Rape, (inJustice) and The Objects That Remain

Fire season is upon us and for @KGNU Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with @Dani_Anguiano and @alastairgee for an update on their reporting work for The Guardian @guardian about the devastating in California of nearly two years ago. is the harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century. There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

6 Aug 202030min

@claudiacragg speaks here with J Chester Johnson about a side of his grandfather, Lonnie Burch, that he never knew and only discovered late in his own life. His new book is and is he says a 'story of reconciliation'. The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst in US history (see more details below), has been widely unknown for the better part of a century, thanks to the whitewashing of history. In 2008, Johnson was asked to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance, where the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. In his research, Johnson happened upon a treatise by historian and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells on the Elaine Massacre, where more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of African-American men, women, and children perished at the hands of white posses, vigilantes, and federal troops in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. Johnson would discover that his beloved grandfather had been a member of the KKK and participated in the massacre. The discovery shook him to his core. Thereafter, he met , a descendant of African-American victims of the massacre, and she and Johnson committed themselves to reconciliation. Damaged Heritage brings to light a deliberately erased chapter in American history, and offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge—and repudiate—our collective damaged heritage and begin a path towards true healing. The Elaine Massacre occurred on September 30–October 1, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of  in rural . Some records of the time state that eleven black men and five white men were killed. Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine, AR shortly after the incident stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, recently ranging into the hundreds. The white mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Brough) and vigilante militias like the Ku Klux Klan. According to the , "the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in  and possibly the bloodiest  in the ". After the massacre, state officials concocted an elaborate cover-up, falsely claiming that blacks were planning an insurrection. The cover-up was successful, as national newspapers repeated the falsehood that blacks in Arkansas were staging an insurrection. A New York Times headline read, "Planned Massacre of Whites Today," and the Arkansas Gazette (the leading newspaper in Arkansas) wrote that Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection." Subsequent to this reporting, more than 100 African-Americans were indicted, with 12 being sentenced to death by electrocution. After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted. Because of the widespread attacks which white mobs committed against blacks , the  of Montgomery, Alabama classified the black deaths as  in its 2015 report on the lynching of African Americans in the South.

30 Juli 202035min

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU with Lacy Crawford @lacy_crawford about her memoir, One night in October 1990, a young Lacy Crawford took a phone call at her dorm, surprised to hear an older boy pleading for her to come help him. Crawford was mystified but convinced there must be a reason, so she slipped across her boarding school campus and met the boy at his dorm window. When she climbed inside, she was confronted by the boy and his roommate, both stripped down to their underwear. That night would haunt her for decades to come. Crawford emphasizes that the sexual assault she experienced was not unusual. “It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time,” she writes. “First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me.” She describes St. Paul’s as a lauded, sometimes lonely place where privileged teens were obsessed with their academic futures. (The author, when faced with the possibility of not returning for her senior year, pleaded with her parents: But what about Princeton?) Crawford, a novelist, uses her storytelling skill to illuminate the myriad ways female students were taught that their desires and bodies were less valuable than—even subject to—those of their male peers. She’d had other sexual experiences as a teenager, a fact her teachers later used against her. When she began to experience physical ailments because of her assault, Crawford was certain it was a result of “what she had done.” She was so wrecked by the experience that she saw herself, not the boys, as the one to blame. Crawford’s detailed account of her assault and its aftermath relies on an indelible memory as well as careful research. Medical reports and other documentation help her piece together the school’s reaction when she revisits it decades later, after other victims began holding the school accountable. Notes on a Silencing is a ghastly account that all would wish Crawford would never have hard to write, of a teenage girl learning that people in power often value reputation above all else.

16 Juli 202034min

When our younger son finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar some years ago, he commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me  of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg’s own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia. Greenberg has written that :- "I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill." (From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy website)

2 Juli 202017min

With all the #Chinabashing going on, it's perhaps important to remember why the #PRC, its people and culture rather than its national entity, matters to the rest of the world. It is easy to lose sight of now but that is why perhaps in June 2020 it's a good time to reprise a previously broadcast interview with Simon Winchester @simonwwriter.  @claudiacragg speaks here with Winchester about Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. The subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Times over a decade ago (). At the time, I commented that I can only think those who responded with such vitriol to Winchester knew absolutely nothing at all about Winchester and his work, nor anything about the subject of his new book. In this latest opus, the award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Simon Winchester returns with the remarkable story of the growth of a great nation, China, and the eccentric and adventurous scientist who defined its essence for the world in his multi-volume opus, 'Science and Civilization in China'. Winchester relates how most of us know that the Chinese invented a great variety of objects and devices long before they were known of in the West. Not simply famous things like gunpowder and paper, but also harnesses for horses which had a huge effect on the West when they arrived. Why, though, did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is the so-called 'Needham Question', after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it. Needham was a British biochemist and was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese He was also cited by the United States during the McCarthy era for his investigation into the use of illegal weapons by the US on the Koreans in the Korean War. Winchester, The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa is a writer and adventurer whose articles have appeared in such publications as the National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler . He has now written well over a dozen books on travel and history.

25 Juni 202023min

Walter Schaub speaks  here with @claudiacragg for @KGNU @KGNUNews about ethics in government and the filing of a complaint with regard to the management of #COVID19 and a member of the administration.  Schaub is a senior advisor to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington who previously served as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE). He is a frequent cable news contributor and has also worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Campaign Legal Center

11 Juni 202027min

Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg (all comments greatly welcomed) speaks here with , @iamaraindogtoo filmmaker and documentarian. He is the author of several books addressing American history, including: , and and more. His new film is called

28 Maj 202028min

@claudiacragg speaks with  @davedaley3, author: "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" & "Unrigged: How Americans Battled Back To Save Democracy," ex-EIC @salon Following Ratf**ked, his “extraordinary timely and undeniably important” (New York Times Book Review) exposé of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation’s leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in the wake of his and other reporters’ revelations. With his trademark journalistic rigor and narrative flair, Daley reports on Pennsylvania’s dramatic defeat of a gerrymander using the research of ingenious mathematicians and the Michigan millennial who launched a statewide redistricting revolution with a Facebook post. He tells the stories of activist groups that paved the way for 2018’s historic blue wave and won crucial battles for voting rights in Florida, Maine, Utah, and nationwide. In an age of polarization, Unrigged offers a vivid portrait of a nation transformed by a new civic awakening, and provides a blueprint for what must be done to keep American democracy afloat.

21 Maj 202042min