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December 28, 2016 Page 7 Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. O PINION Unable to Distinguish Facts from Opinion or Lies 2016, the year of ‘post-truth’ J ill r iChardson “Post-Truth.” The Oxford English Dictio- nary named this its word of the year for 2016. This was a year when campaign lies — most, though not all, coming out of the Donald’s mouth — were so numerous that fact checking became nearly impos- sible. Yes, each individual statement could be fact checked. But there were so many rapid-fire falsehoods that it was impossible to debunk them one by one on TV without de- voting entire shows to just that. And, far too often, nobody even cared if their preferred candidate was untruthful. The Internet was awash with fake news that was more popular than the real news. One fake news story told Trump by supporters that the pope had en- dorsed Trump, while another one told Clinton supporters that he’d denounced Trump. In reality, he did neither. Things have hardly got- ten better since the election, with Trump making false claims about “millions” of “illegal voters” and deny- ing intelligence assessments that Russia intervened on his behalf. This is a difficult time to teach so- cial sciences, because students often cannot distinguish between fact and opinion. A sociology professor I know posted on Facebook a line from a student’s final paper: “If colored people would just follow the law, they wouldn’t get shot by the po- lice.” A real student actually wrote that and turned it in. As a professor, you have to grade students with political views dif- ferent from your own fairly. But in addition to the offensive racial term, this student’s statement makes a claim that can be proven true or false with evidence. As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is enti- tled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Research can determine whether police shootings of people of color are due to law breaking by people of color or not. In this case, the ev- idence doesn’t support the student’s conclusion. The professor failed the student — not for his or her opinions, but for failing to do the assignment well. What do you want to bet the student will respond by calling the professor “biased”? I’m only a lowly teaching assis- tant, but I grapple with the current environment in my classroom too. This semester, I led students in a discussion of same-sex marriage. We wrote each argument for and against legalizing same-sex mar- riage on the board. I asked students to determine which ones were opin- ions, and which made empirical claims that could be proven true or false with evidence. Sociology can’t really evaluate opinions, like the claim gay mar- riage is “unnatural,” or the com- peting one that same-sex couples deserve the dignity of marriage. It can, on the other hand, scien- tifically evaluate whether children of same-sex couples turn out okay (they do) or whether humans use marriage only for heterosexual pro- creation (they don’t). By the end of class, I had a list of claims made by the anti-same sex marriage camp listed on the board, all of which were demonstrably false. Not one was true. Was I biased? I must say, even though I per- sonally support marriage equality — as do the majority of Americans nowadays — I felt uneasy teaching this lesson. I do my best to keep my personal political views out of the classroom, even on subjects I care strongly about. Instead, I wanted my students to distinguish between facts and opin- ions, and apply their knowledge from the semester to evaluate the accuracy of empirical claims. But I knew it’d be easy to accuse me of “bias.” A disgruntled student could even submit me to the “Professor Watch- list” — a right-wing website taking aim at professors conservatives dis- agree with. In this post-truth world, it no lon- ger matters whether a statement is factual. If you don’t like someone’s facts, you can accuse them of “bias” and counter their truth with a story you got from a fake news site. Especially when you’ve got the president-elect cheering you on. OtherWords columnist Jill Rich- ardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by OtherWords.org. What Part of “Never Again” Does He Not Understand? A hysteria that ignores history J ohn l a F orge Asked last year whether he would require American Muslims to register in a database Donald Trump said he “would certainly implement that -- absolutely.” During a Nov. 16 appearance on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, former Trump spokesman Carl Higbie said a reg- istry of Muslims would be “legal” and that “We did it during World War II with the Japanese.” “You’re not suggesting that we go back to Japanese internment camps are you?” Kelly asked. “I’m not proposing that at all,” Higbie said, “But I’m just saying there is precedent for it.” To this Kelly declared: “You can’t be cit- ing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the presi- dent-elect is going to do.” But of course he could, because Mr. Trump appears to win support by boastfully saying and doing anything that produces a roar from the mob -- crowing about sexual assault, torture, shooting people in the face, bombing civilians, de- porting millions -- no matter how unlawful, bigoted, sexist, hateful or dishonest it sounds. The so-called “precedent” in- cludes the bitter irony that many imprisoned Japanese-Americans by had sons in the military fighting against fascism in Germany and Italy. Muslim-Americans likewise have thousands of children in the US armed forces. Yet Khizr and Ghazala Kahn, the par- ents of Humayun Khan -- an Army captain who died in a car bombing in Iraq in 2004 -- were viciously belittled by Trump, using the same bigotry with which he attacked Feder- al Judge Gonzalo Curiel, absurdly calling him “Mexican.” News coverage of Higbie’s Muslim registry “precedent” bal- loon neglected to mention that arresting 3 to 11 million undocu- mented immigrants (Trump calls this whole class “Mexicans”) would also require a mass po- lice-state internment program like the WWII crimes visited upon Japanese-Americans. The media also ignored the fact that the US government has officially memo- rialized an apology for the WWII mass arrests and detentions, and has erected a monumental promise never to do any such a thing again. The National Japanese American Memorial in Washington, D.C., pledges never to repeat this overt- ly racist chapter of American his- tory. The national media’s ignorance or omission of this national monu- ment is partly understandable. It’s not noted on any of the DC tour maps I consulted. The memorial is a permanent reminder of the shameful arrest and imprison- ment-without-cause of more than 120,000 Japanese-American civil- ians. What’s more, for a city like Washington, which is crowded with mostly self-congratulatory monuments, the internment me- morial is a vanishingly rare, direct and unambiguous admission of wrongdoing by the government. Inscribed in the memorial’s el- egant marble pedestals are Presi- dent Reagan’s words: “Here We Admit A Wrong. Here We Affirm Our Commitment As A Nation To Equal Justice Under The Law.” Also carved in stone is this pledge from the late Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii: “The Lessons Learned Must Remain As A Grave Remind- er Of What We Must Not Allow To Happen Again To Any Group.” In 1988, Reagan signed the Civ- il Liberties Act which apologizes on behalf of the government and declares that the mass arrests were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” This sounds familiar. In The Underside of American History, historian Roger Dan- iels writes about early 1942 that: “Racist feelings were intensified by wild rumors of sabotage and espionage, and a variety of groups demanded the expulsion of Jap- anese-Americans from the West Coast.” The US Army and the War Relocation Authority forces then used house raids to detain and ship 120,313 Japanese-Americans to hastily-built, barbed wire-circled prison camps -- many built in the desert. Today’s advocates of Trump’s “database of Muslim residents” should consult the 1983 federal commission on the mass deten- tions of World War II. It found there was “no military necessity for the mass imprisonment of the Japanese Americans and that a grave injustice had been done.” The US started down this road immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, when more than 2,000 people in the country were arrested in se- cret. The Justice Department re- fused then to issue a list of names or the number of those incarcerat- ed, arguing that “national security interest” outweighed the public’s right to know. During these secret arrests, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., visited the Krome deten- tion center near Miami and found it astonishing that “...the Immigra- tion and Naturalization Service is fixated on detaining and round- ing up countless Arab-Americans without any justification.” But Trump would rather we forget US history, ignore Rea- gan’s apology, and break Senator Inouye’s promise. Today’s war- time hysteria, fueled by Trump’s baseless accusations against im- migrants, helps some ignore our history, especially if it is ugly, and consider repeating it even if we’ve promised “never again.” John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environ- mental justice group in Wisconsin. The Law Offices of Patrick John Sweeney, P.C. Patrick John Sweeney Attorney at Law 1549 SE Ladd, Portland, Oregon Portland: Hillsoboro: Facsimile: Email: (503) 244-2080 (503) 244-2081 (503) 244-2084 Sweeney@PDXLawyer.com
