The Scanner

Right now, counties across the country are less than a month away from selecting new County Mayors, County Commissioners, judges, and prosecutors. In Tennessee and other places, school board races are now partisan exercises, bringing an uncomfortable and unwelcome political dimension to a role that should be entirely focused on doing what’s best for kids.

The stakes are high. Book banning, school safety, and teacher retention are just a few of the important issues that the school board here in Hamilton County will need to confront straightaway. Third-grade reading levels, test scores, and post-secondary readiness are still far from where they should be.

If public education is now another arena for the right’s endless appetite for culture war hysterics, we need focused, compassionate, collaborative leaders like never before.

Jill Black is running in the newly created District 11, which includes neighborhoods from Lookout Mountain to Missionary Ridge, including large swaths of Alton Park, East Lake, and the Southside. She’s a social worker with a long-time interest in advocating for better schools. Ben Connor is a nonprofit executive and highly engaged public school father running in District 6, which includes parts of Red Bank, the North Shore, and North Chattanooga. Katie Perkins is a teacher running in District 8, which is predominantly East Brainerd and East Ridge.

I was grateful that they made time to talk to me about why they’re running, the issues they look forward to tackling, and their paths to winning for this special episode of The Scanner.

Learn more:
Jill Black - District 11: jillblackforschoolboard.com
Katie Perkins - District 8: katieperkinsforschoolboard.com
Ben Connor - District 6: votebenconnor.com

Cynthia Deitle is the Matthew Shepard Foundation’s Director of Civil Rights Reform. She joined the foundation, which was founded by Judy and Dennis Shepard after the murder of their son, a gay college student, in 2017 following a two-decade career at the FBI. Cynthia held a variety of positions within the bureau, in a number of different regions, investigating hate crimes, working with victims, and strengthening relationships between law enforcement agencies and their communities.

Cynthia travels the country to conduct special trainings for police departments and sheriff’s offices about how to better respond to hate crimes and support victims. She was in Chattanooga as the second speaker in our ongoing Pivot Point policy forum series, and her conversation covered a lot of topics, including the sometimes tense relationships between local agencies and the federal governments in how they work together to combat hate in our communities.

Referenced in this episode:

“10th Anniversary of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act.” The Justice Department, October 17, 2019.

"Hate Crime & Discrimination in Chattanooga: A Preliminary Assessment of Data and a Proposed Law Enforcement Response." The Mayor's Council Against Hate, February 2020.

Recently, we commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on a day that is now  known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Our guest today, Devora Fish, is the executive director of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission, a state agency devoted to teaching the holocaust to children across the state and ensuring that it’s lessons are not lost to history, particularly as we lose more and more survivors every year.

Devora talked about the links between the lessons of the Holocaust, the current debate in the United States about confederate statuary, and how these topics are being shared with our children -- and what happens when they’re not shared with our children.

Support the work of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission at their website, TNHoloCom.org.

Becky Monroe is a lawyer, a researcher, and an advocate for communities that have been victimized by hate crimes and discrimination. Currently, she is the Director of the Divided Community Project at the Ohio State University Moritz School of Law, where she offers free consulting to cities that are grappling with bias-motivated conflict and violence. She comes to this role after serving as Counsel and as Interim Director of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, as a Senior Policy Advisor to the White House Domestic Policy Council, and – most recently – as the Director of the Stop Hate Project at the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Becky was in Chattanooga to keynote the first of our PIVOT POINT forums, which are working to build stronger policy responses to hate in communities like ours, and we’re very grateful for the time she gave us. On the website for her current project it says: “By divided community, we mean a community with conflicts that could potentially polarize its residents, such that people stop listening, tensions simmer, and, in regrettable instances, some “final straw” incident triggers civil unrest and disorder. No nation, including our own, can escape such tests.”

Our conversation looks at some of the places where those tests are taking place in America right now -- and what we can all do to make sure we come through them stronger and safer.

Referenced in this episode:

"Hate Crime & Discrimination in Chattanooga: A Preliminary Assessment of Data and a Proposed Community Response." The Mayor's Council Against Hate, January 2020.

Christian Picciolini is an author and an activist who has devoted the last couple of decades to helping people free themselves from the white power movement in America. He comes to this work with tremendous credibility, as he himself was a radicalized member and recruiter for some of the most violent neo-nazi groups in the country for years. His story is fascinating and provides something of a blueprint for understanding how radicalization occurs among young people and how they can be turned away from hate.

Christian’s work has made him one of the most prominent voices on this subject right now, and he’s bringing his message to larger and larger audiences all the time, most recently through a documentary series on MSNBC called "Breaking Hate." We were honored to have him join us as the guest speaker at a recent public meeting of the Council Against Hate. While he was in Chattanooga, he was also interviewed by Council Against Hate co-chair Alison Lebovitz for her show on WTCI, "The A List."  Special thanks to Alison and Emily Compton for their support and assistance, and to our friend Allison Padilla-Goodman at the ADL for connecting us to Christian and his organization, Free Radicals Project.

Referenced in this episode:

“My descent into America's neo-Nazi movement & how I got out.” TEDxMileHigh, December 20, 2017.

“Christian Picciolini shares his story of emerging from white supremacy and how Chattanooga can fight hate.” Chattanooga Times Free Press, November 12, 2019.

“The A List with Alison Lebovitz, Episode 1107 with Christian Picciolini.” WTCI-TV, January 16, 2020.

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian is an expert on China, specifically Chinese politics and how China’s position in the world is changing. Right now, she is the China reporter for Axios and previously has written about the country for Foreign Policy Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others.

Over the course of 2019, Bethany was the lead reporter on one of the year’s most significant pieces of investigative journalism, which focused on the appalling treatment of Uyghur Muslims  by the Chinese government. This project, which came to be known as the “China Cables,” exposed a widespread system of really disturbing persecution against this religious minority, which is occurring at the exact moment that the White House and a number of American companies are trying to figure out if and how they can responsibly and ethically engage with this rising super power.

Referenced in this episode:

“An American Reporter Was Denied A Visa To China. She Said It’s Because She Criticized The Communist Party.” Buzzfeed, June 19, 2019.

“Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest By Algorthim.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, November 24, 2019.

“‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims.” New York Times, November 16, 2019.

“U.S. commission says China may be guilty of "crimes against humanity’.” Axios, January 8, 2020.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in the early 1970s as a nonprofit legal center working to expose and combat the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations in Alabama and across the Deep South. Since then, it has grown into one of the nation’s pre-eminent social justice organizations, working around the country on legal, educational, and advocacy strategies to combat racism and racial violence. The SPLC was most recently in the press for partnering with the New York Times and other media outlets on the release of a cache of controversial emails from Stephen Miller, who is now the White House’s top policy advisor on immigration issues.

For the last two decades Heidi Beirich has led the SPLC’s “Intelligence Report,” one of its most well-known and, at times, controversial undertakings, which seeks to track the evolution and movement of hate groups across the country. Charitable organizations, law enforcement agencies, and policy makers at all levels utilize the Intelligence Report to better understand hate in America. Heidi spoke to us about this aspect of their work, how she sees hate changing in America, and what role she feels the SPLC should be playing moving forward.

Referenced in this episode:

“Southern Poverty Law Center Loses Intel-Gathering Boss.” The Daily Beast, October 28, 2019.

“Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world.” Vox.com, November 18, 2019.

“A Racist Book’s Malign and Lingering Influence.” The New York Times, November 22, 2019.

The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition -- or TIRRC -- was founded in 2003, but over the last several years have become one of the most important political and policy organizations in the south. The White House’s frequent and often jarring changes to federal policies about immigration and refugee resettlement have put TIRRC at the center of a lot of conversations about what the impact of these policies looks like at the local level. Right now, TIRRC is celebrating the groundbreaking of a new headquarters facility in the Antioch community of Nashville, but they are active in cities and towns across Tennessee and some neighboring states, and it’s clear that they intend to have an even stronger voice in defending the rights and needs of new Americans in the years ahead.

We spoke to the Judith Clerjeune, TIRRC’s policy director, about some of the many battles that TIRRC is engaged in right now, what she thinks the future holds for the south’s refugee population, and what each of us can do to help.

Referenced in this episode:

“Nashvillians of the Year: Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.” Nashville Scene, December 5, 2019.

“Tennessee's refugee resettlement lawsuit dealt major setback, leaving U.S. Supreme Court as final option.” The Tennessean, October 16, 2019.

“'TIRRC is here to stay', new headquarters opening in Antioch.” The Tennessean, December 8, 2019.

This episode is a live recording of a panel discussion that the Council Against Hate produced as part of Chattanooga’s annual Startup Week. Every year in early October, Startup Week pulls hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors and creators together for dozens and dozens of events all over downtown Chattanooga. Startup Week is presented by The Company Lab, better known as CO.LAB. The Council Against Hate got involved for the first year with this panel, which is all about how to combat hate in the startup world, particularly from the standpoint of an entrepreneur or CEO.

The moderator for this panel is Susan Harris, who is the CEO of See Rock City, Inc. She was joined at the Palace Theatre by a great group of panelists:

Aaron Lincove, who is the Vice President of HR for KenCo Group
L'Erin Chidester, the General Manager of The Dwell Hotel
Ronald Harris, the Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

This episode is a really practical and insightful how-to guide for people in the private sector can build safe, welcoming, fun places for their workers. The way our panelists engage with these issues is uncomfortable at times but always honest and always constructive.

If you want to get more involved with the Council Against Hate’s Business Action Team or any of our action teams, you can join at any time cha.city/againsthate,

Deborah Levine is Editor-in-Chief of the American Diversity Report, an award-winning author of 14 books, and was recently named a “Diversity and Inclusion Trailblazer” by Forbes Magazine.  She writes a regular column for the Chattanooga Times Free Press about issues of diversity and social justice, and she is the founder of the DuPage /Chicago Interfaith Resource Network and the Southeast Women’s Council on Diversity. We’re very proud that she’s also a founding steering committee member of the Mayor’s Council Against Hate.

Deborah’s latest book, which she wrote with Marc Brenman, is called “When Hate Groups March Down Main Street.” Every single page of this book is teeming with ideas and suggestions and strategies that people in cities and towns all over American can use to combat hate and violent extremism at the local level. The book is clearly inspired by the terrible events in Charlottesville that took place in 2017, but as Deborah and Marc make clear, there is plenty to be concerned about in cities of all sizes, everywhere in the country right now, but also plenty of reasons to be hopeful. Their book is a resource manual that’s meant to be put into action by people who want to reclaim a sense of safety and civility in our country right now and its release could not be more timely.

Referenced in this episode:

"When Hate Groups March Down Main Street: Engaging A Community Response." Rowman & Littlefield.
"When Hate Comes to Your Town," by David Grinberg. Democracy Guardian, November 7, 2019.
Council Against Hate + Mainx24: "When Hate Groups March Down Main Street" release party, December 7, 2019.