Trump’s America: Bully Nation.

Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).

Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).

An ad from progressive group Move On shows how around the country, nonwhite and Muslim students are getting bullied by racist whites who’ve been emboldened by the unvarnished racism of the Donald Trump campaign.

Titled “Our Kids,” the video shows excerpts from news stories in which black, Muslim and Latino schoolchildren across the U.S. have been threatened and harassed by their white peers.

In Oregon, vandals hung a banner aimed at Latino students that said “Build a wall” — a reference to Trump’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep Latino immigrants out of the country.

At a high school basketball game in Chicago, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at black and Latino players and their supporters.

As the 75-second video moves from incident to incident, an ugly picture emerges of what’s motivating Trump voters, no matter what the candidate and his TV surrogates say about “economic anxiety” and “outsider politics.”

“Donald Trump is endangering our kids,” the ad says, before cutting to footage of students describing their experiences.

This country is caught in a whirlpool of shit. This hatred has to stop. Please, share this, get this out everywhere, it’s an important message for all.

Via Raw Story.

Council for National Policy.

Stephen Bannon.

Stephen Bannon.

If you’re like me, you went “who?” Yet another nasty group of people, who revel in extremism, and one I had not heard of before. As it turns out, two Trump henchpersons have not only heard of it, they are part of it. How surprising, right?

According to an SPLC statement, Breitbart.com CEO Stephen Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway — hired as Trump 2016’s CEO and campaign manager, respectively — are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a highly secretive group that includes a roster of controversial white supremacists and rightwing agitators.

“The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called ‘culture wars,’ along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included,” wrote SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok.

The SPLC was able to obtain the CNP’s closely-guarded 2014 membership directory and found that it included “people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama ‘birther’ and the propagandist hit man responsible for the ‘Swift boating’ of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.”

Conway and Bannon’s names both appear on the CNP’s 2014 membership roster. The SPLC was unable to determine their current membership status.

The Center noted that the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret, but the membership roster opens a window on how purportedly moderate Republicans meet and network with right-wing extremists in formulating their policy agenda and crafting legislation.

The CNP roster of members includes “real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law,” the SPLC said.

Well. That’s terrifying. These are the people the so-called not completely batshit repubs are networking with, and we are now living in interesting times, with the rise of white nationalism and open bigotry. I think I could have lived without this particular knowledge, but it’s best to as knowledgeable as possible these days.

Via Raw Story.

Oh, Canada, For Effing Shame.

Jennifer Dorner posted this image after dropping her kids off on the first day of school in Montreal. (Courtesy Jennifer Dorner/Facebook).

Jennifer Dorner posted this image after dropping her kids off on the first day of school in Montreal. (Courtesy Jennifer Dorner/Facebook).

A picture posted by mother Jennifer Dorner has started yet another conversation about why not to wear costume headdresses. She took the image while dropping her children off for their first day of school at Montreal’s École Lajoie on Monday, August 29. The image shows a Grade 3 teacher in a headdress in front of the children, and according to Dorner, smaller headdresses were being handed out for the children to wear.

Sarah Dorner, Zoe’s mother, told thestar.com that her daughter refused to wear the headdress.

“We have been teaching our children that costumes like that are inappropriate,” Dorner also said. “The other kids in the class were all wearing them.”

“A lot of children aren’t necessarily taught cultural sensitivity or have much awareness about indigenous cultures,” she went on to say. “But in our family we have many indigenous friends, so it’s a conversation we’ve had many times.”

Gina Guillemette, a Margeurite-Bourgeoys school board spokesperson, told news outlets that the two teachers seen sporting headdresses have backgrounds in anthropology and history and are introducing indigenous history into the curriculum. Guillemette also told CBC News the headdresses worn by teachers were a way for the kids to know which “family, or class, to go to.”

Guillemette told the Gazette that “the teachers decided to wear hats to symbolize that they were Native chiefs,” to separate their students from another Grade 3 class.

Right. So naturally, you could not be bothered, as educators, to thoughtfully choose a particular tribe, maybe one in your actual part of the world, find out what their traditional regalia might be, and actually ask members of that tribe if it would be okay to dress in a certain item. Oh, that would be bringing Indians into things, and I guess you can’t have that in a school, it might poison young minds with the truth or something. As Adrienne Keene wrote on Native Appropriations, this is not a lightweight matter:

Adrienne K of Native Appropriations writes that a non-Indian casually wearing an Indian headdress “furthers the stereotype that Native peoples are one monolithic culture, when in fact there are 500+ distinct tribes with their own cultures. It also places Native people in the historic past, as something that cannot exist in modern society. We don’t walk around in ceremonial attire everyday, but we still exist and are still Native.” She also draws attention to the deep spiritual significance of a headdress and maintains that when a non-Indian wears one “it’s just like wearing blackface.”

Getting back to the teachers at  École Lajoie, they seem to not only miss the point, they are determined to miss the point:

“No offence was intended—if any parents were offended, we apologize,” Guillemette told the Gazette. “We didn’t want to offend anyone. It was the opposite; we wanted to sensitize the students to the contributions of native communities.”

Oh For Fuck’s Sake! What about the children you offended, do they not count? And there’s that magical if – if you were offended, words of the classic notpology. You sensitize students to the contributions of native communities by appropriating a headdress unique to specific tribes, and mashing up all tribal cultures into one messy clump? You sure as hell don’t sound like educators to me, you sound like flaming assholes who live to perpetuate stereotypes.

“How can they possibly be teaching an authentic understanding of indigenous culture? Dorner asked thestar.com. “It doesn’t help their cause to say that. If anything, it makes it even more distressing.”

This isn’t the first time Dorner has addressed cultural sensitivity with the school either. In 2014, “they were doing a play where Santa goes to Africa and gets Ebola and gets sick and the local tribes are dancing around him and my daughter was going to be in blackface,” she told the Gazette.

“We managed to convince the school not to do blackface at the time, but they still kept the story line. Santa ends up being saved by scientists who come from the North Pole.”

She met with the school multiple times in 2014, according to the Gazette to discuss “cultural appropriation and this kind of insensitivity and was hoping that we had come to some kind of understanding, but apparently not. Which is why I’m particularly upset this time. The message doesn’t seem to be sinking in.”

Canadians, please, wake the fuck up. This school, and its staff, should be shamed into the ground by a whole lot of very angry people. Apparently, the open bigotry at this school strikes too many people as just fine, and that is seriously fucked up.

Full story at ICTMN.

Bigot, Bigot, Bigot, Racism!

Former Missouri GOP head Ed Martin with Phyllis Schlafly (Facebook.com).

Former Missouri GOP head Ed Martin with Phyllis Schlafly (Facebook.com).

Holy moly, the bigotry just keeps piling up and up and up and up. There’s just no end to it all. First up, Ed Martin, who is a Tea Party person, who was assuring people at a rally that no, they weren’t bigots, and that’s it’s not racist in the least to hate Mexican people. Or Muslims. Or the whole variety of brown people.

Riverfront Times writer Danny Wicentowski attended the rally, which he described as a scene where “some 200 patriots who really, really hate Hillary Clinton listened to a succession of speeches delivered by a string of local conservative luminaries who also really, really hate Hillary Clinton.”

Before featured speaker Jim Hoft — also known as conservative blogger The Gateway Pundit aka “The Stupidest Man on the Internet” — took to the stage, former Missouri Republican Party director Ed Martin reassured the crowd that they’re not racist for hating Mexicans.

“Donald Trump is for Americans first,” Martin said of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. “He’s for us first. It is not selfish to support, or to be for, your neighbor, as opposed to someone from another nation. And Mexico, Mexicans, that’s not a race. You’re not racist if you don’t like Mexicans. They’re from a nation.”

:Momentarily typeless: Wow. I don’t even want to know what he thinks about us Indians, because we’re nations too. I imagine in our case, he thinks differently about all that nation stuff.

He applied the same logic to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants.

“If you don’t think Muslims are vetted enough because they blow things up, that’s not racist,” Martin said. “There’s white Muslims, black Muslims, green Muslims. This is not racism.”

Um. There are green Muslims? Where? There’s also this issue of Muslims in general “blowing things up”. There have been a lot of white men prone to “blowing things up” too, so are they going to be uber-vetted also?

On Monday, Martin released a statement to the St. Louis Dispatch newspaper attempting to walk back the racist remarks, saying that by “Mexicans” he actually meant “illegal immigrants.”

Honestly, it should be an automatic indictment of these people, that they have walk back just about every comment, because they can’t manage to think before they speak.

Next up, why it’s LePage again, and his feelings are hurt, yes they are!

Per Politico, LePage told reporters in Maine on Wednesday that he was deeply wounded when he heard a report that he’d been called a racist by Maine lawmaker Drew Gattine. Even though the report turned out to be false, LePage called Gattine and left a threatening voicemail last week where he called him a “c*cksucker” and a “son of a b*itch.”

But really, it’s LePage who is the victim here.

“I may not supposed to be that sensitive to these things, but I am,” LePage confessed. “I lose sleep over this, and it’s frustrating when you hear people talk about cheap political stunts to hurt their opponent and not do the right thing. Being called a racist was a horrible thing for me. It was enormously hurtful. It hurt my family.”

LePage then declared that he would never talk to the news media ever again as punishment for hurting his feelings.

“I will no longer speak to the press ever again after today,” LePage said. “And I’m serious. Everything will be put in writing. I am tired of being caught — the gotcha moments.”

I…I…uh, oh man. Here’s a thought, Mr. LePage, shut the fuck up. That would be best for everyone.

Rounding out the racism report, the NFL.

Professional football players who commit violent crimes almost always get a second chance in the NFL, provided that they can still play well.

However, it seems that many NFL executives are drawing a line against signing a player who doesn’t stand during the national anthem.

Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman has talked with several NFL execs who said they wanted no part of having Colin Kaepernick on their teams, even though the athletic quarterback could still help a team in need of a player at the game’s most important position.

“I don’t want him anywhere near my team,” one front office exec told Freeman. “He’s a traitor.”

“He has no respect for our country,” said another. “F*ck that guy.”

“In my career, I have never seen a guy so hated by front office guys as Kaepernick,” said an NFL general manager.

Golly, and here I thought they were all about the money. Let’s see:

Defensive end Greg Hardy viciously assaulted his former girlfriend and left her covered in bruises. Despite this, he was welcomed with open arms by the Dallas Cowboys after serving his suspension.

Former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocked out his wife Janay Palmer in an elevator in 2014, and his team still publicly praised him as a man of great character. In fact, the team even posted an article written by a Ravens PR bigwig that was titled “I Like Ray Rice.” The team only released Rice once video of the incident came to light.

Quarterback Michael Vick ran a brutal dog-fighting operation in which pitbulls were tortured and killed. He was nonetheless scooped up by the Philadelphia Eagles right after he finished serving his prison sentence.

Minnesota Vikings running back was indicted for whipping his four-year-old son with a tree branch, leaving his legs covered in slash wounds. Nonetheless, he was welcomed back as a hero the year after he served his suspension.

Wide receiver Donte Stallworth killed a pedestrian while driving under the influence of alcohol — that didn’t stop the Baltimore Ravens, Washington Redskins or New England Patriots from signing him after he served his time.

But Colin Kaepernick isn’t good enough to spit on. Interesting, ennit? The NFL has finally decided to get all moral and righteous, right up until another player does something terrible, then they’ll be back to supporting criminals again, I’m sure.

Dakota Access: Indigenous Round Up.

DAP

As the number of water protectors continues to burgeon on the banks of the Cannonball River in protest of the Dakota Access oil pipeline’s route across Standing Rock Sioux ancestral, treaty-protected lands, national media outlets are starting to pick up the story.

Both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have run pieces, and The New York Times published an op-ed by Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman David Archambault II, as well as a detailed explanation of the issues. But Democracy Now! has been out in front with in-depth reports on more than one night. Last week we brought you the independent news show’s initial report.

Anchor Amy Goodman has since interviewed both Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault II and Ojibwe activist, journalist, author and sometime vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke. Both reports aired last week, as support from Indian nations and people continued to grow to several thousand.

Watch Archambault and LaDuke below, and read the stories at Democracy Now!, including an August 30 report on the Black Lives Matter movement’s visit to the spirit camps..

Full Story.

[Read more…]

#VeteransForKaepernick.

Colin Kaepernick.

Colin Kaepernick.

Finally, people have spoken up for Colin Kaepernick’s sit down in an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing murders of brown people, and those people are veterans.

In the days since San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem as a way to protest the oppression of people of color in the United States, journalists, fans, and NFL players both past and present have expressed their outrage.

Most of their criticism focuses in on the disrespect that Kaepernick was supposedly showing the flag and the U.S. military members who have fought and died for our freedom.

Well, on Tuesday, veterans from all over the country took to social media, not to attack Kaepernick for his actions, but rather to show their support. The #VeteransForKaepernick hashtag took off and ended up trending worldwide.

And others pointed out that black veterans are not immune from being shot by police once they return to civilian life. Just last September, India Kager, a 28-year-old navy veteran, was shot and killed by police in her parked car while her four-month-old son was in the backseat.

My thanks to all the veterans who stood up and put those nasty bigots in their place. Full story and more tweets at Think Progress.

LePage: The Apology.

CREDIT: AP/MICHAEL DYWER.

CREDIT: AP/MICHAEL DYWER.

You didn’t think I was serious, did you? Okay, well LePage sorta kinda apologized, except not really. He’s sorry he made noises about stepping down.

All of this morning’s headlines focused on Maine Gov. Paul LePage apparently apologizing for an angry voice mail he left a state lawmaker, suggesting during a radio interview that he might even resign.

By the end of the day, the headlines were about LePage taking back the idea of quitting.

Lost in the political intrigue is that LePage didn’t apologize for using a gay slur. (He repeatedly called Rep. Drew Gattine a “cocksucker.”) He’s instead apologizing for losing his temper. LePage said he nearly couldn’t breathe after a reporter told him Gattine had said the governor is racist.

LePage also certainly isn’t apologizing for endorsing racial profiling. In a news conference Friday after LePage got caught leaving that short-of-breath, furious voice mail, the governor defended himself by saying “people of color” are “the enemy.”

[…]

LePage is aware that what he’s saying is considered racist, though he’s equally certain he’s not racist.

“Now they’re saying, ‘Well, you can’t do this,’ every day they’re saying, ‘You can’t do it because of the racially charged atmosphere in our country,’” he said. “But the same token is all lives matter. That’s the bottom line: All lives matter. And the majority of people dying are Mainers.”

Yes, yes, dying at the hands of those awful brown people from out of state. This, when he openly admits all the meth in Maine is being manufactured and dealt by white Mainers. But it’s the brown people’s fault, and no, he’s not racist, not one whit.

The governor issued a much less apologetic statement before his radio interview. In it, LePage acknowledged he’d purposely called Gattine “the worst word I could think of.” He didn’t apologize to LGBT people. He didn’t take back the proposal to racially profile people entering Maine.

“I make no apology for trying to end the drug epidemic that is ravaging our state,” he said. “Legislators like Gattine would rather be politically correct and protect ruthless drug dealers than work with me to stop this crisis that is killing five Mainers a week.”

The worst word you could think of was cocksucker? Really? Wow. I get the feeling LePage doesn’t think much of women, either. As for your crisis of five Mainers a week dying, perhaps you need to focus on more social programs which could help people when it comes to drugs. Are you working to make sure people have clean needles? Do you have needle drop off stations? Free clinics with counseling? Low cost rehab? Anything? Because just being a racist twit who wants an excuse to go homicidal on brown people is not going to help your problem, Gov.

The Advocate has the full story.

ICANN vs .GAY

Shutterstock.

Shutterstock.

The World Wide Web will soon be responsible for more than 10 percent or even 15 percent of gross domestic product in G20 countries, yet gay people continue to be denied opportunity to fully participate in its operation. Despite clear plans and global support to create community benefit from the new .GAY namespace, the top brass of the internet continue to deny LGBTQIA efforts to operate it. What does this say about equality of opportunity and nondiscrimination for the gay community when it comes to operations of the world’s most important means of communication and enterprise?

Years of fighting for equality and human rights have brought the LGBTQIA community together. Allies and advocates fought collectively to create organizations and policy improvements within government, institutions, and corporations so that safe spaces and equal footing could exist for employees and citizens, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Despite these advancements, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has ignored its own commitments to human rights and nondiscrimination by disadvantaging the gay community over big money interests.

ICANN is a California nonprofit organization responsible for keeping the Internet “safe, secure and interoperable.” Since 1998, it has also been responsible for contracting with those operating Internet namespaces. Some legacy namespaces include .COM and .ORG, but hundreds more have recently been released into the market such as .BANK, .YOGA, and .NYC.

Each operator is responsible for managing and developing policies for their respective namespace. With four companies applying for the .GAY namespace, ICANN has found itself in the middle of a controversy involving the transparency and fairness afforded to dotgay LLC, the only community-based applicant for .GAY competing against strict business applications.

There’s much more to this story at The Advocate, so click on over to read. Just once, it would be so nice if something could work, and work smoothly.

The Poor Get Everything Free. It’s A Disaster.

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

Wayne Allyn Root, a Donald Trump admirer who often claims to be in frequent contact with the GOP candidate has led campaign rallies for him in Nevada, said yesterday that people who receive federal benefits such as Medicaid, welfare and food stamps should lose their right to vote, as should women who use “free contraception” under the Affordable Care Act.

Root’s plan would cut a large swath of Americans from the voter rolls: Roughly one in five Americans benefit from means-tested benefit programs, while 67 percent of women with private health insurance use copay-free contraception through the Affordable Care Act (which, by the way, is paid for by insurance companies, not by the federal government).

Root told Virginia radio host Rob Schilling yesterday that much of the energy behind Trump’s campaign, as he discusses in his new book “Angry White Male,” is that the country is “evenly divided between the makers and the takers,” so “the middle class is basically paying, paying, paying and the poor get everything free, and it’s a disaster.”

One time, we needed to apply for help, because serious broke, no food, no anything. We sat in an office for over 8 hours only to see someone who wanted us drown in a swamp of red tape, when we explained that a new job was in the works, just needed help for two weeks. Much frowning, sighing, and grumbling. Then a pronouncement: if you have a job, you don’t qualify for aid. “We. have. no. food.” Frowning, sighing grumbling part II. Wanders off to talk to other people. Finally comes back with a “I really shouldn’t do this…” Okay, I can give you two food vouchers. We received paperwork for $80.00 worth of food to cover the two weeks. In return, we had to commit to 80 hours (each) of community service. Anyone who thinks poor people get anything for free needs to be most seriously smacked.

Root said that he had recently seen a map on the internet showing that if only “taxpayers” had been allowed to vote, the 2012 election would have been “a Republican sweep.”

“So if the people who payed the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories,” he said, “but you’re allowing people to vote. This explains everything! People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back. The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?”

Root quickly amended his statement to say that receiving Social Security and Medicare shouldn’t disqualify someone from voting, but “in general most of the things I just rattled off should preclude you from voting.”

We could get landslide victories by denying Christian straight white conservative men from voting, too. Hmmm.

“Social Security should not, Medicare should not, because you paid into the system,” he said. “But all the other stuff, all the other goodies, free Obama phones, free contraception, you know what, you can get them but you shouldn’t be allowed to vote, it’s a conflict of interest. Take that away, we’d win every single election in this country.”

:chokes on tea: Free contraception? On what planet? Here’s a thought – you pick up the tab for 20 years of contraception for 5 women, plus the pink tax they have paid for those 20 years. Then tell me what you think about free contraception.

Via RWW.

Colleges: the best and the worst.

college-x750_0

The Advocate has a couple of good articles up about the best and worst campuses, so if you’re pondering where you might go, give them a read. First, the best:

The nonprofit organization Campus Pride — which advocates for more inclusive college environments — recently released its Best of the Best list of LGBT-friendly campuses. The list of 30 schools included some old standbys, like Tufts and Cornell, but newcomers too. Check out the universities that are new to this esteemed ranking below, and find the full Best of the Best list here.

Second, the absolute worst:

Campus Pride usually highlights the best colleges for LGBT youth, as expensive as they may be. But for the first time today, the advocacy group is calling out the worst campuses for queer students.

“Most people are shocked when they learn that there are college campuses still today that openly discriminate against LGBTQ youth,” said Campus Pride executive director Shane Windmeyer in a statement accompanying the Shame List released today. “It is an unspoken secret in higher education, how [schools] use religion as a tool for cowardice and discrimination.”

That secret has been spoken about more openly in the past several months, as the U.S. Department of Education announced in January that it was creating a searchable database listing every U.S. college and university that requested a waiver from the LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination protections outlined in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex (including gender identity) in schools that recieve federal funds.

Click on over for the full articles. These considerations fully matter if you’re hetero, too, as a school that is accepting and open is likely to be a much more positive experience.

Shaun Tan.

Shaun Tan, photographed at the Illustration Cupboard gallery in London in June with the Fox, one of the characters from his new book

Shaun Tan, photographed at the Illustration Cupboard gallery in London in June with the Fox, one of the characters from his new book.

Shaun Tan, the latest artist to give form to these German folk stories collected in the early 19th ­century, is not one to shy away from difficult subject matter. Even so, the ferocity of the Grimms’ tales did give him pause. Take “Hansel and Gretel”, one of the first that Tan reread four years ago as he considered whether to take on the job of illustrating them.

“It’s pure nightmare fodder,” says the Australian writer, artist and film-maker. “Starvation, abandonment, abduction, cannibalism, psychological torture and subsequent oven-based revenge: sweet dreams, little ones! But it’s also my favourite tale. The leaving of stones and breadcrumbs, the house made of cake and bread and sugar — the imagery is so strange and beautiful.”

You can see why Tan, a master of beauty and strangeness in his own right, decided to go ahead. Over the course of his two-decade career, the 42-year-old from Perth has established himself as one of the world’s most important children’s authors. This status was capped in 2011 when he won the SKr5m (£450,000) Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the richest and most prestigious in the field of children’s and young-adult literature. Yet even the most cursory glance through Tan’s densely wrought, often highly political illustrated books is enough to dispel the notion that they are for children alone. Tan himself insists that he does not have a particular audience in mind as he works, preferring to think of what younger and older readers have in common than what sets them apart.

‘Harbour’, from Tan’s graphic novel ‘The Arrival’, 2006.

‘Harbour’, from Tan’s graphic novel ‘The Arrival’, 2006.

In the book that made his name, The Rabbits (1998), Tan collaborated with the novelist John Marsden to produce a fable of colonisation rich in retro-futuristic imagery and references to Australian history. His first solo project, 2000’s The Lost Thing, was a tale about a boy and a forlorn crab-machine figure that could also be read as a critique of “economic rationalism”. It would later be adapted by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann into a film that won an Oscar for best animated short in 2011. The Red Tree (2001), a powerful and ultimately hopeful meditation on childhood depression, has inspired musical and theatrical productions and even been used as a resource by professional therapists.

But it is for The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic novel focusing on the struggles of refugees to remake their lives in unfamiliar, confronting ­surroundings, that he is best known. Drawing on research into Ellis Island and mass European immigration to the US, Tan’s hand-drawn sepia frames evoke family photo albums and, at first, locate us in an early-20th-century world that we feel we know. Yet the destination country is also a place of fantastical animals, indecipherable script and flying boats, to which freshly admitted immigrants are delivered in capsules suspended from balloons. The fantasy is disorientating, capturing the texture of the migrant experience in ways that straightforward realism never could.

FT Magazine has a wonderful in-depth article and interview with Shaun Tan: How Shaun Tan transformed children’s literature. I’ll just add that I think Shaun Tan’s books are by no means limited to children, wonderful stuff.