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Is There Such a Thing as a Safe Gun? |
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Monday, 18 January 2016 09:15 |
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LaFrance writes: "Plenty of people are skilled at keeping guns around, and using them, without killing anyone. But that doesn't mean the guns themselves are safe. Gun-safety technology has barely improved over the decades, even as many firearms have become more powerful."
Flames exit the barrel of a gun as a man fires a Sig P320 at a Utah gun range in December 2015. (photo: George Frey/Reuters
Is There Such a Thing as a Safe Gun?
By Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic
18 January 16
 here’s that old line, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” How absurd is that? Of course guns kill people. Killing is what guns do. And they do it really, really well.
Plenty of people, however, are skilled at keeping guns around, and using them, without killing anyone. But that doesn’t mean the guns themselves are safe. Gun-safety technology has barely improved over the decades, even as many firearms have become more powerful.
“Handgun designs have been the same for the last 100 years,” said Timmy Oh, the co-founder of Dual:Lock, a startup that’s making a fingerprint-authentication system for firearms. “So in that sense, there hasn’t been much safety technology integrated, and everything is still very mechanical. In terms of the design of firearms itself, it’s something that has been designed to be a weapon.”
Oh is one of many entrepreneurs working on improving gun safety at a time when officials are increasingly calling for technological progress in this realm. In a speech at the White House earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced he’s directing the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to conduct or sponsor research into what it would take to make guns harder to use without authorization, and less likely to fire accidentally.
“If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” Obama said. "If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun. Right?”
The technology Obama described seems possible, certainly, but it isn’t necessarily straightforward. That’s for a few reasons. For one thing, gun owners often want their weapons to be instantly accessible and usable. That’s why so many people choose not to store their firearms in safes. According to one American Journal of Public Health study, there is at least one unlocked firearm in 43 percent of homes with guns and children in them in the United States; and 9 percent of homes have guns that were kept unlocked and loaded.
The system Dual:Lock built attempts to solve this safety problem with an external safe that essentially keeps the gun locked in its holster until the authenticated user reaches for it. “The thumb aligns perfectly on the sensor, so that movement of grabbing the gun unlocks it,” Oh told me.
Making guns personalized so that they only work for approved users is a major theme in gun-safety technology today, but not everyone agrees that fingerprint sensors are the way to go. “A biometric solution is a great solution for someone who is not in inclement weather, or someone whose hands aren’t going to be dirty,” said Margot Hirsch, the president of the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, which offers grants to individuals working on gun safety. “So then you’ve got RFID, which uses radio frequencies, and only allows the firearm to discharge when the gun owner places a corresponding token—like a ring or a bracelet—in very close proximity to the trigger.”
Authentication that uses RFID, short for radio-frequency identification, might be better for law enforcement or a hunter, for example. “Or someone perhaps a little more recreational,” Hirsch said, “Because you can still wear a glove. Your hands can get dirty or wet.”
Among those advocating for improvements to gun-safety technology, the biggest challenge may be getting people to buy the guns equipped with them. One buzzed-about smart-gun company, Armatix, has had a difficult time gaining traction. Its handgun, which used an RFID authenticator linked to a wristwatch, was the first firearm of its kind to reach the market. Armatix went through a bankruptcy-like restructuring last spring, after many people criticized the relatively high price of its guns. A review by America’s 1st Freedom, a publication run by the NRA, called Armatix’s smart weapon “sleek” but unreliable and ultimately “disappointing.” The review also raised questions about remote hacking, an aspect of personalized authentication that is likely to continue to come up.
“Some guys sniggered that [Armatix’s] .22 was for shooting squirrels,” said Robert McNamara, the founder of TriggerSmart, another company building a weapon authenticator. “The purists of the gun world would’ve considered it a peashooter. As is often the case, the pioneers make mistakes and the next wave of people who come along benefit from that.”
McNamara may be one of them. TriggerSmart is developing its own RFID-enabled gun, one that he hopes—like many of the people developing advanced gun-safety technologies—will appeal to law enforcement. That’s one strategy for wider adoption: If gun enthusiasts see police officers and members of the military using a certain weapon, they’re more likely to buy the same thing. “Police officers, they don’t have time to swipe their fingers in a crisis situation,” McNamara told me. “Half the cops in America are going around wearing gloves, anyway. With RFID, as soon as they pick up the gun, it works ... as fast as I can draw the weapon, the weapon is active and ready to fire.”
That’s the idea, anyway. TriggerSmart is still testing its product, a painstaking process, and one that McNamara estimates will take a couple more years. “Because they’re such serious weapons,” he said. “We need to go and test technology rigorously in extreme conditions—in the desert in Africa and in the snow up in Alaska—to make sure that they perform perfectly well.”
Then there are the cultural and political hurdles to overcome. In the United States, especially, guns are part of the cultural identity and inextricable from politics. “It’s quite possible this thing might happen overseas before it ever happens in America. It could be Australia or England or somewhere, where they might develop smart guns first,” McNamara said. In America, anything related to gun regulations—and, by extension, improving gun safety—is so contentious that it may take longer for smart guns to gain acceptance.
“Nobody’s trying to take away guns,” McNamara said. “This is just offering another kind of gun. There’s thousands of types of guns. This is just another one. I don’t think, in any stretch of the imagination, that there’s anything in the president’s announcement that we’re taking away anybody’s guns. But of course there’s the fear-mongering. Paranoid fantasies.”
Hirsch, at the San Francisco-based Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, is more optimistic. But she also, when I asked about how realistic it is to expect smart guns to become widely accepted in the U.S., chose her words very, very carefully.
“We believe that the market demand will drive the gun manufacturers to want to take advantage of this opportunity to provide safer firearms for their customers,” Hirsch said. “I believe smart guns will take time to see broad adoption, but the momentum is building.”
Will Murphy, a Florida detective who’s developing a fingerprint authenticator called Gun Guardian, is more frank: “For a current firearms manufacture to convert equipment over to start producing smart guns is going to be extremely expensive,” he told me. “It’s my opinion that they won’t convert until they see a large demand by the consumer.” (Murphy, for his part, says safe guns already exist: “All firearms are safe when used properly and responsibly,” he said.)
In the United States alone, there are some 350 million firearms—or, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, more guns than people. “The majority of gun owners are responsible,” Hirsch said. “I don’t know if guns are any more lethal than they used to be. The problem is they’re falling into the wrong hands.”
That’s true. People do kill people, just like guns-rights advocates like to say, but they wouldn’t always be able to without guns.
“It’s in their inherent nature that firearms disseminate violence really quickly,” said Oh, the Dual:Lock co-founder. “Just the simplicity, pulling the trigger. It’s not something like a construction machine, where if you make a mistake you might lose a hand. You’re playing on a much higher level when talking about safety.”
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The Afghan Puzzle |
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Sunday, 17 January 2016 14:18 |
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Escobar writes: "Just like Lazarus, there were reasons to believe the Afghan peace process might have stood a chance of being resurrected this past Monday in Islamabad, as four major players - Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and China - sat together at the same table."
Afghanistan. (photo: Shutterstock)
The Afghan Puzzle
By Pepe Escobar, Counter Punch
17 January 16
 ust like Lazarus, there were reasons to believe the Afghan peace process might have stood a chance of being resurrected this past Monday in Islamabad, as four major players – Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and China – sat together at the same table.
The final communiqué though was not exactly ground breaking: “The participants emphasized the immediate need for direct talks between representatives of the Government of Afghanistan and representatives from Taliban groups in a peace process that aims to preserve Afghanistan’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
A week before the Islamabad meeting, while in the Persian Gulf, I had an extremely enlightening conversation with a group of Afghan Pashtuns. After the ice was broken, and it was established I was not some Sean Penn-style shadowy asset with a dodgy agenda, my Pashtun interlocutors did deliver the goods. I felt I was back in Peshawar in 2001, only a few days before 9/11.
The first groundbreaker was that two Taliban officials, currently based in Qatar, are about to meet top Chinese and Pakistani envoys face to face, without interference from the US. This fits into the strategy laid out by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by China and Russia, according to which the Afghan puzzle must be solved as an Asian matter. And Beijing definitely wants a solution, fast; think Afghan chapter of the New Silk Roads.
The post 9/11 Afghan War has been going on for an interminable 14 years; taking a cue from Pentagonese, talk about Enduring Freedom forever. No one is winning – and the Taliban are more divided than ever after the previous peace process collapsed when the Taliban announced Mullah Omar had been dead for two years.
That good old “strategic depth”
Still, it all hinges on the complex interplay between Kabul and Islamabad.
Take the see saw of Afghan CEO (yes, that’s his title) Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. He juggles between Tehran – where he emphasizes terrorism is a threat both to Iran and Afghanistan – and Islamabad, where he discusses peace process arcana with Pakistani officials.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, for his part, never skips a beat renewing his commitment towards peace and economic development in Afghanistan.
When an attempt towards a peace process actually started – informally – in Doha, in 2012, including eight Taliban officials, the Taliban were furious that Kabul actually privileged talking to Islamabad. The official Taliban position is that they are politically – and militarily – independent from Islamabad.
As my Pashtun interlocutors emphasized, most people in Afghanistan don’t know what to make of all that Kabul-Islamabad talk, including what they regard as dangerous concessions, such as sending young Afghan military to be trained in Pakistan.
Islamabad plays a highly leveraged game. The Haqqani group – which Washington brand as terrorists – finds safe harbor inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. If the Taliban will be on the table at any peace process that will be brokered by Pakistan – which still enjoys a lot of leverage over those Taliban clustered around the new leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor.
My Pashtun interlocutors are adamant; the Taliban and the ISI remain indistinguishable. Their strategic alliance is still in place. All Taliban in Doha are monitored by the ISI.
On the other hand, there seems to be a subtle shift involving the Pakistani military and the ISI (which knows everything there is to know, and is complicit on much that happens concerning the Taliban). Last month, Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif went to Afghanistan by himself; so that could mean the military will privilege real peace on the ground instead of manipulating Afghanistan as a “strategic depth” Pakistani pawn.
Caution: pipeline ahead
So, in principle, the Afghan talkfest will remain in effect. The Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – another key player on Washington’s Top Ten Terrorist List – is also interested in the peace process. But HIA says it must be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned – meaning no Pakistani interference. Hekmatyar is clearly positioning himself for a future leading role.
The plot thickens when we turn from the Taliban to ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s advances in Afghanistan. For circles close to former President Hamid Karzai, a.k.a. the former “mayor of Kabul” (because he controlled nothing else), Daesh is a creation of Islamabad’s foreign policy, so Pakistan may gain full access to energy-rich Central Asia, China and Russia.
That sounds a bit far-fetched when compared to what’s actually going on in Pipelineistan.
Kabul has committed to a huge 7,000-member security force to guard the $10-billion, 1,800 km long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline within Afghanistan, assuming it will really be finished by December 2018. Optimistically, heavy work on clearing TAPI’s passage – and that includes demining – will begin in April.
Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov already
ordered state companies Turkmengaz and Turkmengazneftstroi to begin building the country’s 214-km section of TAPI. The pipeline will also travel 773 km in Afghanistan and 827 km in Pakistan before entering India. Whether all this frenzy will actually materialize by 2018 is open to never-ending question.
Where’s my heroin?
Meanwhile, what is the CIA up to?
Former acting CIA director Michael Morell is now spinning “the reemergence of Afghanistan as an issue”, so “the debate on how many troops we [the US] keep in Afghanistan is going to reopen.”
The Pentagon for its part is spinning the need for 10,000 boots on the ground. The top NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, wants his 10,000 with a vengeance; “My intent would be to keep as much as I could, for as long as I could.” Enduring Freedom forever, indeed – as the Pentagon has been forced to admit, on the record, that the Afghan security forces are incapable of “operating entirely on their own” despite a whopping Washington investment of $60 billion-plus since 2002.
The latest Pentagon reports describe security in Afghanistan going down, down, down. Which brings us to Helmand.
Only a few days before the Islamabad meeting, US special forces shadowing Afghan troops got into a tremendous firefight with the Taliban in Helmand. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook, in trademark newspeak, didn’t call it “combat” – but a “train, advise and assist” mission.
The Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the 2001 American bombing. The Taliban control no less than four Helmand districts. Civilians are caught in the crossfire. And yet Pentagon special forces and air strikes in Helmand are just qualified as sightseeing.
In the end, everything comes back to Helmand. Why Helmand? My Pashtun interlocutors loosen up and say it with a mouthful: it’s all about the involvement of the CIA in the heroin trade in Afghanistan; “The Americans simply can’t let it go.”
So here we are delving into perhaps a new chapter in a gas and poppy epic at the heart of Eurasia. The Taliban, divided or not, have come up with their ultimate red line; no talking with Kabul until they get a direct talk with Washington. From a Taliban point of view, it makes total sense. Pipelineistan? Fine, but we want our cut (that’s the same story since the first Clinton administration). CIA heroin? Fine, you can keep it, but we want our cut.
My Pashtun interlocutors, about to board a flight to Peshawar, lay out the road map. The Taliban want their Qatar office – a really nice palace – officially recognized as a representation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan; that’s what the country was from 1996 to 2001. They want the UN – not to mention the US – to remove the Taliban from its “most wanted” list. They want all Taliban prisoners released from Afghan jails.
Will that happen? Of course not. So it’s up to Beijing to come up with a win-win scenario.
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Stand With Her: Black Men As Anti-Rape Activists |
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Sunday, 17 January 2016 14:16 |
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Greene-Hayes writes: "In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, I often wonder where are the black men mobilizing against sexual violence against black women? Have we hidden - like the Biblical David - away from the eyes of our communities because we are secretly invested in rape culture? Are we afraid because we do not actually know what sexual violence looks like?"
Jannie Ligons, one of the victims of sexual assault by former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, smiles as attorney Benjamin Crump holds up her arm. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
Stand With Her: Black Men As Anti-Rape Activists
By Ahmad Greene-Hayes, The Root
17 January 16
Your Take: As black men in America we are hurting, but black women are hurting, too. And it’s past time we reckon with the truth that they are often hurting because of us.
 n the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, I often wonder where are the black men mobilizing against sexual violence against black women? Have we hidden—like the Biblical David—away from the eyes of our communities because we are secretly invested in rape culture? Are we afraid because we do not actually know what sexual violence looks like?
Or are we worried that we may look in the mirror and face the fact that we may also be harm-doers?
In July 2015, a group of about 10 black men joined together in the living room of Black Women’s Blueprint in Brooklyn, N.Y., to discuss these things openly and honestly, without restraint.
We gathered because we wanted to discuss ways to dismantle the patriarchy within. We pinpointed key ways to stand in support of black women survivors of sexual and intimate partner violence. We also vowed to be conscientious of our socialization into a society that prizes misogyny and sexism, and strategized ways to move from theory to praxis and from talk to action.
We thought critically about what rape is, what consent looks like, how to stop street harassment and how to get real about the monsters deeply embedded in who we are as male-identified persons under patriarchy. We also agreed that this inner work is never ending.
As I looked back on our meeting, I realized that we are doing similar work to our African forefathers during the 19th century. Historian Tera Hunter notes in To ’Joy My Freedom, black men across the South joined together and mobilized against the sadistic and utterly vile attacks against black women’s bodies by white racists overcome with rapacious lust.
In Savannah, Ga., there was the Sons of Benevolence and in Mobile, Ala., there was the National Lincoln Association, who met regularly to map legal and social solutions to the problem of white-on-black rape.
Black men led and sustained an anti-rape movement at the height of white supremacist Klan terror. Despite the widespread anti-black violence that ensued following the legal eradication of slavery as it had formerly been practiced, black men unapologetically mobilized against racialized rape and sexualized racism alongside black women.
But how many black men mobilized against rape within black communities? How many black men chose to, instead, shame black women into silence? How many black men tasked black women with hiding their own victimization from the eyes of society in order to protect the black men doing the victimizing?
These past six months have been quite overwhelming for black communities and families faced with fighting our own demons. Social media has been filled with post after post of individuals wrestling with the ill that is sexual violence.
In the midst of these conversations were rape apologists or people—mainly black men—who stood firm, flat-footed even, on behalf of accused rapist Bill Cosby, and even joked about the severity of R. Kelly molesting children, despite his chauvinistic behavior on a recent HuffPost Live segment. The wide ranging lengths and leaps that black men have made to justify rape—a violation of one’s mind, body, soul and spirit that can never be just—is beyond distressing. Take for example, the video below where Umar Johnson argues that the state is “taking down Cosby.”
Though not applicable in Cosby’s case—despite Johnson’s opinion—the state’s assassination attempts on not just the bodies of black men, but their characters is well-documented. Legal records, newspapers and cultural history bears witness to the ways white supremacists depicted black sexuality as deviant and perverse. Pathologic engagements with black people’s bodies rendered black men and women sexual beasts.
Yet, in cacophonous contradiction, white women and men lusted after what Vincent Woodard has called “the delectable Negro.”
The Negro as a delicacy to be eaten is a metaphor that rings loudly in the heart of the white American soul. That is evidenced by white supremacists continuing to murder black people at astronomical rates. So, it makes sense, then, that conversations about the sexual violence that pervades our communities is fraught with tension, anger and accusations of racial traitorship.
Understanding the root, though, does not mean that it doesn’t need to be pulled out and destroyed. Understanding the root means knowing that state-sanctioned rapists who were sworn in “to protect and serve” black women, but who instead targeted them, are as reprehensible and violent as the police officers who killed Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant and Sean Bell.
Understanding the root, the toxic root of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, means that black men must always care about and advocate alongside black women and girls. We must care that an anti-black state apparatus granted former police officer Daniel Holtzclaw the power and authority to bring to life his deepest, darkest, nonconsensual fantasies with black women’s bodies.
We must love black women enough to jump on buses, hop on planes, or do whatever it is that we need to do to get to Oklahoma City next week for the National Justice Ride for Survivors of Holtzclaw.
But we must also stand up when the predator is a black man with an iconic television show or hot albums. We must be there for her when she’s an 18-year-old black girl in Brooklyn, N.Y., gang-raped by five black teens who look like us.
No rape is negligible.
As Essex Hemphill once asked, “How eager are we to burn this threadbare masculinity, this perpetual black suit that we have outgrown?”
Though I think masculinity is inherently flawed and will always be as long as we are invested in white colonial constructions of gender, as black men, we must wrestle with who we are as male-identified people and what that means for black women—cisgender, transgender and gender-nonconforming.
As black men in America we are hurting, but black women are hurting, too. And it’s past time we reckon with the truth that they are often hurting because of us.
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#OscarsSoWhite, Again: A Symptom of Hollywood's Racism |
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Sunday, 17 January 2016 14:11 |
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Keeler writes: "This is the first time since 1998 that the Academy of Motion Pictures have not nominated a single African-American actor for two years in a row. Even films like 'Creed' and 'Straight Outta Compton' which were viewed as Oscar contenders only garnered nominations for Sylvester Stallone and white writers Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff."
This is the first time since 1998 that the Academy of Motion Pictures have not nominated a single African-American actor for two years in a row. (photo: Twitter)
#OscarsSoWhite, Again: A Symptom of Hollywood's Racism
By Jacqueline Keeler, teleSUR
17 January 16
Hollywood also continues to whitewash racially diverse American stories and reduce people like Native Americans to stereotypes.
 nce again, the 2016 Academy Award best acting nominations are all white — a repeat of 2015 despite widespread criticism expressed by the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. But while reading about the Academy Award nominations, my thoughts truned to the tragic image of the late Misty Upham, a Native American actress of the Blackfeet Nation who appeared during the 2015 Oscars telecast in the “In Memoriam” montage while Meryl Streep looked on.
There was some criticism by members of the Academy about why she was remembered and not others. Some accused Meryl Streep — Upham’s cast mate from “August: Osage County” — of adding her young costar to the montage and displacing others. Indeed, Upham was never nominated for an Oscar in her short life but many felt that she was about to break out when she died in October of 2014 year at the age of 32.
Over a year later, her death, like that of so many Native American women, remains unsolved.
This is the first time since 1998 that the Academy of Motion Pictures have not nominated a single African-American actor for two years in a row.
Even films like “Creed” and “Straight Outta Compton” which were viewed as Oscar contenders only garnered nominations for Sylvester Stallone and white writers Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff.
And, unsurprisingly, after 88 years there are still no Oscar nominations for Native American actors or filmmakers or writers.
Indians have been a part of Hollywood at least as long as the cowboy. But the struggle to disentangle our modern selves from the old storylines set up at the dawn of the medium of cinema continues into the 21st century.
For Upham, being able to act was a balm to so much pain: “Acting has saved me from darkness many times.” However, it was not enough. Despite working with Streep and Benicio del Toro and with Quentin Tarantino in Django Unchained, she struggled with inner pain, poverty, and mental illness.
After her death, her family found the Auburn, Washington, City Police Department unresponsive to their requests to search for her body. Family and friends organized a search after giving up on the police, and sadly, found her body at the bottom of a small ravine near her home.
Upham’s story is not unusual. Police oftentimes do not take seriously reports of missing Native American women and Federal authorities decline to prosecute in over 70 percent of reported cases on Native American reservations. Criminal justice studies find Native women are 2.5 times more likely than other American women to experience violent crimes and in some U.S. counties, Native women are 10 times more likely to be murdered. On top of this, nearly 70 percent of the men who commit violent crimes against Native women are not Native. Native women are the only group of women in America more likely to be assaulted by men not of their own race. The statistics on murder and violence are equally alarming in Canada where First Nations women have been organizing under the hashtag #MMIW, “Missing and Murdered Women.”
Yet, these painful stories and virtually every other type of story featuring Native Americans are not told by Hollywood. All filmgoers and tv watchers ever see, when they do see Native people on the screen, are stereotypes.
And in this past year since Upham died, in the new world of streaming Adam Sandler’s “The Ridiculous Six” was produced by Netflix for $60 million featuring threats of rape against Native women and the script originally featured graphic sexual jokes about Native women, who were either portrayed as over-sexed “squaws,” dirty ugly “squaws” or as noble Indian princesses and given names like “Beavers Breath” and “Wears No Bra” — unnecessarily feeding negatives stereotypes about Native women. Extremely irresponsible considering the astoundingly high rates of rape of Native women by non-Native men.
That’s what makes Leonardo DiCaprio’s Golden Globes speech after his Best Actor win unique in many ways. The last time a Hollywood star of his stature used an awards show to draw attention to Indigenous issues was nearly 44 years ago in 1972 when Marlon Brando sent Native American actress Sacheen Little Feather to the podium to refuse his Academy Award for The Godfather in protest of Native American portrayals in film.
It should be noted that The Revenant features the rape of Native women as a plot point, but DiCaprio, whose advocacy for environmental issues is well-known, did not focus on Hollywood portrayals of Native people but asserted, “It is time we recognize your history and that we protect your indigenous lands from corporate interests and people that are out there to exploit them.”
Kudos to “The Revenant’s” Alejandro González Iñárritu, a Mexican director nominated for an Oscar for the level of detail he brings to authenticity and the truly stunning cinematography, but despite, this is yet another Hollywood film with white male protagonist. The Native American actors are simply ancillary to the story. This can be seen in pretty much every Hollywood film with Native Americans in it. From the Unforgiven, to Dances With Wolves, to television shows like Longmire.
And Native American comic Ryan McMahon, speaks for many Native American cinefiles when he asks in an article in Vice if, “it is time the world hear Indigenous voices … why were there so few speaking roles for Indigenous people in The Revenant?”
This generation of Native Americans actors do not follow their dreams to Hollywood in order to continue to play buckskin and loincloth Potemkin villager parts that serve only to provide a backdrop to a white male actor’s heroics. I agree with Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when she said in her TED Talk that “The Danger of a Single Story” — that is, the world seen only from the perspective of the white male — is that, “it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar … Many stories matter.”
In light of this, I call for a moratorium on “buckskin and loincloth parts” until portrayals of Native people are balanced with those featuring modern Native American protagonists. We must get away from the portrayal of Native people as either savage warriors of the past, “Indian princesses” to be courted and conveniently killed off before giving birth to a Mestizo nation north of the Rio Grande, or as stoic stereotypes.
And when I call for modern roles I mean not just the odd, rich casino owner in “House of Cards,” or an obnoxious tribal leader denying nice white characters the right to adopt an Indian baby, or even, the silent, perfect killer Indian in Fargo, the TV series.
Zahn McClarnon, the Lakota actor who plays cold-blooded, Native American killer Hanzee on “Fargo,” expressed his frustration with the limited roles offered to Native American actors in an interview with New York Magazine. “I'd love a role where I'm playing a father, a loving husband, a relationship-based movie. A child and father, father-son kind of thing,” said McClarnon. “I do a lot of that stuff in my classes I take, and I have a lot of fun doing it. Just being a human being and relating to another human being.”
In this vacuum of diverse portrayals, it is no wonder that stereotypes are all most Americans know about Native people.
The result of this whitewashing of racially diverse American stories — both those based in the real world and those in fantasy — was found in a 2014 UCLA study to reduce minority representation in films by more than half. Racial minorities make up 40 percent of the population but only 17 percent of leads in films, while 83 percent of the lead actors in films are white.
America is rich in stories — embarrassingly so. Let’s bring all the missing stories to the table and then we can begin to see each other as people.
That desire to share her story and her dreams is what drew Misty Upham to acting and for her to blurt out at theater camp at 12 years of age, “My name is Misty Upham, and someday you will know that name as the best living Native American actress.”
She and every American child deserves the right to do so unhampered by stereotypes and an industry stuck on a single story.
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ack in September 2013, well before Bernie Sanders decided to run for president, the liberal journalist Peter Beinart 
