is the essence of the truly liberal mind and of the civilized person: maintaining a constant tension between doubt and confidence, between intellectual skepticism and moral courage.”

Doubt is Weiss’ first principle. It covers the other six. Weiss stressed that her message was not to change minds or to bridge political divides, but to “warn you that the habits of mind that we must ferociously defend and nurture if we want to live in an open society … that those habits of mind are under threat.”

This is no a battle between the left and the right, she said, or between MAGA and pussy hats; it is a battle to preserve the “right to dissent, to say no, to protest, to re-examine your assumptions, to speech and change your mind.”

“It took guts for George Carlin to say those seven words on that Santa Monica stage half a century ago,” Weiss said. “We can help honor his legacy today by keeping all the words alive and vibrant, and by defending the quality of free thinking and independence that made him and, frankly, make the American experiment so genius.”

After her conclusion and thunderous applause, President Michael E. Hill opened the Q-and-A by asking what ethical compass drives Weiss.

Weiss said it was partly her strong Jewish faith and her upbringing in a politically diverse household. When it comes to online trolls, she said she often has to guard herself from fighting fire with fire. Instead, she strives to live by the principles she mentioned in her lecture.

Hill turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked if Weiss thought the United States was in danger of dying.

Overall, Weiss said she is optimist, but Trump is a cause for concern.

“I think we need to lean into proportion and be careful about hysteria,” she said. “… I do think what (Trump) represents and the way we are living, where there are no guardrails on the culture that he has trailblazed … I think is really a threat. I think he’s both a leader of it and a symptom of it.”

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi to talk ‘Call Me Zebra’ in CLSC Roundtable

by Emma Francois on
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When Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi imagines her “anti- love” heroine’s future beyond the novel, Call Me Zebra, she sees her setting off on a “subterranean, sinister journey,” reminiscent of a Grand Tour of Italy.

“She’s probably grinning with self-satisfaction right now, loitering around Italy’s catacombs,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said.

Van der Vliet Oloomi will discuss Call Me Zebra in her Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Roundtable presentation at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, July 26, in the Hall of Philosophy.

Zebra, fueled by the written word, constantly asks herself to choose: Life or writing? Love or literature?

The sole remaining descendant of an Iranian family of autodidacts, anarchists and atheists, Zebra retraces the journey of her exile that brought her to New York City from Iran, Turkey and Spain. Her odyssey, and an affair with an “Italian expat” philologist living in Catalonia, forces her to grapple with the limits of a life lived exclusively through literature.

“It is an excruciatingly painful and absurd process, a process that, rather paradoxically, generates much of the novel’s whimsy, humor and play,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said. “At some point, Zebra realizes that the exile’s greatest revenge is love; love of self, of life, of others.”

Dave Griffith, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, said the novel thinks globally about what it means to dissent, in discussion  with Week Five’s theme: “The Ethics of Dissent.”

“There’s so many other things that can be taken away from you, like your homeland, like your sense of security,” Grif th said. “But one thing that can’t be taken away from you is your intellect, which you yourself can cultivate and own. … It’s an innately dissenting view of the world.”

Zebra too strays from the typical portrait of a dissenter; her “promiscuous” consumption of literature and declarative first-person narration, Griffith said, is “evocative.”

“You just want to listen to her and follow her and try to understand who she is and why she sees the world the way she does … You can’t not have an opinion about it,” he said.

Van der Vliet Oloomi said this fullness of the character’s voice and personality reflects her self-described mission of “becoming more Zebra.”

“Zebra’s voice is so infectious, so grand and unfiltered (for good and for bad), that once I was strong enough to give her permission, once I acquiesced to her pained and perverse logic, she took over immediately,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said.

But this heady voice took seven years to fine-tune.

“It was like she had been waiting for years in the corridors of my mind, waiting to contaminate the page,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said. “And once I discovered how funny she is, how utterly bizarre, I didn’t hesitate to give in.”

For Van der Vliet Oloomi, writing is a process of “unravelling,” but not in the sense of something coming undone or being deconstructed.

“(It’s) yielding to an open, untethered space with an explorer’s gaze; approaching what I’ve referred to in the past as the ‘dark forests of writing’ with an attitude that is equal parts curious and discerning, a will that is simultaneously tender-hearted and steely,” she said.

Her writing style is slow and deliberate, Van der Vliet Oloomi said, “and in an unspoken contract with all of the readers who pick up my work that I will not have rushed anything.”

Honest sentences, according to Van der Vliet Oloomi, require writers to exhume memories, emotions, thoughts, physical sensations and belief systems that people often repress.

“During the seven years it took me to conceive of and write the novel, I was drawing on personal experiences of disorientation, of having been unmoored from what, in Iran, I had come to briefly recognize as home,” she said.

According to Griffith, the book takes readers to different places — physically and intellectually. Although Van der Vliet Oloomi began plotting the book nearly a decade ago, it is deeply relevant in its exploration of borders and migration.

“In my experience, things that are timely are most often also timeless in the sense that we cannot understand the present moment without uncovering the contexts and events that have combined to produce it,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said.

Zebra and her family understand history as a curation of narratives and myths — another inherently dissenting viewpoint woven into the fabric of the story.

“… Central to (the book’s) DNA is Zebra’s push against revisionist histories; her wide-eyed look at the ways in which our national histories influence, distort, annihilate and revive one another,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said. “The present is history; the past is our future.”

Beethoven Festival to conclude with fourth symphony and CSO soloists performing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante

by Justin Kelly on
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Stilian Kirov leads the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67 in Beethoven Festival Concert No. 2 on Tuesday, July 24, 2018, in the Amp. ABIGAIL DOLLINS/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Beethoven’s fourth symphony is the least known of all his symphonies, according to musicologist Robert Greenberg. But even the least of Beethoven ranks among the best in history.

“If any of Beethoven’s contemporaries had written this symphony, it would be considered that composer’s masterwork,” Greenberg wrote in his 1996 book The Symphonies of Beethoven, “and that composer would be remembered forever for this symphony, and this symphony would be played as an example of that composer’s great work.

At 8:15 p.m. Thursday, July 26, in the Amphitheater, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will conclude its three-concert Beethoven Festival with a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra. Timothy Muffitt, the music director of the Music School Festival Orchestra, will be conducting, and CSO members Simon Lapointe and Christopher Fischer will be featured as soloists in the Mozart.

Symphony No. 4 may be the least popular of Beethoven’s nine, but Muffitt specifically wanted to program it for this concert because it exhibits a unique side of Beethoven’s musical palette.

The fourth, he said, is overtly joyous and filled with wit, which contrasts the serious nature of the music on the previous installment of this Beethoven Festival. He also said that sections of the fourth symphony — like the clarinet solo in the second movement — explore atmospheres and colors that aren’t usually associated with the early 19th century.

Beethoven’s fourth symphony, although less popular now, was influential in its day. According to musicologist Mark Ferraguto, the fourth particularly affected Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann, all giants of the era directly following Beethoven.

“There are not more than a handful of composers in all of Western music that had more of an impact on those who would follow than Beethoven did,” Muffitt said. “Aside from just presenting the music because it’s extraordinary music, I think we always want to be reminded of what a towering figure he was in the evolution of Western music.”

This final concert of the Beethoven Festival is also somewhat of a transition to non-Beethoven repertoire: the pieces by Barber and Mozart aren’t tied in to the Beethoven theme in any particular way, according to Muffitt.

Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra is a great opportunity for the audience to hear one of the best offerings of American Romanticism, and the Sinfonia Concertante displays an unusually expressive aspect of Mozart, Muffitt said.

The Sinfonia Concertante features Fischer, the CSO’s principal violist, and Lapointe, the CSO’s assistant principal second violinist, as soloists. This concert is an opportunity for the orchestra to showcase two of its own members, as soloists are usually visiting artists.

One might expect Lapointe to be somewhat nervous — it’s commonly said that it’s most nerve-wracking to perform in front of one’s colleagues — but Lapointe said he feels supported by his peers in the CSO, sans judgment.

“I’m just so excited to have the chance to perform with my friends and colleagues in the CSO,” Lapointe. “We always say, you know, when the (CSO) musicians address the audience at the concerts, how proud we are to be members of the orchestra here, and that’s because it’s true.”

Shaun King, Edwin Lindo, Tamika Mallory discuss social justice, white privilege at morning lecture

by Maggie Prosser on
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Shaun King, columnist for The Intercept, Edwin Lindo, social-justice scholar and advocate, and Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women’s March, lead a discussion on the ethics of dissent on Wednesday, July 25, 2018, in the Amp. ABIGAIL DOLLINS/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Shaun King, Edwin Lindo and Tamika Mallory live out dissent every day.

The three activists, educators and thought leaders spoke to what King called the “disturbing and problematic” state of the United States at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Wednesday, July 25, in the Amphitheater.

King moderated the Week Five panel on “The Ethics of Dissent.” King is one of the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement through his active social media presence, which he uses to highlight and discuss injustices. He is also a columnist at The Intercept; co-founder of Real Justice PAC; chief executive officer of TwitChange and HopeMob; and author of The Power of 100!: Kickstart Your Dreams, Build Momentum, and Discover Unlimited Possibility.

He opened the conversation by citing two studies; the first about the correlation between mirror neurons, race and violence.

King said the study involved having white and black people watch the 1991 video of the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. The results concluded that when black people watched the video, fear, anger and sadness receptors in their brains lit up. In white people, these receptors were not as active.

“When African-Americans watched that video two times, five times, 20 times, their brain looked just like it did the first time,” King said. “But after about three times watching it, there was virtually no brain activity lighting up for the white folk who watched the video. It didn’t mean that they no longer cared, but this is where mirror neurons come into play.”

According to the American Psychological Association, mirror neurons are neurons that equally fire in the brain when humans perform an action or observe another human performing that action.

“The study showed that when you see something and believe that that could happen to you, your brain responds in one kind of way,” King said. “But when you see some type of injustice or horror or trauma and begin to understand, ‘Yes, that’s awful, but it will probably never happen to me,’ those parts of your brain are no longer activated.”

King referenced another recent study, where researchers studied the mental health consequences of police brutality. In particular, they compared the number of sick days people took off of work as a result of police violence.

Over 30 percent of African-Americans between 2014 and 2017, King said, took one or more days off of work following direct experience with racial violence or trauma from events that happened to others across the country.

After the video of Minnesota police shooting and killing Philando Castile surfaced, King said, thousands of African-Americans took the next day off of work — nearly zero percent of white people had taken days off because of the impact of racial violence. King clarified that this response doesn’t mean white people weren’t bothered.

“It is clearly neurologically, biologically, emotionally — one group appears to be more significantly bothered than the other,” King said. “And I say that to say that what I do and what … we do every day, we do for many reasons, but I know we do for at least two: out of love for our people, and we do it even out of a place of pain, trauma.”

King turned to Mallory and Lindo and asked why they continue to fight, despite the death threats, jail time, criticism and abuse.

“I ask myself that all the time, I really do,” Mallory said. “Sometimes I wake and I need to know why can’t I just stop. I can’t.”

Mallory is the co-president of the Women’s March board and an Obama administration advocate for civil rights, gender equality and health care. She served as the youngest-ever executive director for National Action Network and has since founded a strategic planning firm, Mallory Consulting.

However, she is most proud of her role in creating the Crisis Management System, a community-based effort to stop gun violence in New York City that awards $20 million to violence intervention organizations annually.

The effort hits close to home. Her son’s father was shot and killed 17 years ago. Her son was 2 years old at time. Mallory said she was embarrassed by the situation. She felt judged by her family for getting pregnant at 17 and getting involved with a man who “went out and got killed.”

Over time, she received phone calls from sympathetic relatives and friends who unpacked their shared experiences of losing loved ones to gun violence. Mallory realized that all the stories sounded the same.

“It came to me one day that it was not me that needed to be embarrassed — that America had a problem in terms of turning a blind eye to the issues that black people are dealing with in this country,” she said. “… America should be embarrassed about the number of black men who are dropping, dying at the hands of guns.”

Mallory’s work with the Crisis Management System led her to see victims and shooters as equals — both were hurting — and to see that addressing the root of shooters’ pain could stop gun violence. Her determination was an effort to save her son from his father’s fate.

“It is very personal for me. It is not something I can turn off as it is my lived experience,” she said. “I am not telling you a story of someone else; I am telling you my story, that my son’s father was shot twice and left in a ditch for two weeks before his body was discovered. That’s my story, and it happened because the system failed him. … People say, ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ but there are no boots. We need boots.”

King said he also works to better the lives of his children. He then turned to Lindo.

A social justice scholar and advocate fighting against economic, racial and education oppression, Lindo was one of five activists who participated in an 18-day hunger strike to protest the murders of men of color in San Francisco; he also spent three months at Standing Rock organizing efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. Lindo also worked for the Seattle Peoples Party and taught at the University of Washington School of Law.

Lindo is a new father himself. His daughter, Estella, was born Aug. 21, 2017 — the day of the solar eclipse.

“On Aug. 21, in the South, when Nat Turner was praying right before the rebellion, he asked God, ‘Give me a sign. Give me a sign that this is the rebellion that I need to enter for my life.’ And there was a solar eclipse,” Lindo said. “… My daughter is connected to (that). But that says to me that my responsibility is to stop negotiating with injustice.”

A lawyer himself, Lindo knows the importance of negotiation in society, he said, but “there is no middle ground between justice and injustice. There is no gray area.”

“If the negotiation is between ‘stop killing us,’ I don’t know what the other option is — kill us less?” Lindo said. He then paraphrased Malcolm X: “I can’t thank you for putting a knife in my back 9 inches … and say thank you for pulling it out 6 (inches). It’s still 3 inches in.”

For Lindo, the fight for equality is a “protracted struggle” that he, Mallory and King are a small part of. He said his daughter may not ever get to walk down the street and feel safe, but maybe his grandchildren or his daughter’s grandchildren will.

Lindo grew up being afraid of flashing lights and was taught the protocol for what to do if he was ever pulled over. The murder of Alejandro “Alex” Nieto pushed Lindo into activism.

Nieto was a licensed security guard with a taser in his holster, Lindo said, who was eating a burrito at the top of a hill when police were dispatched to the area after someone called 911, claiming “there was a Mexican with a gun.” The police fired 59 bullets; 14 hit Nieto.

That could have been Lindo, he said, and had he been at the top of that hill, his law degree couldn’t stop the bullets; no number of degrees could have stopped 59 bullets.

“This is draining work,” Lindo said. “There are times when I lay in my bed paralyzed because I don’t know if I can keep doing this. What else can I do? I literally didn’t eat for 18 days — I lost 25 pounds in 18 days. … What are we willing to sacrifice? Because I think once we find what we’re willing to sacrifice, we find what we’re willing to live for.”

After applause, King switched gears to talking about white privilege.

“Privilege functions in a way that when you have it, you rarely understand that you have it,” King said. “It functions in some ways in a visible type of way where you benefit from privileges in society that you don’t even know are there. You just go about your daily life.”

“White privilege” has a negative connotation; when people hear the phrase, he said, they often think it denotes a lack of hard work. King described his white mother, who worked in a lightbulb factory and how she shed pounds of weight working in the heat.

When King tried to explain white privilege to his mother, she thought he was discrediting her work.

“White privilege is the reality that the factory didn’t even hire black people — that she had a job black people weren’t even getting,” he said. “… She was in a factory that was completely inaccessible to people of color.

“That’s white privilege.”

King referenced James Forman Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and law professor at Yale Law School. In May 2018, a black graduate student at Yale fell asleep in a student lounge. When she woke up, she was surrounded by police; a white student had called campus security.

For days after that, Forman attempted to comfort black students who felt violated, with some threatening to leave the school. While all of this was happening, the white professors continued teaching, unphased by the atrocity.

“That’s white privilege,” King said.

What question does King get the most from white people? “Shaun, what can I do?” he said.

“I’m glad you are asking that question,” King said. “I’m concerned that you think asking the question is good enough. And it’s not. It’s just not.”

Lindo read an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice. … Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

White privilege is like a moving walkway at the airport, Lindo said. White privilege is getting on the walkway and turning to a black person walking the long hallway beside the walkway and saying, “I’m with you. I support you.”

“Acts of silence, acts of omission, acts of division, especially throughout history, are actually acts of detrimental harm for people of color, typically black folks,” he said, “because unless we are certainly moving towards rectifying the evils and injustices of this country, it’s going to continue to exponentially get worse.”

Lindo asked the audience if they would let their children, if they had the chance, relive their lives as black people.

“In your mind, if the answer is (no), then what you are telling me and yourself is that you know how bad it is, that you wouldn’t even want your child to go through (it),” he said. “So why are we letting other children go through it? Why are we allowing kids to get murdered in the street and be undereducated?”

In Seattle, the city is building a new, $233-million detention center for 55 youth, Lindo said. If the city invested that money in programming and education, there would be no youth crime, he added — that shows the priorities of institutions.

“Some people say, ‘What does that have to do with me, with Chautauqua?’ ” he said. “What we are talking about is these issues are bound to each other. The black youth in Seattle, Washington, is the black youth that is connected to someone in New York. … Back to the (mirror neuron) study, if you see dramatic imagery, it kills you. … Racism kills. It gets into your DNA.”

Mallory said the Women’s March was an example of white privilege. Many women of color backed out of the march, she said, after 53 percent of white women voted for President Donald Trump in November 2016 — and then turned out in droves for the march.

Mallory said those women of color who chose not to march said: “No, this feminism thing has been nothing but abusive to us. It is dangerous for us, we don’t want to participate in it. Everytime we work with white women, they work with us on what helps them, and then they leave us. They never stay to deal with deep issues and concerns of our community, and we refuse to step into this perceived unity.’”

While white women were concerned with reproductive rights, Mallory tirelessly tried to explain that, for women of color, the fight is over life or death.

“Actually for us, as black people, having children is not even an option, getting pregnant is not even an option in some of our communities because we have gun violence, we have poverty, we have all types of social causes including health conditions that make it almost impossible for us to get pregnant, and then getting an abortion is an expense we really cannot even manage,” Mallory said. “So while you are trying to protect your right to choose, I’m trying to get the right to even have a choice.”

White privilege, Mallory said, is not knowing about Nia Wilson, the 18-year-old whose neck was slashed by a white man while waiting on a Oakland train platform; or the unprovoked, violent arrest of Chikesia Clemons at a Waffle House in Saraland, Alabama, when a white waitress called the police after Clemons questioned why she had to pay an extra 50 cents for plastic utensils.

“Stop policing folks of color,” Lindo said. “Stop policing folks of color because what happens is we’re not only then becoming afraid of the police, we now see you as deputized officers that are trying to monitor our behavior. That is not the relationship we want to have.”

King said his hobby is “exposing” people who called the police on innocent black people for no apparent reason other than their skin color, like Alison Ettel, who called the police on a young black girl selling water on a San Francisco sidewalk.

“When you call the police,” King said, “it’s not just a nuisance. You are putting people’s lives at risk.”

With the lecture nearing its end, Chautauqua Institution Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt asked the panelists what set of principles guide their work.

“I think, for me, one of the principles I try to follow is not to be judgmental about how people are practicing whatever dissent they engage in,” Mallory said.

For her, the mode of dissent is less important as long as it is effective in that community.

Lindo had two principles: to keep marginalized groups at the center of any social movement because those closest to the issue know what will work; and that non-black or non-native people should be thankful for the grace and patience marginalized groups have shown them.

“I have a principle,” King said. “I would rather be clumsily moving in the right direction than later on regret not trying.”

Bari Weiss to speak about cultural and political trends in morning lecture

by Joseph Cooke on
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In a week full of speakers with wide-ranging views like Suzanne Nossel and Shaun King, Bari Weiss will contribute her own perspective to the challenging conversations Chautauquans are having.

Weiss, a writer and editor who covers culture and politics for The New York Times opinion section, will speak at 10:45 a.m. Thursday, July 26, in the Amphitheater as part of Week Five’s theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.” Her columns cover topics like anti-Semitism, the #MeToo movement and free speech at colleges, which she’ll discuss during her talk.

Matt Ewalt, Chautauqua Institution’s chief of staff, said Weiss will bring a unique perspective to the trending topics around dissent for those on opposing political sides.

“Bari will be addressing what she sees as a culture of fear in the United States around free speech, particularly for those on the political right, but also across the political spectrum,” Ewalt said. “She’s written extensively on the state of free speech on college campuses, on what she’s identified as a redrawing of the bounds of acceptable speech by the left, and the derision that meets certain speakers and thought leaders by those who are otherwise calling for an openness in our discourse.”

Before joining the Times in 2017, Weiss was an op-ed editor and an associate book review editor at The Wall Street Journal. She was also a Robert L. Bartley Fellow in 2007 and a Dorot Fellow in Jerusalem from 2007 to 2008. She was a senior editor at Tablet and has written for Haaretz, The Forward and The New York Sun.

She’s also appeared on shows like “Morning Joe” and “Real Time with Bill Maher,” to give an on-air voice to the topics she writes about.

Weiss said she was humbled to be speaking around these issues she’s spent her career covering, especially at a time when these topics — free speech, sexual conduct and social justice — are at the forefront of national dialogue.

“Free speech and free thinking are subjects I care about deeply, and I’ve written about these themes in various contexts my whole career,” Weiss said. “Being able to spend a lot of time working on a big talk about them has been really exciting and challenging.”

In her March 2018 piece, “We’re All Fascists Now,” Weiss criticized the growing frequency with which people on the left classify anything they disagree with as “fascist.”

“The main effect is that these endless accusations of ‘fascism’ or ‘misogyny’ or ‘alt-right’ dull the effects of the words themselves. As they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness — of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right,” Weiss wrote. “For a case study in how this numbing of the political senses works, look no further than Mitt Romney and John McCain. They were roundly denounced as right-wing extremists. Then Donald Trump came along and the words meant to warn us against him had already been rendered hollow.”

Weiss said she is grateful for the chance to speak at the Institution and praised those who are interested in hearing and learning about different perspectives.

“I’m really excited to be speaking in front of an audience of people who choose to spend their vacation learning,” she said. “I expect it will be a really engaged, smart and challenging crowd. I look forward to engaging with them.”

Ewalt described Weiss’ work as significant and said that she has used her platform to critique cultural movements.

“Bari has asked critical questions of the leaders and activists of social movements such as the Women’s March and #MeToo. In doing so, she has been the subject of significant derision on social media,” he said. “As we wrestle with difficult ethical questions inside this week on dissent, Bari’s work, and, I imagine, her lecture, prompt us to ask how we engage (with) one another in asking and answering these questions as a larger community.”

Despite the social media backlash Weiss has experienced, she said no one should be afraid to voice their opinions.

“You can go through life playing it safe, or you can go through life saying what you really think,” she said. “To me, the choice is a no-brainer.”

Steven Conn discusses the impact of Thoreau on Gandhi, King

by Jamie Landers on
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  • Professor Steven Conn gives his lecture "Thinking About Thoreau" as a part of the Interfaith Lecture Series on Tuesday, July 24, 2018 in the Hall of Philosophy. HALDAN KIRSCH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

At different times and in different places, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., two of the world’s most influential leaders of social change, found the power of peace through an essay published on the premise of war.

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, in the Hall of Philosophy, Steven Conn, historian and W.E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio, gave his lecture, “Thinking about Thoreau,” as part of the Week Five theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

Conn’s lecture centered around Henry David Thoreau and his essay, originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government.”

“In this historian’s humble opinion, any discussion of dissent and the ethics of it needs to begin with Thoreau and that essay,” Conn said. “It thrills me, it challenges me and it troubles me.”

First, Conn expanded on what made Thoreau’s essay “thrilling.”

It all started on July 23, 1846, when Thoreau was arrested by a sheriff in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay his $1 poll tax. He was released after one day and one night because an anonymous friend paid his tax.

In 1848, Thoreau revisited his experience of being arrested in a lecture he gave at the Concord Lyceum. The following year, he reworked that lecture into his essay “Resistance to Civil Government”; after his death in 1862, it was renamed “Civil Disobedience.”

“That essay put the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ into common usage and unleashed it on the nation,” Conn said.

Upon its release in 1849, Conn said the essay “sank like a stone” among American readers. The essay only received a few reviews and those few dismissed Thoreau’s ideas as silly.

As an example, Conn paraphrased a review published by author and critic, John Macy, in 1913.

“(Macy said) Thoreau’s essays on forest trees and wild apples were classics to be found in a school 25 years ago, but the ringing revolt of the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ is still silenced under the thick respectability of our times,” Conn said.

Although the essay was failing to make its mark in the United States, Conn said it had an entirely different effect outside of the country.

In 1931, Gandhi said he took inspiration from Thoreau’s work for the movements he led in India.

Conn referenced Gandhi’s words.

“Before I read that essay, I had never found a suitable English translation for my Indian word satyagraha,” Conn said, quoting Gandhi.

Conn said he conducted research to confirm Gandhi’s statement and found that the term “civil disobedience” appeared frequently in the press in the late 1930s and was “almost always in connection with India and Gandhi.”

Thoreau’s ideas also reached Denmark. In the 1940s, an anonymous member of the Danish resistance released a personal testimony on the impact of “Civil Disobedience.”

“This person, him or her, I do not know, wrote that ‘Thoreau’s (essay) stood for me and my first leader in the resistance movement as a shining light,’ ” Conn said.

In 1962, “Civil Disobedience” found its way to Israel when Martin Buber, an Austrian-Israeli philosopher, “summed up Thoreau’s meaning to the world,” Conn said.

“He noted he had read ‘Civil Disobedience’ as a young man,” Conn said, “and I quote, ‘I read it with a strong feeling that here was something that concerned me directly.’ ”

According to Conn, Buber spent much of his life wrestling with his opinion on the essay until he came to understand the origin of his feelings.

“Buber put it this way: ‘By speaking as concretely as he does about his own historical situation, Thoreau expresses exactly that which is valid for all human history,’ ” Conn said. “That’s staggering.”

Next, Conn discussed how the many layers of “Civil Disobedience” make it a challenging piece to understand.

“At its broadest, at its simplest, Thoreau uses the essay to explain why he was arrested and how he responded to it,” Conn said. “He was asked to pay his taxes, when he was asked to do so he refused, (but then) he tells us it was because he opposed the Mexican-American War.”

Although Thoreau’s resistance of the war correlated with the resistance of not paying his tax, Conn confirmed the dates of these events do not line up in the order Thoreau implied. The Mexican-American War started in 1846, but Thoreau had been refusing to pay his taxes since 1842.

“The war, in other words, the war might have prompted Sam Staples, the town sheriff, to arrest (Thoreau), but it was not actually the cause of his protest in the first place,” Conn said. “Slavery was.”

Conn said slavery was a primary motivation, specifically for “the cheerleaders for the Mexican-American War.”

“(Thoreau) brings these two issues together, slavery and the war, when he writes ‘When one-sixth of the population of a nation (the United States), which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country (Mexico) is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize,’ ” Conn said.

Conn believes what makes Thoreau’s opinion on the war profound is that the foreign army he is referring to is from the United States, and the country “unjustly overrun” is Mexico.

“Now he is putting the reader in the position of Mexicans watching this (U.S) army come at you and impose its military law on you,” he said. “It is a really complex, fascinating sentence.”

Although Thoreau talked about slavery negatively, he never declared his opinion in his essay. Conn said Thoreau didn’t because he believed it was self-evident.

“Thoreau isn’t interested in persuading a reader that slavery is an evil institution,” Conn said. “He simply starts with that as a given. He doesn’t deign to entertain the pro-slavery, anti-slavery debates that swirled with such energy in those decades. It is simply beneath his contempt to engage in any protracted discussion of whether slavery is right or wrong. It’s simply wrong.”

Instead of engaging in the debate, Conn said Thoreau wanted to draw attention to the “complicity with slavery on the part of his neighbors and fellow citizens of Massachusetts.”

“There are thousands who (opposed slavery and the war), who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them,” Conn said. “He goes on, not very kindly, about those who, ‘esteeming themselves the children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets and do nothing.’ ”

Conn believes Thoreau achieved two things by implicitly expressing his opinion on slavery. First, he made slavery the reader’s problem instead of shifting the blame to an outside party. Second, he juxtaposed opinion with action.

“Opinions are cheap and easy and, ultimately, meaningless. Action is what actually matters. What are you going to do about it? And when are you going to do it? That’s the challenge and the demand of this essay.”

-Steven Conn, W.E. Smith Professor of History, Miami University in Ohio

The motivation for Thoreau to take action was not derived from an external source, but from his own conscience, Conn said.

“Thoreau sees the individual conscience as pure and clear and unambiguous, quite unlike the workings of government, which are driven by what he calls ‘the rule of expediency,’ ” Conn said.

Lastly, Conn described the aspect of the essay that troubles him.

“It is striking to me how much of this essay is framed around negative actions, rather than positive ones,” Conn said. “The essay is still with words like ‘resign,’ ‘refuse’ and ‘recede.’ All of these imply walking away, rather than engaging with the world and with others.”

The closest Thoreau ever came to expressing a collective political goal was when he “extrapolated his own actions onto others,” Conn said.

“Thoreau writes, ‘If 1,000 men were not to pay their taxes this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable a state to commit violence and shed innocent blood,’” Conn said. “ ‘This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.’ ”

Thoreau’s equation is that 1,000 acts of individual “cautions” add up to a “peaceable revolution,” but Conn does not agree.

“I think it is fair to ask if that is really possible,” Conn said. “I am not so sure. And even if it is, I think it is fair to ask what kind of a society we would have the day after that revolution, and Thoreau provides no answer to that.”

Underneath all of the issues Thoreau discussed was an underlying opinion that government and democracy were useless, and he was not alone in his stance. Emma Goldman, an activist and writer, described herself as an anarchist and claimed Thoreau inspired her ideological beliefs.

“Goldman referred to Thoreau as ‘the greatest American anarchist,’ ” Conn said. “And in her essay ‘Anarchism: What it Really Stands For,’ Goldman quotes extensively from ‘Civil Disobedience.’ ”

Because “Civil Disobedience” can be interpreted as radical right, radical left, both and neither, Conn said the radical individualism Thoreau wrote about had no goal beyond “infidelity to one’s own conscience.”

“That is the political end onto itself, not necessarily the means to get somewhere else,” Conn said.

Even with the essay’s varying interpretations, Conn said it still managed to lead political and social change in the United States.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was in a jail cell in Montgomery, Alabama, for protesting the treatment of black citizens. Before writing the historic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King learned of civil disobedience through Thoreau’s essay and referenced it to his letter.

“Just as Thoreau did not use his essay simply to issue a bill of indictment against slavery, King didn’t use (his) letter to make a vigorous argument against segregation,” he said. “Instead, the letter is addressed to his fellow white ministers, and like Thoreau did to his neighbors, King took them to task for their complacency in the face of injustice.”

Conn believes King also recognized the weaknesses of civil disobedience. According to King, the main weakness was Thoreau’s failure to define what an “unjust law” is.

“That is the challenge King takes up in his letter, and perhaps the most important work that he does,” Conn said. “Almost as if he’s directly talking to Thoreau, King writes, ‘How does one determine when a law is just or unjust?’”

King offered a three-part answer. First, he suggested a just law is a man-made law that squares with or does not contradict “moral law.” Second, a law is unjust if it made and enforced by one group, but isn’t binding on that group. Third, unjust laws are laws imposed on people who have no opportunity to participate in the lawmaking process in the first place.

“Legal segregation, by all three of King’s measures, fails the test, and therefore those laws stand as unjust,” Conn said. “Not only can they be broken, there is a moral civic imperative to do so.”

Conn thinks King’s interpretation of civil disobedience changed the meaning of Thoreau’s essay for the better because it introduced the concept of turning an individual act into something collective.

“Thoreau believed that if each of us were to examine our own conscience honestly, if we were to stare at our ethical selves in the mirror without inching, we would be compelled to put them to work changing the world,” he said. “Perhaps the biggest challenge Thoreau leaves us with is how to get others to join their hands with ours. As we read ‘Civil Disobedience,’ we realize that conscience is a powerful force in the world, but conscience plus community is what can move those proverbial mountains.”

Shaun King, Tamika Mallory, Edwin Lindo to share importance of solidarity in activism

by Julie Ciotola on
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Shaun King

In July 2016, a video of an African-American man pulled over for a traffic stop surfaced on social media. The video depicted the man, Philando Castile, being shot by a police officer while reaching for his glove box. He died shortly after in a local hospital.

The video is shocking and quick, described by the New York Times as how “mundane conversation about a broken taillight devolved within seconds into gunfire.” Trevor Noah, host of “The Daily Show,” said the video was disturbing and “broke my heart into little pieces.”

For Black Lives Matter activist and social justice scholar Edwin Lindo, this type of discomfort can be beneficial.

“I’d like folks to be ready to be uncomfortable because that discomfort is where we grow,” said Lindo, an instructor at the University of Washington. “It’s not an uncomfortableness of being attacked, but an uncomfortableness of being pushed to expand how you see the world.”

Tamika Mallory

At 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, July 25, in the Amphitheater, Lindo will join The Intercept columnist Shaun King and Women’s March national co-chair Tamika Mallory as a panel of Black Lives Matter activists. The panel is part of the Week Five theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

King, co-founder of the PAC Real Justice and former senior justice writer at the New York Daily News, visited Chautauqua last summer to speak during a week on “The Nature of Fear.”

“Following Shaun King’s Chautauqua lecture in 2017, we reached out to him about our week on ‘Ethics of Dissent’ particularly on the questions we were intending to explore and how to engage movement leaders in such a critical conversation,” said Matt Ewalt, Chautauqua’s chief of staff. “Shaun was very interested in leading a program with Black Lives Matter activists that would respond to these questions, reflecting on the ethical frameworks that drive the work and how we can understand the ethics of dissent within Black Lives Matter alongside other contemporary movements and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

In addition to sharing the history of African-American activism, Lindo said he hopes to emphasize the power of solidarity.

Edwin Lindo

Though police brutality targets black and Latino communities, Lindo said, all races need to recognize inequality and take universal action against such hatred.

“We have to work together because if we don’t, it becomes a struggle and a fight that feels overbearing,” he said. “We need everyone, and to be able to speak to as many people as possible is crucial and necessary.”

For King, this exposure to injustice began in 2014 when he was forwarded several videos of African- American men who fell victim to police violence.

“I learned, as most of America learned and as most of my friends learned, that police in America were not killing people every two or three weeks; it was not even every two or three days,” King said in his lecture last year at Chautauqua.“It was every three or four hours.”

His discomfort sparked action, and now King is well-known within the Black Lives Matter movement. With over 1 million Twitter followers, he uses social media to voice his oppositions against racism and violence. As a co-founder of Real Justice PAC, King and his team work to elect prosecutors at both county and municipal levels who are committed to derailing discrimination in the justice system.

He has also raised almost $10 million for charities worldwide and has received accolades like the Epoch Humanitarian Award.

Mallory, who spearheaded the creation of New York City’s Crisis Management System that works to prevent gun violence, also believes in progressive change that goes beyond simply acknowledging a problem. In an interview with The Root, Mallory criticized those who like her social media posts but fail to take any action.

Specifically, she cited an April 2018 incident when an African-American woman was arrested at a Waffle House in Alabama.

“What happens is sometimes people sit back and say, ‘OK, maybe on social media it’s important, but it’s not important in terms of our bottom dollar,” Mallory told The Root. “So when a young woman by the name of Chikesia Clemons can be dragged up and down Waffle House all over the place … and we can still go to the Waffle House, even though we’re sharing the video on social media, that’s a problem. … I don’t need your likes, I need your movement.”

Mallory devotes her time to social justice causes as president of Mallory Consulting, a firm that has worked with Fortune 500 corporations to fight against issues like gun violence and mass incarceration.

Though these three activists will spend limited time at the Institution, Lindo said he is optimistic about their visit. Progressive change is the end goal, but Lindo said it needs to be sparked through civil and informative conversation.

“I’m glad that these conversations are happening in a place like Chautauqua,” Lindo said. “The history of it is one of curiosity and investigating and one of exploring ideas. If we are only listening to certain ideas, we start to get sucked into a vacuum, so I think this is a chance to present ideas that perhaps are unique to this particular group.”

Astounding Talents: Peking Acrobats to balance spinning plates aplenty in Amp for Family Entertainment Series

by Kevin C. Vestal on
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Lions and dragons and gymnasts will storm the stage when the Peking Acrobats perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 25,  in the Amphitheater as part of the Family Entertainment Series.

The Chinese troupe, now celebrating its 32nd season, is known for combining traditional music with special effects for performances filled with astounding physical maneuvers. In one of their most famous stunts, the acrobats balance atop a pagoda of chairs —all while standing on their heads.

In her review for DC Metro, Marlene Hall said that the Peking Acrobats’ 30th anniversary national tour was like “Cirque du Soleil meets the East,” and praised the performers for pushing “human capacity beyond human capacity.”

Other feats involve spinning plates, paper parasols, animal costumes and balance beams. For one stunt, over 10 acrobats squeeze together atop a single unicycle while flashing colorful fans to resemble a peacock. Chautauquans can also expect to see gymnasts jump through hoops and contortionists steady goblets in their hands and mouths as they ex their talents.

According to the Gertrude C. Ford Center of Performing Arts, the origin of Chinese acrobats dates back 4,000 years ago to the Xia Dynasty, but gained widespread popularity during the Warring States Period, which lasted from 475 to 221 B.C. During the Han Dynasty, the acrobatic acts were dubbed the “Hundred Plays,” and music was added to underscore the somersaulting, lion dance and tightwire routines.

The performance on Wednesday, July 25,  will mark the Peking Acrobats’ Chautauqua debut. Other Chinese troupes that have visited the grounds include the Golden Dragon Acrobats, which have returned to Chautauqua regularly since 2006, and The Peking Circus, another troupe that performed during the 1992 season.

Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Deborah Sunya Moore said the Peking Acrobats’ live music will offer a new component for families to enjoy.

“I’m excited about presenting the Peking Acrobats because they come with Chinese musicians and instruments,” Moore said. “This added element is exciting for Chautauqua.”

Inaugural Chautauqua Janus Prize to celebrate disruption of form, Nicole Cuffy’s ‘Atlas of the Body’

by Emma Francois on
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At 17 pages, Nicole Cuffy’s  bildungsroman covers more years in her protagonist’s life than there are leaves in her book.

Cuffy’s work, Atlas of the Body, is the inaugural winner of the Chautauqua Janus Prize, named for the Roman god of duality who simultaneously looks to the past and the future.

A reception will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 25, in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor, followed by a book signing.

Atom Atkinson, director of literary arts, said the reception will be a celebration mirroring the spirit of the prize, trying something both fun and new: The George Burton group will provide the jazz and Janus the inspiration for the evening’s signature cocktail.

The Janus Prize recognizes short works of fiction or nonfiction that experiment with form and disrupt convention in a way that is new, challenging and unexpected, but also accessible.

“In its very innovative strategy, it’s capable of creating a new kind of understanding for the reader of time, of history (and) of future,” Atkinson said.

Kazim Ali judged the prize, selecting Cuffy’s work out of 16 finalists.

Ali is also the Chautauqua Writers’ Center Week Five prose writer-in-residence and will deliver his Brown Bag lecture, “Genre Queer: Notes Against Generic Boundaries,” at 12:15 p.m. Friday, July 27, on the front porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall.

“I’m interested in the way the structure of Atlas of the Body is able to expand time and describe how ‘impact’ is not a moment in a life, but something that happens over many years,” Ali said. “Her characters do not behave the way characters in a novel or play do, but the way people in a life do.”

Cuffy, who comes to Chautauqua for the first time, is an editor at Atomic Theory Micro Press; her work has appeared in Mason’s Road and The Master’s Review Volume VI.

Cuffy said Atlas of the Body originated from an emotion. She wanted to focus on loss and grief in a way that wasn’t “cliche.”

After meditating on the idea, she said the story emerged organically.

“From there, I’ve always been fascinated by anatomy,” she said. “I thought that was just a really good way for me to get into the gristle, so to speak, of the emotions, which was first love, growing up, trying to define what success is, coming out of poverty and grieving.”

Through the anatomy of the heroine, Maya, Atlas of the Body reveals the texture of a life, similar to the rendering of an Impressionist painting.

Inspired by the intersection of the arts, Cuffy’s form breaks from a linear tradition, instead drawing from pointillist techniques. Like dots of colorful paint on a canvas, snapshots of a young woman’s life act as “islands of illumination” that together reveal a whole.

“But you can still see that it’s made up of those little facts,” Cuffy said.

The final portrait became a study of another style: Minimalism.

With more happening off the page than on, Cuffy said she embraced the idea of “giving enough scene to tell the story with really no excess.”

Though short in pagecount, the story melds many of Cuffy’s interests.

In fact, Cuffy said she dreams of creating a “salon a la Gertrude Stein” that creates space for conversation between different types of artists, from the literary to the performative.

Cuffy said she has always been interested in anatomy. Before she majored in creative writing, she toyed with the idea of studying medicine. She incorporates science of the body into much of her work, and writes with a medical student’s textbook of anatomy for reference.

She is also a ballet dancer and certified yoga instructor, which has enhanced her knowledge of the body, particularly the interconnectedness of the mind.

“I would also say that my writing, my style, my process for creating something is kind of what gave me the predilection for yoga in the first place, being really interested in the spirituality, the meditation, and then asana,” she said. “That all kind of fits together.”

Cuffy said this space to explore and experiment with form is vital.

“Literature is one of the fine arts, and one of the things that is so important about art is it evolves as culture evolves. It’s always a reflection of what’s going on in the world. As you, in literature, play with form, you’re creating this reflection … of the world at large.”

-Nicole Cuffy, Author, Atlas of the Body

Cuffy said parts of the story are “deeply personal.”

For instance, in one scene, Maya looks at a photograph of her grandmother as a young woman “that always makes her cry” because the woman in the photograph does not know her future, her “aborted dream of stardom” or the lung that “grows and then devours.”

“Growing up, most of my grandparents had passed away before I was born,” Cuffy said. “There’s something so complicated that happens when you’re looking at an old picture, … particularly when it’s someone who’s tied to you.”

Cuffy knew her grandparents through pictures and stories from her parents. She said there is something poignant about looking at portraits and knowing more than the person in the frame.

“You also have this awareness that one day, someone’s going to look at a picture of you and know way more than you do now about your life,” she said. “It makes you really aware of your own mortality. It’s both really sad and really beautiful; it’s one of those things that makes life so precious.”

This duality is exemplified in the final pages of the story, when Maya maternally holds a bird fallen from a nest.

“I was thinking about fetal anatomy, and how close a human fetus is to a chicken fetus for quite a while in gestation … but also, in terms of anatomy, I was just thinking about grief and how it’s so tied to loss, but it’s also tied to birth,” Cuffy said.

Though the bird’s future rests in Maya’s palms, the moment is not about the bird, but Maya’s own perch on a precipice.

Like the god Janus, Cuffy said Maya is caught in a moment of in-between, a “nascent (and) fragile state that at the same time is full of potential and full of a future.”

Suzanne Nossel addresses current threats to free speech at morning lecture

by Maggie Prosser on
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Chief Executive Officer of PEN America Suzanne Nossel lectures on “The Future of Free Speech” Tuesday, July 24, 2018 in the Amphitheater. RILEY ROBINSON/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Factories and electrical plants surrounded Niagara Falls by the late 19th century. It took a painting, “Niagara Falls, from the American Side” by Frederic Edwin Church and the Free Niagara movement led by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to loosen industrialism’s grip on the falls.

When Suzanne Nossel visited just a few days ago during her trip to Chautauqua Institution, the footprint of the Industrial Revolution on the nation’s oldest state park was nearly obsolete.

“If (Church and Olmsted) could use a visionary masterpiece and a shoe-level movement to snatch back Niagara Falls from the clutches of industry, maybe we could use our vision and vigor to restore free speech from the forces that threaten it,” she said.

The chief executive officer of PEN America spoke to free speech and looming threats to the First Amendment at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, July 24, in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Five’s theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

Chief Executive Officer of PEN America Suzanne Nossel lectures on “The Future of Free Speech” Tuesday, July 24, 2018 in the Amphitheater. RILEY ROBINSON/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

PEN America is the leading organization when it comes to igniting national conversations around human rights and free expression issues. PEN America consists of writers, journalists, editors, translators and readers, Nossel said, who strive to “safeguard the written word.”

Nossel read PEN’s — timely — charter: “PEN declares for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship. … Members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.”

In her five-year tenure at PEN America, Nossel has worked on a variety of free speech issues, including censorship and internet oppression in China, constraints on civil society in Russia, free speech on college campuses and freedom of the press — but now, she is more alarmed about “how precarious our fundamental right to free speech has become” than ever.

“To protect free speech today, the First Amendment is necessary but not sufficient. … For free speech to survive and thrive in the new era, we, as citizens, need to race to defend it, even when that means rising in support of speech (from which) we personally dissent,” she said. “We need to understand new opportunities for speech, new threats to it and what it will take to safeguard discourse.”

Nossel addressed three threats to free speech: the rise of the digital age, ideological polarization, and ignorance and indifference to the First Amendment.

“In the past decade, online platforms have become a prime marketplace for our speech,” she said. “… (Social media are) also, make no mistake, markets for companies, campaigns and interests to spend millions on paid campaigns to shape where you buy, who you support and what you think. That same accessibility to openness has made social media platforms breeding grounds for hatred, harassment, manipulation and even terrorism.”

James Madison would have never predicted that while etching the First Amendment into parchment paper, Nossel said, but these platforms are not subject to the First Amendment — “our new public square isn’t actually public.”

Companies have their own community standards. It’s no longer a governmental body deciding rules and stipulations, she said.

“Everyday anonymous algorithms and individual Silicon Valley staffers in T-shirts make countless decisions about what stays and what goes — what becomes a sensation and what sinks in obscurity,” Nossel said. “Mark Zuckerberg thinks Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists are harassers, but he believes Holocaust deniers are just a little misguided.”

Twitter’s terrorists could be Facebook’s freedom riders, she said.

Like most tech CEOs, she said, Zuckerberg can enforce regulations as he pleases with minimal interference from the government because of two factors: social media platforms are international and the protections of the First Amendment do not extend outside of the United States’ borders; and menacing hate speech is protected speech.

“The utopian ideal of the internet as a beautiful, wild garden where all forms of speech can flower has become infested,” she said. “We now recognize that speech can be invasive, even poisonous, with the speech of some strangling that of others.”

The public outcries have caused companies like Facebook to grapple with “blurred boundaries” between offensive and dangerous speech on their platforms. Nossel said this is much more complicated than it seems. It matters not only what words are used, but who is using them.

“Among the most menacing forms of online content are fraudulent news and disinformation being used to skew discourse, sow divisions and even throw elections,” she said.

According to a Pew Research Center study, Americans are losing the ability to discern false from true information; 64 percent of Americans believe fabricated news stories cause confusion about basic facts of current events.

“Free expression is about more than just the right to speak,” Nossel said. “It’s the right to gather and harden information, to sort through competing ideas, engage with one another in search of a new truth, to persuade and be persuaded.”

Despite this growing discourse, most forms of “fake news” are protected speech, she said, and do not infringe on First Amendment rights except in instances like slander, libel and defamation.

“There are no easy answers to regulating speech online, but what is clear is we can’t leave it up to the courts — the First Amendment has very little to say about what you can post on Instagram,” Nossel said “… As citizens, when it comes to defending our discourse online, we have no one to turn to but ourselves. We need to summon our collective powers … to insist that with the great power of social media comes great responsibility.”

Nossel said the second threat to free speech is ideological polarization: The right is weaponizing the First Amendment, while the left is alienated and dismissive toward the principles of free speech.

Conservatives are using the First Amendment to curb government action for equality, she said. One threat to free speech from the right is President Donald Trump’s escalating campaign against the media — the “enemy of the American people.”

“If President Trump was shutting down newspapers or putting journalists in jail, … those tactics would blatantly violate the First Amendment. He’s too clever for that,” Nossel said. “He’s using his own First Amendment right for protected political speech to undercut the rights of the rest of us.”

According to a Quinnipiac poll, more than half of Republican voters agree with the president’s distrust of the media.

“This poses a fundamental threat to our system of self-government,” Nossel said. “It’s the job of the press to hold those in power accountable. President Trump knows that all too well; his is a deliberate strategy to neutralize criticism, shirk accountability … by insulting, denigrating, casting doubt on the messenger. And it’s working.”

Hate speech is also a threat growing from the right, Nossel said.

“Here in the U.S., hateful speech is mostly protected by the First Amendment, but until recently, it was bounded by strong taboos,” she said. “There were simply some things that were unacceptable in our discourse, not because of any laws, but because of a mainstream culture that shunned slurs, stereotypes and swastikas.”

The Trump administration has subverted those taboos, she said, giving rise to white supremacists like Richard Spencer. Spencer’s recent efforts have including speaking on college campuses to provoke a reaction from administrators and students.

Nossel said PEN America advises schools to allow white supremacists to speak alongside counterarguments.

“Through counterspeech, provost messages and Twitter campaigns, colleges can make it clear that allowing a platform for all viewpoints doesn’t amount to an endorsement,” she said. “But letting (white supremacists) appear denies them what they want more than anything else — reporting being shut down.”

This is tearing at liberals’ ideal of free speech, causing some progressives to question whether free speech is compatible with the values of equality and inclusion, Nossel said. And while counterspeech is imperative for combating hate speech, it can also silence other opinions.

This is the paradox of the college campus, she said.

“It’s a vicious cycle on the university quad,” Nossel said. “The right brings in offensive speakers to spread not just ideas, but partially to prove that they can. The left, in turn, calls to restrict speech in the interest of equality and inclusion. Such moves only feed right into the charges that speakers’ beliefs are oppressed.”

The final threat to free speech is ignorance and indifference to the First Amendment, Nossel said.

“We rely on the First Amendment every day, whether when we are opening up the morning paper, signing a petition, taking to the streets in protest,” she said. “It’s like the air we breathe, vital — (but) too often unused; we don’t celebrate it, teach it or, even it seems, remember it. The numbers paint a big picture:”

Nossel cited a survey in which 77 percent of Americans said they supported the First Amendment, but very few knew what it actually entails; 36 percent could name at least one of the five freedoms, and only one in the survey group of about 1,000 could list all five.

“As a society, we’ve long had the luxury of taking our free speech protections for granted,” she said. “To us, the First Amendment is absolute, all encompassing — as sure as the ground we walk on. … For too long, we’ve all been looking elsewhere while the fault lines have deepened under our feet.”

Nossel called for a new mobilization around the First Amendment that revolves around re-educating youth through civics classes to help them better understand free speech; defending free speech as a fundamental, American value; taking free speech into the digital era; and standing up for those who can’t do so for themselves.

America hasn’t always gotten free speech right, she said, and while democracy is veering off the course, it is now that Americans need more speech, not less.

“The writers and artists and actors PEN America supports are undaunting. … It’s the modern equivalent of those women in hats and ruffled collars who marched with the sandwich boards and said ‘save Niagara Falls.’

… Citizens are activated, electrified, empowered. That gives me and artists hope,” Nossel said. “And if those of us who passionately believe in free speech can harness that energy, we can mobilize a citizens’ movement that brings new light into this most basic human freedom.”

After the conclusion of Nossel’s lecture, Emily Morris, vice president of marketing and communications and chief brand officer, opened the Q-and-A. She asked what ethical principles drive PEN America.

Nossel said PEN tries to stay focused on its mission, not dive into politics, but still calls out threats to free speech.

Morris then turned to the audience for questions. One attendee asked what PEN America’s position is on kneeling for the national anthem.

Nossel said PEN America supports the choice to kneel during the national anthem. But, to her, the president’s open opposition to it is a new form of censorship.

“The president of the United States is heckling NFL owners to punish these players; he is trying to exact punishment for speech, maybe not directly, but by encouraging and insisting that the owners impose discipline,” she said. “That’s a government punishment for speech.”

Morris then asked if forms of expression (like applauding) during public forums were harmful to freedom of speech. She was quickly interrupted by various choruses of applause.

Nossel said she thinks forms of expression during public forums or debate can shape individuals’ ways of thinking.

The Building Blocks of Music: CSO, led by Stilian Kirov, moves to Beethoven’s middle period in Beethoven Festival concert

by Justin Kelly on
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Rossen Milanov conducts the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra during their performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 Saturday, July 21, 2018 in the Amphitheater. This concert was the first of a three-part Beethoven festival this week. RILEY ROBINSON/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra Music Director Rossen Milanov thinks Beethoven would have loved Legos.

“He would have been absolutely fascinated playing with them,” Milanov said. “He loves putting things together that are broken up into smaller units.”

The perfect example, for Milanov, is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Beethoven opens the symphony with its famous four-note theme and then uses that motif as the building block for the rest of the symphony.

“The Fifth Symphony is technically just four notes, so that’s a (two-by-two) Lego block, and the entire first movement is made of just (two-by-two) Lego blocks,” Milanov said.

The CSO, led by guest conductor Stilian Kirov, will perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op 67, at 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, in the Amphitheater, along with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61, and the overture from Verdi’s La forza del destino.

This concert will be the second of the CSO’s three-part Beethoven Festival, which began on Saturday with the composer’s Symphony No. 2 and Piano Concerto No. 1. Those works both come from Beethoven’s early period and foreshadowed the masterpieces yet to be written.

Tuesday, July 24, the audience will hear those masterpieces.

The Fifth and the Violin Concerto are both members of Beethoven’s middle period, featuring more dramatic and Romantic elements than his early-period works. They are also two of the composer’s most frequently performed compositions.

Interpreting well- known works like these is a big responsibility. Kirov, who will conduct the CSO for the first time tonight, is aware of that burden — and a little intimidated, too.

“I think if you’re not intimidated, maybe your ego is taking over too much,” he said.

Kirov takes a humble approach to conducting, especially with Beethoven. For Kirov, accurately portraying the intentions of the composer is the most important objective, and he wants to “get out of the way” as much as possible.

“The score is the sun, and my job is to reflect the light to the audience the best way I can,” Kirov said.

In order to achieve that, Kirov tries to get inside the creative process behind whatever composition he’s studying. If they are available, Kirov will study facsimiles of the original, handwritten score so he can see how exactly the composer put the music together.

“In some pieces he’s crossing out whole sections, and sometimes it’s very aggressively crossed,” Kirov said. “He’s revising and revising until he gets something that he believes will be perfect. … I’m trying to at least have some feeling for the process of creation so that I can be a good messenger for what the composer is saying with this great music.”

Kirov is particularly excited to conduct the CSO because it’s somewhat of a homecoming for him. In 2010,Kirov was the David Effron Conducting Fellow conducting fellow under Music School Festival Orchestra Music Director Timothy Muf tt, and he returned as an MSFO guest conductor in 2012.

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to make music with the wonderful Chautauqua Symphony,” Kirov said. “Chautauqua is one of my alma maters — with all of the different arts it embraces, it’s quite unique.”

Historian Ralph Young opens week chronicling history of dissent and protest in America

by Maggie Prosser on
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Dissent, Ralph Young argued, is central to American history.

“American history has traditionally been taught emphasizing exploits of presidents, politicians, diplomats and generals,” he said. “But there is a case to be made that ordinary people, that grassroots movements, can move and shape history just as much as the powerful.”

Grassroot movements and individualistic dissent have been the focus of Young’s professional career.

A professor of history at Temple University, Young is responsible for establishing campuswide “teach-ins,” which engage students and faculty in investigations of controversial issues. He has authored three books on dissent in society. His most recent book, Dissent: The History of an American Idea, tells the United States’ narrative through dissenters and protesters.

Young synthesized 400 years of dissent movements, and his book Dissent, into 40 minutes at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday, July 23, in the Amphitheater to open Week Five’s theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

His lecture began in the 17th century, with the pilgrimage of various religious groups to the American colonies in order to worship freely, but “(Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites) didn’t come over, actually, for the concept of religious freedom — they came over so they could worship their way, which was the right way,” Young said.

Young reminded the Amp of the vast influence religions had on countries and governments. In France, the Catholic Church was an established authority; in England, it was the Anglican Church.

One of these pilgrims, Roger Williams, was at the core of religious dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Williams objected to the Puritans’ lack of separation between church and state, the Church of England’s meddling in state affairs and the Puritans’ intolerance of other religions.

His opinions resulted in his exile from the colony. After his expulsion, Williams wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, an attack on what he had observed of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He wrote:

“Magistrates, as magistrates, have no power of setting up the form of church government, electing church officers, punishing with church censures. … And on the other side, the churches as churches, have no power … of erecting or altering forms of civil government, electing of civil officers, inflicting civil punishments …”

Young said Williams’ argument in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution was that the separation of church and state protected the two entities. Without this, Williams argued, it was not unseemly for a new authority to declare a state’s universal religion.

To Young, this was the first instance of declaring religious freedom in America — over 100 years before it was written into the United States Constitution.

In the latter 17th century came John Peter Zenger, a newspaper publisher who unveiled the corruption of the William Cosby, the royal governor of New York. Cosby accused Zenger of libel and shut down his printing press. During Zenger’s trial, Young said, his lawyer Andrew Hamilton argued that defamatory statements against public officials are not libelous if they are true.

Zenger was eventually acquitted of the charges. His case established the principles of freedom of the press, again, nearly 50 years before it was written into the U.S. Constitution.

In the 18th century, America saw the uprising of political dissent, primarily against the British, which erupted in the Revolutionary War. The country’s 150 years of dissent culminated in the Constitution.

“In 1789, we put (dissent) into our Constitution — that we have the right to dissent. … And Americans haven’t shut up since,” Young said.

During this political revolution, a cultural revolution was also taking form. Young referenced Abigail Adams and her scathing letter to her husband, John Adams, who was drafting the Declaration of Independence, calling for women’s rights. She wrote:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency — and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. … If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”

Young asked the audience what they thought her husband’s response was. He then read this by John Adams:

“I cannot but laugh. … But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out. … We know better than to repeal our masculine systems.”

Young (after the laughter died down) continued to the 19th century and Henry David Thoreau.

While Thoreau was at Walden, the Mexican-American War broke out, which was primarily fought to extend American territory with the hope that the land west of Texas would be fertile and aid the spread of the cotton industry — and slavery, Young said.

Thoreau was an abolitionist and, to protest the war, refused to pay his poll tax. He was thrown in jail for this offense, which led him to write “Civil Disobedience.” This essay became a staple for future dissenters — including a young Gandhi, who led the Indian independence movement against British rule.

Decades later, a young Martin Luther King Jr., inspired by Gandhi’s biography (which mentioned Thoreau’s essay) read “Civil Disobedience”; Thoreau’s argument is reflected in King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Thoreau’s impact is apparent in modern day; in 2010 during the Arab Spring, protesters held signs quoting Thoreau, Young said, proving the “lasting value” of “Civil Disobedience.”

“This just keeps echoing and re-echoing,” Young said. Around the time of Thoreau’s imprisonment, the abolitionist movement was growing. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown were actively fighting the legal practice of slavery in the United States. Brown “took his abolition very seriously,” Young said, and led the attack on Harper’s Ferry, an example of violent dissent.He was tried and executed.

Young quickly went through 20th-century movements, rattling off the names of suffragettes and other famous dissenters, like Chief Joseph, Pete Seeger and Carl Schurz.

Schurz was the secretary of the interior before the Spanish-American War. The war granted the United States temporary control of Cuba and acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Schurz was against the forced colonization.

He wrote:

“If we become an imperialist power, we shall transform the government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ into a government of ‘one part of the people, the strong, and for another part, the weak.’ ”

During World War I, the government passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which outlawed protesting the war. Despite this fact, Young said, dissenters would line the streets of New York City and recite the Bill of Rights in revolt, risking arrest.

Eugene V. Debs, a five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, spoke ill of the Sedition Act, which led to his arrest in Canton, Ohio, causing him to conduct his 1920 campaign from jail. He said in regard to the act:

“These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to (their) rule in the United States.”

Other dissent movements include The Bonus Army of 1932, when WWI veterans swarmed Capitol Hill demanding their pensions; Sen. Margaret Chase Smith’s denouncement of McCarthyism; the civil rights movement; and the rise of counterculture in the 1970s.

“And today, where are we?” Young said. “Well, every time I turn around, there is a protest about something. … All of this is just being in that long tradition of American dissent and that protesters are exercising one of the fundamental rights we have as Americans. One thing we can safely say is we don’t know where dissent and protest will lead, but we do know they will continue.”

To Young, the Constitution, its Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence are a contract between the government and the people — something he said is amplified in King’s final speech:

“All we say to America is, ‘be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they had not committed themselves to that over there.

“But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”

After the conclusion of Young’s lecture, Chautauqua Institution Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt opened the Q-and-A by asking what dissent teach-ins at Temple University are like and how students handle dissent.

“Students, I find, are very interested in understanding their world on a deeper level,” Young said.

Young described how a heated discussion about women’s issues ran over the scheduled class time. He offered to stay so the students could continue their discussion — this went on for another 30 minutes.

Young proposed that the university create a weekly forum, or “teach-ins,” for students to debate and discuss contemporary issues. Teach-ins are now a weekly event that attract 15 to 80 students to talk about hot-button topics like gun control and the rise of the alt-right, he said.

Ewalt turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked what role satire plays in dissent.

“Satire, comedy, is one of the oldest forms of dissent,” Young said. “Think about court jesters, who could say things to the king that nobody else could say — anybody else would get their head chopped off. So it is a very valid way to dissent.”

Another attendee asked how the internet contributed to dissent.

Young said the internet has positive and negative effects — it quickly spreads information and helps activists organize rallies, but can also quickly spread false information. He said the internet promotes “slacktivism” and “clicktivism,” which is liking a post to show support rather than rallying behind a cause.

Ewalt then read a question from Twitter: Are dissent movements that fail still effective or relevant?

“One of the things about dissent movements that seem to flop, they have brought new subjects into the conversation that people need to consider,” Young said.

To close Monday’s lecture, Ewalt asked how to protest against injustices while not tearing at America’s social fabric.

Young said he remembered as a child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and giving into the belief that America was the greatest country in the world. As he grew up, however, various injustices, like those against the Little Rock Nine, made him question that narrative.

“(In the 1960s) we believed this is the greatest country on earth, but there are some things that need to be fixed,” he said. “So I think so much of what was the impetus behind the 1960s was people feeling, ‘OK, this is a great country, let us work to make the reality closer resemble our ideals.’ ”

Free speech should be taken more seriously and Suzanne Nossel will tell you why

by Donovan Conaway on
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The First Amendment protects one’s right to freedom of expression, and Suzanne Nossel will explain why this right needs to be protected.

At 10:45 a.m. Tuesday, July 24, in the Amphitheater, Nossel will take the lecture platform as part of Week Five’s theme, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

Nossel is the chief executive officer of PEN America, a leading human rights and free expression organization. She joined PEN America in 2013 and has increased the organization’s staff, budget and membership. Nossel is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published articles in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. She has also had scholarly articles published in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy and other journals.

Nossel believes free expression is “under attack” in the United States. She thinks that being able to express oneself is a fundamental right, but it is not being protected as much as it should be. Nossel said she thinks people need to learn from others’ perspectives instead of silencing those with differing opinions.

“Take the struggles of others, and don’t shut down free speech,” Nossel said. “Hate speech shouldn’t be suppressed. No speech should be suppressed.”

Nossel said there are better ways to deal with hate speech instead of banning it through the creation of a law. Making hate speech illegal would go against what the First Amendment symbolizes.

“Take on the concerns of diverse groups, and figure out a different system that will invoke change,” Nossel said.

Conversations about equality and free speech need to happen, according to Nossel.

“They have to happen face-to-face and not through social media,” she said. “All sides are important and should be treated as such.”

These conversations shouldn’t be limited to just certain people and groups, she said. Free speech conversation should be talked about publicly and with all people.

“Free speech needs to be taught,” Nossel said. “Introduce it to the new generation so they are raised knowing what is right.”

PEN America is working to have agents based in all 50 states in order to educate about free expression and its importance. The organization is also working with local news outlets across the country, hoping to create a sense of trust between citizens and the media.

“We are growing and doing a lot of work around the world,” Nossel said.

Free expression needs to be taken more seriously and should be a topic of conversation on an everyday basis, Nossel said, not just when there is a rally with attendees who spew hate speech.

“Free expression has been latent and not on the top of enough people’s minds,” Nossel said. “It can’t be forgotten; the issue needs to raised everywhere.”

Nossel wants people to walk away from her lecture with an understanding that free expression is significant.

“Don’t leave free speech up to the courts and officials,” Nossel said. “We all have a role to play and have to stand up for our rights. Change takes a long time and is not easy. We have to make free speech welcoming to everyone.”

Melodies of Movement: Festival Dancers, MSFO continue decades-long tradition in Amp

by webchq on
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BY: STAFF WRITERS LEXIE ERDOS & FLORA JUNHUA DENG

Chautauqua Festival Dancers will perform at 8:15 p.m. Monday, July 23, in the Amphitheater to live music from the Music School Festival Orchestra — for many of the dancers, it’s a new experience. For the two schools, it’s a treasured tradition.

The history of collaboration between the MSFO and the Festival Dancers is one that spans decades, and ballet mistress Glenda Lucena said that it is an incredibly important piece of the students’ experience during their seven weeks at Chautauqua.

“Dancing with live music is a special treat for the students,” Lucena said. “During the summer, they get to be on the stage many times, and this one is especially important for them.”

Lucena said that in the past, the collaboration with the MSFO has gone smoothly because of the orchestra’s dedication to matching the music with the dancers. Before the performance, the dancers and the orchestra are given one opportunity to rehearse together. Lucena said some of the musicians and conductors also attend dance rehearsals to further understand the movement and work of the students and their instructors.

“They come to see what tempo the students need, when they will pose and other things,” she said. “It’s always been a great collaboration.”

Timothy Muffitt, music director of the MSFO, said this collaboration with dancers is also a good learning opportunity for the instrumentalists.

“I think it’s good for the members of MSFO to have experience working with dancers and to think about how (that) music … translates into movement, and also to experience the process of putting an orchestra and dancers together,” Muffitt said.

Although Muffitt oversaw the collaboration, he will not be conducting the orchestra himself. Yue Bao, the 2018 David Effron Conducting Fellow, will be conducting the opening piece, “Les Animaux modèles,” composed by Francis Poulenc. “Three Facets,” choreographed by Michael Vernon, is set to the first three movements of the piece.

Bao said “Les Animaux modèles” is like an “animal carnival” to her. The music makes her picture scenes of a countryside on a July morning because of its “humor, color and wits.”

The rest of the program will be conducted by special guest, David Cho, who was a conducting fellow at Chautauqua in 2002. It has been a tradition for the orchestra to bring back a previous fellow as a guest conductor for the MSFO and Festival Dancers collaboration. Cho is now serving as the seventh music director of Lubbock Symphony Orchestra.

The second piece will be “In the Interim,” choreographed by Mark Diamond, who is celebrating his 30th year at the School of Dance. The piece will be set to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major.

Piano student Chuyue “Chloe” Zhang, who recently received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School and was one of the piano competition winners at Chautauqua three years ago, will be playing the piano part of the Ravel. And Zhang said she has played this piece before, though not with an orchestra.

According to Cho, this piano concerto sounds a lot like George Gershwin because of the “jazzy feelings” it produces.

The third dance, choreographed by Sasha Janes, is titled “Ecstatic Orange” and will be set to a piece by Michael Torke of the same title.

Tonight’s show will end with “Serenade,” choreographed by George Balanchine and set to music from Serenade for Strings, op. 48, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Russian Romantic composer composed three famous ballets, “The Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” along many other works that are suitable for ballet.

According to Cho, Tchaikovsky’s music is fluid, with its “thick, lush, romantic sound of string playing,” as opposed to some of Poulenc’s music, which can get angular. Cho said Tchaikovsky’s music fits into human body, “instrumental-wise and also dance-wise.”

“Serenade” is a particularly special piece, according to School of Dance Artistic Director Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. The choreography is done by “one of the great masters,” Balanchine, and is extra special because Patricia McBride, associate artistic director, worked directly with Balanchine, who created numerous roles specifically for her.

“It’s not often that you get to work with someone like Patricia, who has worked directly with Balanchine for 30 years,” Bonnefoux said.

According to Muffitt, live music is more exciting and “more visceral” than recorded music because it’s “right there in the room with you, created by people for you right there on the spot.”

“To hear what a real orchestra sounds like … is different than having a stereo turned way up in the rehearsal room,” he said. “There is a human element involved.”

Knowing that dancers are used to working with recordings, Muffitt said he, Cho and Bao tried to make the music sound as close to the specific recordings the dancers used during rehearsal.

“For that reason, we want to make it as easy as possible for them,” Muffitt said. “But that’s part of the real world. And from the audience’s perspective, to have a live symphony orchestra down there really makes the night.”

According to Lucena, the experience and opportunities that the students from the School of Dance and the MSFO receive are meant to enrich and advance their education in the craft. Many of the students seek to continue working in music or dance professionally and see the Chautauqua programs as a stepping stone into a professional career.

Lucena said that she and the School of Dance instructors work to mimic a professional work environment in order to make that potential transition into a professional realm easier for the students as they get older.

“We treat the students here as professionals,” she said. “We strive to provide an environment that is similar to what they will have if they continue to work in dance professionally.”

The experience that the education at Chautauqua provides is in many ways unique to the program for both the instrumentalists and the dancers. Bonnefoux said that the musicians are given the opportunities to work in choreographic workshops so that both the dancers and the orchestra students are able to better understand the entire process of a collaborated performance.

“I don’t know any other places like Chautauqua that allow young dancers to work directly with the musicians,” Bonnefoux said.

Ralph Young to discuss history of dissent in America at Week Five opening morning lecture

by Maggie Prosser on
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Ralph Young goes against the grain.

Young, a history professor at Temple University and author of Dissent: The History of an American Idea will provide a historical context of dissent at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday, July 23, in the Amphitheater to open Week Five, “The Ethics of Dissent.”

To Young, dissent is more than a “disagreement” — it’s a structural change.

“Generally, dissent emanates from grassroots movement like the civil rights movement and (pushes) against the power or structure to make fundamental changes,” he said. “So disagreement isn’t necessarily trying to make change, but dissent is trying to do that — it’s trying to get laws overturned that are negatively impacting one group’s rights.”

Young’s book, Dissent, extensively covers the history of dissent in America’s foundation and its history — from Puritan Anne Hutchinson, who was at the center of the Antinomian Controversy, a religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1630s, to the Occupy and Tea Party movements in the 21st century.

“At its founding, the United States committed itself to lofty ideals. When the promise of those ideals was not fully realized by all Americans, many protested and demanded that the United States live up to its promise,” Young wrote in the description of his book “… Some dissenters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people.”

Despite the book’s descriptive title, The History of an American Idea, Young said dissent is not solely an American idea, but that the United States is one of a handful of countries that has the right to dissent embedded in its constitution.

“American dissent, I feel, has influenced a lot of other countries as well,” he said. “For example, in Europe in 1968, you had the Prague Spring, you had the Paris uprisings, you had student protests in Berlin, and I think a lot of that got some of its influence from what was going on in the United States at that time with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

For Young, dissent is a gray area; it is not exclusive to progressive movements. He also classifies current movements like those of the alt-right and the Ku Klux Klan as dissent.

“I do think of the alt-right and the KKK as dissent movements because they are protesting against the reality that exists today, which is usually what protests are doing,” he said. “They are protesting against the status quo.”

Dissent is also a gray moral area. Young will pose questions in his lecture about whether dissent should have a higher moral comparative, if the act of dissent should ever escalate to violence and where the line is drawn between civil discourse and disobedience.

“I think there is a line that separates the two, but I think that when people are being very oppressed they might start getting involved in violence, and that creates a whole other issue — should dissent ever be violent?” he said. “One of the major dissent movements in American history led to the American Revolution, which was very violent, though we were born out of that very violent dissent.”

The morals of dissent will be at the center of Young’s visit to Chautauqua Institution. While on the grounds, Young will also be hosting conversations throughout the week as a scholar-in-residence. During these conversations, Young will give an in-depth look into dissent movements across three different eras of American history, as well as the morality of ethics.

This is Young’s first visit to the Institution, but he is eager to engage with Chautauquans about timely issues.

“I suppose in one way it might sort of be preaching to the choir because dissent is in the genes of Chautauquans. … I think dissent is central to American history,” Young said. “It’s been one of main forces that has created the United States, but at the same time, today in the current political climate, I think dissent is even more important than ever. And so it is a very timely subject.”

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