Saturday 31 August 2019

A national dialogue needed....By Zainah Anwar

PAKATAN Harapan, are you listening?
What kind of Malaysia Baharu do we want to live in? How can we work together to bring into existence the Malaysia that we want and we deserve, that we actually voted for on May 9?
How do we build common ground to share this nation? How do we stop politicians and hateful ideologues from preying on our fears and exploiting our vulnerabilities for their own short-term self-interest?
Make no mistake. It is not us they care about. It is their own power, privilege and entitlements.
My greatest prayer as we welcome our 62nd year of Merdeka is for the good citizens of this country to send a clear and unequivocal message to the politicians and the hate mongers that they can no longer win elections nor make money peddling their politics of fear and division, and trumpeting a Malaysia based on a supremacist ideology.
Obviously, this is not an easy task, as the forces driving polarisation continue to use the emotive appeal of race and religion to exploit our vulnerabilities. It is the only currency they know to undermine this new government and its efforts at reform.
But what is tragic is that the political leaders we believe in, are caving in in fear, or complicit in their silence. Instead of listening to the voice of the rakyat on their myriad issues of concern over all that have gone wrong with Malaysia in the past decades, they, like the previous government, are responding to the baying of ethnoreligious supremacists. It was that choice that hammered the final nail in the coffin of Barisan Nasional.
Is Pakatan Harapan on a hara kiri mission to be a one-term government, betraying their supporters who voted for change?
It is astounding that we have allowed a foreign preacher, a wanted man in his own country, unwanted in countries that had once welcomed him, and banned from entering many other countries, to create such havoc here.
This is the man who called on Umno and PAS to work together to prevent the “enemies of Islam” (a favourite phrase of his) from gaining influence.
This is the man who said it is better to support a corrupt Muslim politician than a Muslim who joins hands with non-Muslims to come into power.
It defies logic that a man accused of preaching hate, instigating communal tensions, and radicalising Muslim communities could have been awarded permanent residence status and treated like a rock star by some state governments, past and present, and welcomed by the privileged and powerful.
The rakyat did not bring change on May 9 only to see more of the same.
This new government needs to listen. Not selectively, but carefully. And intelligently.
And it needs to act wisely on the very grave and fundamental issues confronting us as we rebuild this nation to be an inclusive and just society for all.
If we cannot depend on the political leaders to listen and in so doing, generate a constructive national dialogue on many of these issues, the rakyat will once again need to step up and make the case for reform and build public support and pressure to move forward.
Look at the current debate on poverty. It is disappointing to say the least that the Minister for Economic Affairs has responded to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in the same predictable way that a Barisan Nasional minister would have reacted.
He has dismissed the report out of hand, instead of taking this opportunity to recognise that yes, the government’s decades-old national poverty line income of RM980 per household per month is ludicrously low to be used as a benchmark in 2019. You don’t need to be an economist to figure out that an urban family of four cannot survive on RM8 per person per day. You just need to be poor and hungry.
While the minister believes that RM980 is adequate for a family in peninsular Malaysia to “live healthily and actively”, Bank Negara calls for a “living wage” in Kuala Lumpur of RM2,700 for a single adult, RM4,500 for a couple without a child, and RM6,500 for a couple with two children.
In introducing the “living wage” concept, Bank Negara stated that as Malaysia moves into a high-income category, it must begin to introduce a minimum acceptable standard of living where citizens are able not just to meet their basic needs, but also able to participate meaningfully in society, with the opportunity for personal and family development, and freedom from severe financial stress.
If the government does not want to listen to a foreign expert, it can start by listening to its own Central Bank. It can listen to its own Khazanah Research Institute and its call for a revision of the poverty line income and the methodology to reach consensus on what constitutes the new minimum income given the higher cost of living in Malaysia.
It also questioned the wisdom of treating the B40 as a homogenous group, lumping those in absolute poverty with those in relative poverty when different strategies and policy instruments are needed to address two different types of poverty.
This is the kind of policy discussion to build a new Malaysia that should be hitting the news pages.
I hope by now, too, the Education Minister has begun to realise why he gets himself into a hot soup every time he hits the headlines.
The rakyat are desperate for a comprehensive reform of the national education system, not dribs and drabs about the colour of school shoes, hotels opening up their swimming pools to students, or introducing khat into the Bahasa Malaysia syllabus.
We understand most of the ministers are new to governance, and some even to leadership, but they must learn fast – how to make policy, how to consult, how to listen, how to build trust and confidence, how to communicate, how to give hope and clarity of vision. If they cannot shape up, then ship out.
They must realise the sense of panic and despondency that the rakyat who voted for change feel today.
May 9 was a monumental achievement. We don’t want the leaders on whom we placed our trust to now ignore the realities on the ground.
Many of my friends have given up hope that change could ever take place. But I refuse to believe this, simply because we cannot afford to.
Many people are despondent over the outrageous High Court judgement on the Sisters in Islam case, but some of us are priming for battle at the Court of Appeal. The outpouring of support and donations to SIS, and the over 1,000 new Twitter followers gained within 48 hours show Malaysians are still invested in the change they want to see. And I still have faith in the many good women and men in the Judiciary that rule of law and constitutional supremacy will prevail over reckless efforts to turn this country into a theocratic dictatorship.
We must continue to speak out and hold this government accountable.
We must continue to mobilise and organise and build support for the change we want to see.
We were Bersih. We made May 9 happen. We can do it again.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own and do
not necessarily reflect those of

Read more at https://www.thestar.com.my/opinion/columnists/sharing-the-nation/2019/09/01/a-national-dialogue-needed#FDaZb7XFB69peSmi.99

Friday 11 May 2018

'Queen of Dragons': The inside story of Malaysia's election fixer.

Hannah Yeoh is a natural target for the online hate mob. Young, female, successful and highly visible. Since her election to the state assembly in the Malaysian state of Selangor in 2008, she has faced the usual kind of abuse on social media—insinuations about her marriage, the occasional death threat.
Last year, it metastasised. In May when university lecturer Kamarul Zaman Yusoff put a post on Facebook alleging that Yeoh’s 2014 memoir, Becoming Hannah, which includes a discussion of the role of her Christian faith in her decision to enter politics, presented a persuasive case for Christianity. The stories in it, he said, could “coax, influence and instigate” people to convert, and thus amounted to proselytising—a crime in Malaysia, where two systems of law, civil and shariah, run in parallel.
That post went viral and splintered into a massive campaign of misinformation, as other social media users – many anonymous – took the original half-truth and evolved it. Meme-style doctored quotes pasted onto her image spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, alleging that she had called for the establishment of a Christian state in Malaysia, that she was an overt supporter of Israel. They circulated quickly, in part because the medium allowed it – more than half of Malaysians use WhatsApp to share, find or discuss news, according to 2017 research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – and in part, because so many people were primed to believe it.

Yeoh is an ethnically Chinese Christian in a country where the majority of the population are Malay Muslims, and where identity politics has always been a pathway to electoral success. The allegations against her were designed to play into long-held and deeply-rooted conspiracy theories—that outsiders, Christians and the Chinese have a plan to undermine Malaysia’s religion, culture and heritage. Yeoh had unwittingly become the latest, but by no means the only, avatar for those fears.
She is also an opposition figure in a political system where a single party has jealously held onto power for more than half a century, whose supporters have shown themselves more than willing to exploit these fictions for electoral gain.
“It’s not some random citizen commenting. These are all political websites, political blogs,” she says. “We call them cyber-troopers.”
The past few years have shown how easily electorates in supposedly developed democracies can be manipulated by false narratives that confirm peoples’ prejudices and widen existing social divisions. Compared to the US or Europe, however, Malaysia is the Wild West, where independent operatives, religious extremists, special interest groups and governments all compete for attention. Deep-rooted racial and religious tensions, a quasi-autocratic administration, a moribund mainstream press and ubiquitous social media usage have made this fertile ground for sowers of misinformation.
Another election is due in May 9, in a political environment made more febrile than ever by the weakness of the prime minister, who has been embroiled in a massive, multi-billion dollar corruption scandal, and by growing religious and racial intolerance. In that mix, cyber-warfare could have a major, and damaging effect.
“I think it’s like a timebomb, to be honest,” Yeoh says. “We don’t know how extensive an impact it will have.”
The personal cost has been significant too. Yeoh has reported several websites to the police, but they have taken no action. The falsehoods continue to circulate. In December, a quote attributed to her saying: “Israel owns Jerusalem” went around on WhatsApp, an inflammatory statement at a moment when Malaysian Muslims were protesting against US president Donald Trump’s decision to move the Ameri-can embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Yeoh is worried that people reading the allegations may take matters into their own hands. In February 2017, a Christian pastor, Raymond Koh, was abducted in Malaysia, and is yet to be found. Many in the community believe that his disappearance is linked to earlier allegations that he had been proselytising to Muslims. It is a case that preys on Yeoh’s mind.
“When these lies reach the hands of extremists, it can be life-threatening for the victims,” she says. “That is my concern. That it does not just become something to talk about on social media, but it becomes life-threatening… these kinds of allegations, when they come to religion, are very sensitive. When the lies end up in the hands of people don’t know how to process those lies, that’s scary.”
The Malaysian government’s first forays into cyberwar began a decade ago, in the aftermath of a humbling election result. In 2008, opposition parties were able to sidestep the government-controlled mainstream media and get their messages directly to the electorate. The ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, which has been in power since Malaysia’s independence, lost five state assemblies and its two-thirds majority in parliament, an important threshold, as it denied the government the ability to rewrite the constitution.
“I think we saw the potential of the internet impacting peoples’ views in 2008, when the opposition really used the internet to garner support and to spread alternative news,” says Tan Meng Yoe, a lecturer in communication at Monash University in Selangor, who researches how the internet has shaped religious and political discourse in Malaysia. “I think that was when we learned the potential of spreading a lot of news very fast to the masses, for better or for worse.”
One expert, who contributed to Barisan Nasional’s election postmortem review, says that the party’s leaders concluded then that they needed a better strategy. “The leadership agreed that the major reason why they lost was that they lost the social media war,” he says. “So after that they poured a lot of money into this so-called cyber-warfare.”
At the same time, the party doubled down on its identity politics. Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, and to be Malay is to be Muslim, according to the constitution. Barisan Nasional, and its largest constituent party, the United Malays National Organisation, have maintained their position through affirmative action policies that give Malays preferential access to housing, education, government contracts, jobs, and even import licences for cars.
In the 1970s, these policies were justified on the basis that ethically Chinese communities had benefited more than Malays during British rule, and that the balance needed to be redressed. Over the decades since, Malay identity has become more tightly bound to religion, and to an increasingly conservative interpretation of it. The economic arguments for affirmative action have been gradually replaced by an ethnonationalist narrative, by which the government has positioned itself as the protector of the faith and the race.
“There is [now] this siege mentality that somehow there is an attempt by the Chinese to try to carve a larger political space, or even to carve a larger political space for Christians,” says Mohamed Nawab Osman, who heads the Malaysia program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
It was in this environment that Syarul Ema Rena Abu Samah found her calling. In 2008 she was a relatively minor blogger, albeit a politically well-connected one – her mother had been a regional communications head for the party; her husband is a former youth leader. She was tangentially involved in the party’s online strategy, and taught a few classes on how to make infographics, but as Barisan Nasional started to gear up to fight the next election, she was invited into the tent.
By 2013, she had built a network of 80 cybertroopers who ran thousands of fake social media accounts, that created and amplified falsehoods to undermine opposition to the government.
A decade on, the playbook that she developed for online misinformation is a familiar one. She and her colleagues worked to delegitimise Barisan Nasional's political opponents by fabricating supporters who would make outrageous, usually racist statements, that would drive anger against the main opposition parties.
“We would take names and pictures from [social media accounts in] Indonesia or the Philippines and make a fake account, acting like an opposition supporter. We’d come up with racist statements… then we’d print screen and spread it everywhere,” she says in an interview in her lawyer’s office in Kuala Lumpur.
If a major story broke that would damage the government, her network would create a distraction. “If an issue like [a major corruption scandal] comes up, people get angry. But you throw out an issue like: ‘this Chinese fella mocks our people’, they will focus on that.”
Sometimes they targeted specific politicians. One 2014 post that she showed to WIRED was a faked quote from Theresa Kok, an opposition member of parliament. Kok had been arrested in May of that year and charged with sedition for a YouTube video in which she allegedly made jokes about Malaysia being an unsafe place to live. Syarul Ema’s post shows Kok saying that she saw nothing wrong with offending Malays—tacitly admitting to the charges. Kok filed a police report.
During the interview Syarul Ema, an intense, round-faced 35-year-old, vacillates between contrition and barely suppressed pride at her ability to shape political narratives. “I have said sorry,” she says. “Publicly.”
Her crowning achievement came later in 2014, when she was called in to firefight during a by-election in Teluk Intan, a constituency where the racial mix, and hence the electoral algebra, was finely balanced. The ethnically Chinese population was expected to vote for the DAP, Malay voters would turn out for Barisan Nasional, so both sides looked to the Indian minority to swing the result.
Twenty-four hours before polling stations opened, a video began to circulate on WhatsApp. It began with footage of a scuffle in the street, then cut to an Indian member of Barisan Nasional giving an angry piece-to-camera, alleging that he had been assaulted by a DAP activist who had insulted his mother and religion. It was a lie, entirely masterminded by Syarul Ema.
“I gave him a script,” Syarul Ema says. “I asked him to say: ‘if you love your religion, you need to go and vote for Barisan Nasional and make sure that the DAP loses’.” The DAP lost the seat by 500 votes.
All of this was done with the tacit blessing of the government. She claims to have met with the media unit at the Prime Minister’s office; they did not respond to requests for comment. However, the government has made no secret of the fact that it encourages a huge network of cybertroopers, some of whom are on the payroll.
Syarul Ema says that she was never paid; she did it out of an ideological commitment to the party. “I was indoctrinated,” she says. “I thought I was fighting dark forces. I really thought that.”
She was kept at arm’s length, an independent consultant running her own team of volunteers who were tasked with solving problems. Her account tallies with those of others who spoke to WIRED; that they were given a basic direction by the party, but that their tactics were of their own devising. “They call it ‘Black Ops’,” she says. “Cyberwar. Propaganda.”
Syarul Ema’s defection came about because she wrote something online that she actually believed. In 2015, angered by prime minister Najib Razak’s flip-flopping on economic policy, she wrote a scree about trade policy and tax, which included the quintessentially Malay curse-word “Pukimak”—literally “mother’s pussy”. On that basis, she was sued for insulting the prime minister.
“Even Trump doesn’t sue people who criticise him,” she says. “Why am I being sued for that? Because I am telling the truth? They sued me because of one f-word. It’s unjust.”
Her house was raided, her phone was confiscated. She has now been formally charged under Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act, an open-ended piece of legislation that is routinely used to shut down opposition in Malaysia. The case is due to go to trial in the next few months.
The fake news machine has kept on moving since Syarul Ema quit. Just as in the US or Europe, where dog-whistle stories targeting migrants or Muslims have spread widely and rapidly, the narratives can look unhinged to anyone outside of the specific community that they aimed at.
Just in the last 12 months, the police have had to debunk rumours that Chinese government patrol cars were operating in Malaysia; shoppers have boycotted shoe company Bata Primavera after a false report that it was stocking shoes with ‘Allah’ written on the soles; and the owner of the local McDonald’s franchise has filed police reports against social media users wrongly claiming the company was funding Israel’s actions against Palestine.
The problem has become so wild, so well established, that the government says that it feels compelled to act. In March, they passed a bill in parliament that would outlaw fake news, making it punishable by up to 10 years in jail and 500,000 ringgit (£91,000). The law is incredibly broad, covering local and foreign publications, social media, and anyone who offers “financial assistance” to those posting or sharing news deemed to be fake.
Its first conviction, on April 30, was of a Danish citizen, Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman, who pled guilty to lying about witnessing the shooting of an alleged member of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Fadi al-Batsh, in Kuala Lumpur. He was sentenced to a month in jail.
The law was met with horror from activists and journalists, who say that the bill will simply be another way for the government to crack down on dissent and suppress embarrassing stories. Amnesty International said it was a “blatant attempt to shield the government from peaceful criticism”. Lawyers For Liberty, a local free speech NGO which is representing Syarul Ema, called it “the death knell for freedom of speech”.
Pro-government cyber-troopers already seek out dissent online, finding offence where they can. Under Najib the government has been hyper-sensitive to criticism. Dozens of people, from high profile activists and critics to individual Facebook users, have been charged with sedition, or under the Communications and Multimedia Act for things that they have posted on social media. These can be quite innocuous. In February, a 24-year-old man was fined RM4,000 (£730) by a court in Kuala Lumpur for a Facebook post mocking the prime minister’s karaoke rendition of Sha La La La by The Walkers, which he performed in duet with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, in 2016.
The point of greatest sensitivity is a massive corruption scandal, centred on a government-backed fund, One Malaysia Development Berhad, known by its acronym 1MDB. Najib and those in his inner circle have been implicated in the misappropriation of billions of dollars from the fund. Najib has denied any wrongdoing, and any deviation from his official account is punished. In August 2015, Malaysia issued an Interpol “Red Notice” seeking the arrest of the British journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown, founder of a Malaysian news site, the Sarawak Report, which covered the scandal. Interpol rejected that request.
With an election around the corner, analysts see the law as a naked attempt by the government to gain an advantage and to discredit their critics. On May 2, a week before the election, the head of the Kuala Lumpur police Mazlan Lazim announced that a fake news case had been opened against the opposition leader Mahathir Mohamad, who had claimed that a charter jet due to fly him to a campaign stop had been sabotaged.
“[The new law] will be targeted at the opposition. Not people who put out fake news in support of the government,” says James Chin, a Malaysian academic and the director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania. “Once you put in place this law, you go after all the opposition cyber-troopers. The [administration] can turn around and say: ‘look at these prosecutions. It’s clear that the people who are spreading fake news in Malaysia are the opposition’.”
The opposition does have one expert on board. In an attempt to make amends for her past work, Syarul Ema has turned whistleblower. Using her old screenname “Ratu Naga” – Queen of Dragons – she is trying to expose the tactics that she helped to popularise, calling out fakes on social media. “I believe that we can open up people’s minds so that these tactics no longer can be used,” she says. “Now, I just tell the truth only.”

Tuesday 23 January 2018

14th GE, of spoiling their vote,

Those who are thinking of not voting at the 14th GE, or of spoiling their vote, please give this a read


Someone shared this to me. Please read and share if it resonates with you.
"For months, there has been talk especially among the younger citizens about abstaining from voting in the upcoming General Elections. I've been looking at so many articles to weigh this creature called The No-Show Paradox, in order to weigh the difference in voting and abstaining as an overall knowledge-hunting exercise.
Somebody from India wrote this about not going out to vote in elections and I must share this with all as I believe what he says here is VERY IMPORTANT especially to those of us who have been living in a world without wars:
"The problem with not voting is that it promotes anti-democratic tendencies. Even though the peace and stability of our times has given us a sense of complacency, democracy is not something that you can take for granted. It might seem to be the way of the future. But if you consider our entire human history, democracy has always been an aberration. Just think about it. Every five years, the people controlling your military and judiciary and banks and what not, agree to submit themselves to a popular mandate. And even more astonishingly, they agree to step down if they lose the mandate. The whole process amazes me always. Why the hell does the guy who has the entire military at his command, agree to surrender that power and go back to an ordinary life ? Such an idea was a stuff of legends just a couple of hundred years ago. In my country - India, at least one prime minister( Indira Gandhi ) came to a conclusion for a brief while that she was above popular mandate. And I guess that the idea of popular mandate and peaceful transfer of power is still just a fantasy for more than a third of the world's population.
Bottom line - Democracy is a miracle. A miracle that our generation played no part in creating. We have no right to weaken what we didn't create. You might despair about the quality of the candidates you are getting. But it doesn't matter. Democracy doesn't guarantee that you will be ruled by the best people. It just guarantees that the struggle for power will be fought via ballots and not bullets. That in itself is a damn huge accomplishment. Ask the millions of people who have died at the hands of the Nazis and every other tin pot dictator in the world. And the guys at the top need to be reminded about this always. They need to know that the powers they have are temporary and can be taken back by the people any time. However affable and likable they might seem during campaigns, if you don't remind them of their fallibility, power will corrupt their minds and they will soon assume that they have a divine right to rule.
Elections are the mechanism we have for reminding the rulers of the supremacy of the popular will. And every vote that is not cast takes a brick away from the strength of popular mandate. An election with low voter turnout, gives dramatically less legitimacy to the elected government. Opposing interests will no longer respect the government. They don't need to. After all getting 50% vote out of a voter turnout of 40% implies that you have the support of just 20% of the country. That is not popular mandate. Opposing interests will conclude that they have a fair chance of capturing power if they incite an armed uprising. After all the rulers can count on the support of barely 20% of the population at maximum. So every time we choose not to vote, we are strengthening the hands of fringe elements who resent the idea of democracy.
I am not exaggerating. In India for example, reducing participation in parliamentary democracy is one of the main strategies of various armed insurgent groups like Naxalites and other separatists. And if and when the insurgency prone areas like Kashmir or North-east record less than 50% voter turnout, you can immediately sense the panic in the government circles. Voter turnout is not a mere statistic. It is the lifeblood of democracy.
Our vote counts. It may or may not put the candidate I like in office. I may not even like anyone. In that case, I will just hold my nose and vote for the least evil. Our political parties are just the product of the milieu we live in. As the society matures and becomes more open and progressive, we will get better candidates. But for that to happen, we need to stay on course. We need to carry the torch of democracy forward. Staying home on election day is not the way to do it. A right that is not exercised is a right that is not valued. And a right that is not valued, will most definitely be taken away.
Picture this.. Years from now, democracy is just but a distant memory. An inevitable outcome of years of low voter turnout. Your children are living in a country where change of rule is no longer done overnight after a few handshakes, but involves years of battles and thousands of corpses. Try telling them that you didn't vote because you thought that everyone was equally bad and that your vote didn't matter. They will laugh at your face and tell you that it is obvious that every politician is corrupt to some degree. You don't need to be a genius to figure it out. But what mattered was the fact that they had enough fear in them to come and ask your permission every five years and you were naive enough to let that power slip away.."

Monday 8 January 2018

Winfrey's full speech at the Golden Globe Awards.

In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: “The winner is Sidney Poitier.”
Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. I remembered his tie was white, and of course his skin was black, and I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney’s performance in “Lilies of the Field”: “Amen, amen. Amen, amen.”
In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award.

It is an honor — it is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who inspired me, who challenged me, who sustained me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson, who took a chance on me for “AM Chicago.” Quincy Jones, who saw me on that show and said to Steven Spielberg, “Yes, she is Sofia in ‘The Color Purple.'” Gayle, who’s been the definition of what a friend is, and Stedman, who’s been my rock.
I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, because we all know the press is under siege these days. But we also know it’s the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice, to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this.
What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year we became the story. But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics or workplace.
So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farmworkers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and in politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.
And there’s someone else: Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case, and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted.
Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived — too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. And for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men.
But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.
I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, because we all know the press is under siege these days. But we also know it’s the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice, to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this.
What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year we became the story. But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics or workplace.
So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farmworkers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and in politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.
And there’s someone else: Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case, and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted.
Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived — too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. And for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men.
But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.