"The sculptures were meant to be provocative: 'Miss Mao' shows Mao as a topless woman with distorted, babyish features..."

"... while 'the execution of Christ' depicted a firing squad of life-size Mao statues aiming rifles at Jesus. But Gao denies they were defamatory.... Gao is accused of breaking a law that wasn’t even enacted until nearly a decade after these artworks were first exhibited. In 2018, China criminalized acts that 'distort, smear, desecrate' or otherwise 'damage the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs.'... Gao, who is a Christian, maintains that his artwork was not intended to defame Mao but rather to explore, through cartoonish depictions of a symbolic figure, the concepts of original sin and repentance.... For [his wife] Zhao, who was not married to Gao when he made the statues, it makes no sense for authorities to claim her leaving with her child would 'endanger state security,' as officials claimed...."

From "Seven-year-old New Yorker stuck in China over father’s political art/Gao Jia, the American-born son of a well-known Chinese dissident artist, has missed first grade because his parents have been stopped from leaving China" (WaPo).

What is FAIR?

Because I follow the Twitter feed of the erstwhile NYT columnist Bari Weiss, I noticed that there's a new group that calls itself FAIR — The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Here's their video:

 

That's on such a high level of abstraction that it hard to understand what's really going on there. The assumption is that you'll recognize at least some of the names/faces and trust their authority. They seem to be banding together as a correction to the excesses of social-justice activists. But what exactly? Are we to trust them as experts, with details to come later?

I found their website, here, and the front page has that video embedded next to the words "What is FAIR?" So I'm stuck in a loop. "What is FAIR?" is the question I had after watching the video. So I watched it again. As far as I can tell, based on the words spoken, it is a forthright demand for the old-fashioned color-blindness approach to racial justice: There is "one race, the human race."

Given the famous names who've joined together — Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Bari Weiss, etc. — I would expect news coverage of this organization, which seems to have been announced yesterday. But when I did a Google News search, only one thing came up, a NY Post item titled "Booksellers were unprepared for Dr. Seuss ban as sales skyrocket." 

That's not an article about FAIR, just a reference to it at the end of an article about the Seuss crisis:

A Web site has sprung up called BannedSeuss run by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism that says: “Erasing books is insanity. Stand up for our common humanity.”

Here's the BannedSeuss website.  Ah! It has the full text and pictures of "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (a book, that, I think, is cancelled because of the line "A Chinese man who eats with sticks" and the picture of a man whose eyes are represented by short angled lines when everyone else in the book has eyes represented by dots). 

Back to the NY Post: