Racism exists, and racists use racial slurs. When this happens, the insult is usually intentional, and the meaning is unambiguous. They use these terms either to establish dominance over another person/group, or to mobilize and motivate other racists. For the most part, we all know and recognize language that is used to do that. Its whole raison d’etre is to communicate racism. It’s not all that subtle, because subtlety doesn’t have the intended effect.
Now we are creating a very different kind of “racial slur,” if it can be called that. Racial animus is assigned to words or phrases even if the linkage to racism is unknown to everyone who uses it, even if no living person uses it to communicate racism. The connections to racial inequality are historical, and so indirect that we need experts to alert us to them. Did you know that “cakewalk,” “fuzzy wuzzy,” and “master bedroom” are racial slurs? Now you do. And it is not just words. A few weeks ago, we learned that the scratchy, distorted version of “turkey in the straw” wafting into the neighborhood from ice cream truck loudspeakers was (according to some) perpetuating racism. Why? Because a racist recording from 1916 used the tune. Even though no ice cream business owner, truck driver or kid chasing the truck had any idea of this imputed meaning, everyone stopped using that song. …
At the beginning of the New Year, Robert Knake, who was once the Obama administration’s Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted in a blog that “at some point in the next decade, the Chinese government, with the support of Russia and other authoritarian regimes, will move forward with plans to establish a separate [DNS] root system for their share of the internet.” It sounds terrible — the global Internet breaking into two.
I respect the fact that Knake didn’t play it safe by just expressing another “China is bad and a threat to the global internet” opinion. No, he made a prediction that something specific will happen. Predictions advance knowledge because they can be proven right or wrong. One can also quantify their probability by placing bets on them. …
Internet Governance Project
A recent event on “International economics and securing next-generation 5G wireless networks” featured Ambassador Robert Strayer, who heads the US State Department’s Communication and Information Policy team. But the focus of the talk was not really on 5G security, international trade or 5G development. Instead, the talk was an extended attack on China and the Chinese-based telecommunications vendor Huawei — another episode in an ongoing U.S. government campaign to shut Huawei and other Chinese firms out of the U.S. market, and to convince every other country in the world to do the same.
One would expect that from a Trump administration State Department official. A few months later, however, Jason Healey, a cybersecurity professor at Columbia University, repeated the same stuff in a blog on the Council on Foreign Relations. In a short piece called “Five Security Arguments against Huawei 5G,” Healey tried to shore up the fraying U.S. campaign against Huawei with another broadside. …
About
