Luke Harris on Critical Race Theory, Cindy Cohn on Pegasus Spyware

  Little Rock, 1957 This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’