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kevinbingham · 4 years ago

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The story of how white terrorists overthrew the US Government

Originally from here.

WOW. I knew some bits of this, but not all of it with the big picture. It is well worth the read. It’s a 2000 word essay (approximately 4 pages). ________________________________________

@michaelharriot 9:24 PM · Oct 21, 2019 ------ Thread:

A lot of white people were shocked to learn about the bombing of Tulsa from HBO's "Watchmen" while most black people are familiar with the bombing of Black Wall Street.

Even historians mention these events as isolated incidents. ------- Racial terrorism is actually normal in American history but I believe we talk about in the wrong way. These are not isolated incidents , nor are they rare.

This is the story of how a national campaign by whites terrorists overthrew the US government ------- A few weeks ago, Donald Trump tweeted that there would be a coup if he was ousted from the presidency and media outlets portrayed him as crazy. It it is NOT crazy to think that a race war is possible.

It has happened FOUR TIMES in history. ------- The first race war was the genocide of native Americans. The Civil War was the second. But I want to talk about the third one because it was actually an overthrow of the US government. ------- When we talk about racial injustice in America, we usally start with slavery and then go to the Jim Crow era. But we often forget that there was a period after the Civil War where white racists actually overthrew the government. This is not hyperbole. ------- First, we must remember that blacks were a LARGE part of Southern states right after the World War Wyipipo ((If they can call it "the War against Northern Aggression" then I can call it what I want).

Ala., Fla., Ga., & La. were more than 40% black. SC & MS were MAJORITY black ------- Because racial terrorists hadn't taken black people's right to vote SEVENTEEN black people served in Congress between 1870 and 1898.

All of these were Republicans (We'll get to what happened later). ------- In many states, including Mississippi, 90% of black eligible voters were registered to vote. Part of this was because Union troops were still in the South after the War for White Supremacy (Again, I call it what I want, you call it what you want). ------- And this "black wave" didn't just happen in Congress. It started happening on the local and state level, too. To combat this, white people enacted poll taxes, literacy tests and...

Nah, I'm just bullshitting.

They just started killing black people. ------- Now history books often mention these incidents as "riots" or "racial violence," but the FBI defines terrorism as acts "inspired by or associated with primarily US-based movements that espouse extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature" ------- In 1866 during the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, ex-Confederates, police officers and regular, store-brand white folks attacked black Republicans in New Orleans. They killed any women, kids & black person they could find.

238 people were killed, most of whom were black ------- Historians estimate the Pulaski, Tenn. KKK committed 1,300 murders during the run-up to the 1868 election.

The same year, in St. Bernard Parish, white Democrats dragged somewhere between 35 and 200 black people from their homes and killed them to prevent them from voting ------- In Opelousas, La. members of the "Knights of the White Camelia" along with white Democrats killed 200-300 black people and slaughtered 27 prisoners in the fall of 1868.

It happened all over SC. Altogether, 1500 were killed to prevent them from voting ------- One of the things you must remember is that in many of these state, the Union soldiers in charge of upholding the law were black.

Can you imagine how salty white confederates must have been to fight for white supremacy and then have negroes lording over them as a reminder? ------- Not to mention the fact that these black people were now controlling politics. Remember, in many of these states, black people were OUTVOTING these traiterous-ass white supremacists.

Some of them decided to overthrow the government. ------- In Laurens County SC, THOUSANDS of white KKK sympathizers attacked black freedman after the white people's plan to stuff the ballot box failed. No one knows how many black people were killed in the resulting mass murder, but the Governor had to declare martial law in the county. ------- In NC, there was an actual 2-Year war. In the Kirk-Holden war (look it up, it's CRAZY), the army had to come in and fight the KKK.

Racist white Democrats took up arms, ARRESTED the leader of the army (Kirk), impeached NC's governor(Holden) and removed him from office. ------- Ark. had to form a militia to fight the KKK. They basically had to travel across the state fighting the Klan. But they didn't just intimidate blacks from voting, they had another plan: They just assassinated black candidates.

The Arkansas "Militia Wars" lasted almost 2 years. ------- Now, in all of these incidents, NO whites were ever charged, and white, racist Democrats managed to overthrow the will of the majority using violence and intimidation.

But none of those stories compare to what happened to the Original 33 in Georgia. ------- In 1868, a few years before Outkast had their first hit, the citizens of Georgia elected 30 black state representatives and 3 black senators to the state legislature.

24 were ministers. Y'all know white folks weren't having this: ------- First, they expelled 26 representatives.

Then they removed the 3 senators.

10 days later, they removed the final "mulatto" representatives from offices.

Then they started killing them. One-quarter of those black elected officials were jailed, beaten or shot. ------- Then, the Ga. Supreme Court ruled that the elected officials had no right to hold office because their veins held" African or blood."

So the representatives decided to go on a protest march to attend a Republican convention. ------- Now this wasn't just legislators, it was supporters too. You see, a lot of these men had been enslaved, so imagine how proud those black people must have been to see these brave men fighting for their rights.

Of course, the white people were incensed! ------- Knowing this, the black people brought their guns. Of course, during this time, this was perfectly normal... Kinda.

ONE reason these men were elected into office was that, after the Great "Can-I-Keep-My-Slave" War (I call it what I want, dammit!) there was an unspoken rule: ------- Knowing this, the black people brought their guns. Of course, during this time, this was perfectly normal... Kinda.

ONE reason these men were elected into office was that, after the Great "Can-I-Keep-My-Slave" War (I call it what I want, dammit!) there was an unspoken rule: ------- So, to combat this, one of those state senators reportedly had FOUR HUNDRED armed guards with him. I guess he figured that they couldn't ask each one individually but we know the whites don't play by the rules. ------- Remember, these people were walking 25 miles to a POLITICAL rally, when they encountered a white "citizens committee."

Now, if you're white, that might not sound scary, but trust me, black people know that ANY white person who refer to themselves as a "citizen" is up to no good. ------- So the citizens committee told the black people to hand over their guns, which the black crowd refused. The white Democrats were like: "aight, we tried," and let them past.

The black people thought: "Damn, that was too easy. If I know white folks, they are up to something." ------- Of course they were.

A little further down the road, in all-white town of Camilla, the sheriff had deputized damn near all of the white "citizens" and handed out guns.

When the black legislators and marchers came through, they massacred them ------- But they didn't just stop there. For WEEKS white Democrats roamed the Georgia countryside beating, murdering, lynching and killing any black person who even looked like they might vote. ------- Some of y'all know this, and some of y'all don't but in the entire history of America, this was the ONLY non-wartime incident that the President of the United States suspended the constitutional right to Habeas Corpus (the right to be detained without being charged with a crime) ------- That's right. A white supremacist army is the only army that ever defeated the US army.

In 1874 the FIVE THOUSAND members of the Democratic "White League" literally overthrew the Republican Lousiana Governor in the Battle of Liberty Place. ------- In Colfax, La., the same year, the White League killed 150 black people and assasinated Republican candidates

The same thing happened that year in Coushactta, La.

So why do I say the KKK won?

Is it a bit extreme to say they "overthrew the government?" -------- Well, not only did these terrorists use violence to oust democratically elected candidates from office but they changed the course of history.

In the 1876 election, racist Democrats cheated so bad that the Electoral College was basically disbanded. ------- For instance, SC stuffed the ballot box xo bad that 101 percent of eligible voters were represented. In Fla and Georgia, they just created their own ballots. Some of the Southern states just REFUSED to give Republicans their electoral votes, regardless of the results. ------- Instead, Congress decided to let a 15-member group go into a back room and decide what to do (It's a little more complicated than this, but not really. They LITERALLY let some white men decide who would be president because of this racial terrorism) ------- And Rutherford B Hayes was declared the winner 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184

And to make up for a Republican president, Congress and Hayes agreed to do 5 things:

1. Put a Democrat in the cabinet (Hayes did it.) 2. Remove the troops from the South (Hayes did it) -------

3. Build a transcontinental railroad through the south (It never happened) 4. Help build the south from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy (Congress didn't do it)

But the fifth item is why I say the racist terrorists overthrew the government and beat won ------- The South wanted the Congress and the president to assure them that they would not interfere in how Southern states treated its black citizens.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Jim Crow. ------- Now, this kind of racial violence would go on for nearly a century without federal intervention, all because of "compromise" in 1876 when the racist Democrats overthrew the government.

Oh, I haven't forgotten what I said earlier. ------- You see, in 1948, Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and those Southern racists Democrats hated that. They could see that integration was coming, so they decided to form their own party: The Dixiecrats ------- By 1964, almost every Southern Democrat had switched to the Republican party. Their platform was the same as those racial terrorists from the 1860s: They believed they should be able to do whatever they wanted to black people.

Yes, the South seceded again. ------- 100 years after terrorists started their quest to overthrow the government, no Democratic presidential candidate would ever win a majority of white voters in ANY state again.

EVER. ------- So when Republicans talk about how Democrats used to be racists, they are partially correct. But I don't think of them as Democrats or Republicans, I just refer to them as "Racist Whites."

Since the beginning of this country, they have never been on the side of Democracy ------- And these incidents have nothing to do with hate. They are an orchestrated terrorist campaign to keep power. Whether its voter suppression or mass murder, they've done it before and they are still doing it.

And that, my friend, is called "white supremacy" ------- *correction: No Democratic president has won a majority of white voters in any SOUTHERN state since 1964 ------- By the way, I’m not some kind of history genius.

I didn’t know most of this information until a few months ago when phone calls with @HenryLouisGates and @AfricanaCarr sent me down this rabbit hole.

Now THEY are geniuses -------

#racism #end racism #white supremacy #southern history #black wall street #race war #racial injustice #jim crow #white terrorism #us history #micheal harriot #voter supression #kkk

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lookingattheedgeoftime · 5 years ago

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The first few chapters of my end of the world novel, written out of boredom while working in Africa many years ago. You will be the first ever to read this if you want.

The World

In 2025 Quebec declared independence from Canada after years long, systematic campaign of terrorism by the separatist movement. This “independence” was deemed unconstitutional buy the Federalists and they refuse to acknowledge Quebec's right to do so. The Federalists attempted to force Free Quebec into submission with an economic embargo and the threat of military occupation. There was a provision in law and precedence set in the 1970's to initiate war measures act. This provision would allow the federalists to occupy the province. Threats were not successful and the in 2026 Prime Minister enacted the War Measures Act and ordered the Military to take control of the government buildings in Hull. The Quebec government declared this to be an invasion of their legal territory and a civil war in Canada was initiated.

By late 2027 the civil war in Quebec is in full swing. The Federalists fighting against the Quebec government in a protracted engagement along the borders and waterways of the former province. The Free Quebec forces were entrenched and working to repel the federalists who searched the length border for weak spots and try to expedite these weaknesses. The indigenous Indian populations (The First Nations) in Quebec have extensive land claims, for a huge portion of Quebec. Particularly long the Quebec / USA borders areas the federalist forces deemed to controversial to attack from. The aboriginal community took umbrage with the French claiming the entire province for themselves. As a result of the conflict the cross border activities were brought to an end and resulted in the collapsing their economy. Historically the First Nations also had justifiable issues with significant history of rejected land claims and had little expectation this conflict would result in better treatment. They saw the victor in this conflict as a winner takes all situation and it became seen as a and time to act against current and future oppressors. They were an well-armed motivated people and engaged in a guerrilla war against both sides. Simultaneously throughout the other Canadian Provinces the First Nations took positive control of as much occupied and disputed lands as possible and blockaded their reservations from the rest of Canada. Other than in Quebec these blockades turned into an impasse rather than out and out war.

The government of the United States of America decides to tried preserve it's considerable assets in Canada and ostensibly to aid in the stabilization the situation by supporting the government of the remaining parts of Canada. This was achieved by with a strong NATO insertion mobilized from the United States. This merely escalated the situation, other provinces with unrealized Independence agendas reacted to the influx of foreign fighters and other guerrilla fronts are formed. Primary in the west the NATO forces are seen as occupiers and were engaged vigorously by the new independence militias. All sides in the conflict take a terrific amount of casualties. This process drags on, it is thought mostly due to the unwillingness of the Canadian government to commit weapons of the types that would damage infrastructure of Quebec. The Free Quebec government has no such qualms and in the areas about to be taken by their opponents were laid to waste.

Radical right in the United States of America were incensed by the NATO involvement in this war with their next door neighbours on two levels. One is that the military power of NATO is being mustered in the eastern The United States of America. They feared that once the forces have quashed the uprising in the North they will be applied to deal with the unruly and becoming more powerful militia movements in the Northern States. The second and the biggest concern is NATO is working against the government of a sovereign state and believe that the sanctity of the free The United States of America is in dire jeopardy by NATO's power.

Mid 2028 the troubles in Quebec have escalated to a peak and both troops from Canada and NATO are fighting against two resistance movements. Within the Provinces in siege, The fighting was bitter and retributions against the general population seen as supporting the resistance movements become more common place. Free Quebec and the First Nations had settled into guerrilla warfare. These two groups are also working outside the borders of Quebec independently to undermine the power of the Government of Canada in the other provinces. The methods of the citizens sympathetic to either cause are terror, sabotage and assassination. The Militia Movement in the United States of America sets up a coalition between like minded groups within the borders of the United States of America (Religious Groups, White Supremacists disgruntled military factions and politicians) and begin a concerted effort to over throw the government of the United States of America.

This starts a domino effect with the plethora of other factions wanting a piece of the pie. Some of these are very strong (African American, Hispanic and Asian Groups). They mobilize forces to control their own areas and protect their people from the Coalition of primarily white forces. Powerful Drug cartels south of the border see this turmoil in the United States as a opportunity to cement their influence in the southern States. The republic of Mexico, long subjected by US policy and a victim of systemic discrimination see this a opportunity and side with the Cartels and set their sights on reclaiming territory lost to them in the past. The slogan adopted by these forces somewhat ironically, is “Remember the Alamo” apparently seen a the event that there loss of power and territory of their nation.

2029 - The rest of Canada not in conflict with Ottawa, is failing under the burden of supplying fuel and manpower to the war in Quebec. As well as having to deal with their own significant problems with the NATO the First Nations and Militias. The result is once loyal provinces to the central government, broker other deals and decided to join the fray in opposition.

2030 - North America is in chaos, the United States of America is suffering huge strife due to the anarchy caused by the tactics of the various combatants within and outside their borders. The Militia and Ethnic groups bombings, attacks and assassinations of government and political detractors to their agendas are common place. The United States recalls it's forces abroad to face the growing crisis. Canada and NATO are still fighting in Quebec and the Western and Maritime Provinces are more than voicing separatist rhetoric, using captured weapons to enforce their ideals. The Aboriginal, French and English populations in Quebec and Ontario are greatly reduced. There is a continued huge backlash from the Native movement in Canada as well as the United States of America. Communities near reservations are attacked and looted. Extremely harsh retribution is dealt out in all cases by the governments of Canada and the United States of America. Europe and Asia cut off diplomatic ties with Canada and the United States of America because of the miss use of NATO forces and the ethnic cleansing being initiated in North America. NATO recalls what is left of the non-American contingent back to Europe and the fight is continued by the Governments Canada and the USA under the same banner.

2029 - Radical groups in the Developing Nations of the world see a golden opportunity to strike against the West. A virulent strain of the Ebola Virus currently rampaging through the poorest parts of Africa is introduced in volume to major Cities throughout the United States of America. Utilizing the returning war fighters from abroad, either infected by Martyrs or on purpose for a never ending list of other reasons. These carriers enter virtually all airports and other points of entry available in the United States, Canada and even through Mexico carefully muled across the borders. The result is huge amounts of first disease cases in North America. The aftermath is the infection and death of 50 % of the population of North America. Through the wonders of air travel and the infiltrators meant for the USA, it spreads immediately into Mexico and South America. Panic ensues in the war torn countries, foreigners not willing to leave are deported and the gift of mutated virus is given back to the rest of the civilized world.

2030 - Total Suspension of Civil Rights in Canada and the United States of America.

Similar situations are have cropped up in Europe and Asia it is a time of illness, war and rumours of war. With the largest health risk in the last several centuries being the mutated contagion most countries in the world close their borders. It is an attempt in vain to stop the spread of this plague. It is for not, throughout the world in very short time and huge portions of the population dying from the effects of the former tropical disease, not before passing it on to their families, first responders and care givers. The WHO and other such agencies are helpless to stem the tide, the need for anti-virus far outstrips the ability to produce it. The dedicated professionals succumb at the same rate as their patients. With the lack of trade the western world, the European, Middle Eastern countries and Asia are thrown into not only a health but financial crisis.

2032 - Collapse of the world economy, anarchy reigns throughout the world. Only the most remote Countries and Areas are surviving mostly by physical separation and systemic eradication of attempted refugees.

2032 - In order to protect its borders from active aggression from the surrounding countries, the now isolated Israel launches low yield nuclear attacks against its neighbours. The neighbours who had spent decades readying themselves for such and attack reply in kind. The result is the Middle East is reduced to a wasteland that will produce little but fusion glass and cancer for generations. The fallout darkens Africa, Europe and most of Asia.

2034 -The world is no longer a highly organized place. In the vast majority of World Nation's organized government are no longer in control of their populace. Pretenders to the power such as separatist movements, expansionist regimes, financial opportunists, religious zealots die just like the rest. City-states are formed around centres that had a military or other power presence. The other cities and towns decline to isolated areas with populations of roving bands, killing and looting to survive. For the first time in several centuries mankind's numbers are declining at a geometric rate.

An event that started in a huge under populated country has been the impetus of the fall of mankind. But like all good infestations the struggle to live is paramount and globally small groups form and eke out a existence. This is the story of one such individual.

Nathaniel's World

At this point in his life, like most of the people of the world, he was not living the best of times. The New World order has receded to the New World chaos. Citizens of all Nations live in isolated pockets struggling to feed their loved ones and trying to find solace in anything that explains the way it has become. They have little protection against their former leaders or organizations powerful enough to become leaders. Although the population as a whole is one-tenth the size it was ten years before. Famine and disease is still pervasive in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The only outpost of relative prosperity is Australia and they have completely isolated themselves from the world. Airlines do not fly, banks no longer exist, worldwide communication has been reduced to Morse coded messages via cable lines between the outposts of civilization. These pockets of structure and organization disappear at a constant rate.

In the now distant past the North American political system ceased to exist and the population has fended it's self. In the past Governments had enacted powers to seize weapons in an attempt to limit the possibility of a revolution or separation by the provinces or random acts of violence. The result of this is after the decline when the need for security is the greatest there was none to be had. It has left the population unable to defend themselves from the basest elements of the society. A similar policy of the seizure of private assets was enacted to fund the war with Quebec and the Aboriginal population. This generally reduced the population of rich or poor to the same level subsistence and a process of survival of the fittest is the standard.

The wars within Canada and the U.S.A. ended eventually not from a victory but because the armies had been reduced to minimum levels and there was not the material to feed them or fill their weapons. When the few fighters that remained returned to their homes they found vulnerable, impoverished, people with not enough food and little desire to continue living. As thanks for the soldiers efforts, they where stoned in the streets by good and bad alike.

Politicians fared worse, they and their families where hunted down like dogs and murdered. The fabric of society was torn, lawlessness reigned as civic control was lost.

The were exceptions to the rule, one sector of the population the was relatively unaffected by this action was the criminal element. At the onset of the decline the organized criminal fraternities initiated actions against the authorities outside of the general mayhem of the many wars that were raging. They took their place in the new world with assassinations, bombings and looting. In the beginning these occurrences where perceived by the authorities as revenge of the rank and file masses against a totalitarian regime. Retribution was dealt out mercilessly against the normal population. This was much easier than dealing with the real instigators because of their organization's strengths. This policy was ineffective for obvious reasons and after the control structure further weakened by these actions. Once these groups held the upper hand, the criminal element concentrated their activities against the people, taking what they wanted.

During this period the constructive elements in the society, the businesses, the people who had managed to continue to work did no better. They had their resources taxed to past the breaking point. The only places to continue to apply their still needed skills was to groups who could pay in food, medicines or protection.

Money, gold, property and any of the other trappings of wealth had no value at all. The criminal elements resorted to harvesting the last natural resources available and this was by the systematic looting and murder of the population. Law and order was a thing of the past and the population was at the mercy of the gangs of looters.

Other than the Criminal elements, other groups with other agendas began to form. These groups unlike the criminal ones in normal times would be considered closer to the norm. The new wealthy, the ones who once were considered paranoia preppers. Built bomb shelters, hoarded food and armaments barricaded themselves into walled continuities and protected them with mercenaries paying them from the stock piles they had hoarded. Religious groups would attempt to hunt for resources in a communal fashion, as would former political and paramilitary forces.

With controls lost in the large centres transportation of the necessities of life had long ceased. Cities with abundant sources of power such as Hydroelectric or Nuclear continued to work on automated systems. Cities that required imported fuels for power and services turned into cold dark ghost towns.

The population in large centres as well as the rural communities had been further reduced not only from disease and violence but by starvation as well. The rural communities that fortified and isolated themselves did the best. They continued to produce the necessities of life for their groups and sometimes were able to fight off the organized bands of looters.

Part one

Something evil this way comes

She could hear them coming up the front stairs, they groaned with the weight of heavy footfalls. No sooner than they had reached the top of the long flight of steps, they began to force open the entrance door. The men were laughing and calling to the two women they knew were inside the house. Defenceless women were there candies to them, they seemed to feed on the terror.

A busy night had been had by the gang, several of the houses in the once upscale cul-de-sac were burning, illuminating the predawn sky. The mother was waiting at the top of a small set of stairs that led down to the entrance landing where the door was being forced open. She was in tears as was her daughter, both of their faces showed fear and rage. From the front window of the house they had seen the marauders execute several of the remaining neighbours and now it was their turn.

The house was a four level back split design. The first level was the garage facing the street, It also contained the mechanical area, spare room and a crawl space. This was directly under the third level. A short set of stairs brought you up from the garage to the second level at the back of the house. This second level was the family room and a large bed room. The kitchen, dining and main living room area comprised the third level. The three main bedrooms occupied the fourth and final level. From the living / dining room on the third level there was a sun deck facing out over the garage. In the better days, a nice feature. On a warm summer night to sit and take in the cool air and view the mountains in the distance. Also allowing one to call down to the kids that would inevitably playing on the drive way that supper was ready. The house was the most elevated on the block and the only access from the street other than the boarded up garage door was the set of front steps. There was a landing at the top to access the main door and a once inside few more steps to take you into the main room. The only other entrance to the house was the back door off the second level. In better times the house was one of the nicer residences in the middle class subdivision. Now like the rest was a derelict, by all intentions soon to be yet another burned out husk.

The house next on the left had mostly collapsed because of a accidental fire in the early years when people first tried to made do in the depths of winter with fire as a replacement for natural gas. There was a large amount of thick undergrowth prohibiting access to the sides and rear of the house. The alley that served the back of the houses on that side of the street had been blocked by wrecks of cars and refuse for years. Like the garage door all the other entrances were boarded over as were the windows. The ones far above ground level were painted over and mostly boarded up with only a slit to look through. The only open access that was not completely sealed was the door to the balcony over the garage, this was the way they came and went with the help of a extension ladder that was carefully hidden.

It was an optimal night for the looters. A cool moonlit night. Cool was important, it was so they could see light from houses and apartments that were not well prepared. The light would be caused be the occupants were trying to warm themselves with a fire. If it was not the flickering of a cozy fire, it was the warm smoke escaping the domicile's chimney. The full moon allowed easy mobility and communication. They were not the sort that wanted to work during the day when people might put up a fight. Better to sneak up in the dead of night when people were alone and boarded up. The menacing laughter and the sounds of burning wood prevailed in the hollow night as they ransacked the houses. This evening they had concentrated the days work thus far, were the more accessible homes who's entrances were on the ground floors and showed signs of life. Although the house was in darkness and looked abandoned, it had attracted the looter's attention when the teen-aged girl had screamed in horror, at the murder of a neighbour's family. She had baby sat the children in the past, a boy and a girl. No longer toddlers, now well into their teens. Regardless, no one in their right mind could bear to see them die, Certainly not Molly. The gang of looters had dragged the family on to the street as they had done the others. So far six houses in the small neighbourhood were ravaged, the occupants life's blood draining into the gutters. Their prized possessions in a growing pile in the centre of the street. Although there was murder, looting and pillaging, strangely at this late point in the night there was no raping. Perhaps the emaciated people they were victimizing were not as desirable as the hangers on to the tribe were, perhaps the blood lust was enough.

The adults were the first , on their knees in the moon light, the mother then the father, both of their throats opened with a long filet knife. The children shrieked in terror at the sight, then the boy, finally the girl. Before the girl rolled onto the pavement another wail pierced the already chaotic night.

When they saw the mother pull the girl away from the balcony window the looter's attention shifted. The focus of their activities became the large blue house across the street.

The boarded up door flew open with their weight and four of the looters stumbled into the entrance with the momentum of the others behind them. Their expectation was to see helpless new victims to play with. However the woman held to her shoulder a Savage side by side 12 gauge shot gun. It's barrels were cut down to just below eighteen inches, the pattern the shot would print the diameter of the base of a good sized coffee tin at eight feet. That was proved by the bloom that appeared on the chest of the first man through the door. He uttered a gasp and fell back against his compatriots, he clawed at the wound in his chest as he collapsed onto the landing. This was a complete surprise to the new occupants of the entry way and to the group on the stairs. Firearms or more importantly ammunition was unheard of, the game had dramatically changed as did the looters desire to enter the house. The explosion of the shotgun in the dark confined space was deafening. In the dark of the entry way the muzzle blast was like a flash of a camera. The second barrel spewed out its projectiles at the next intruder with similar effect. This time the pellets went high on her target and several of the people in the entrance way were hit by the buckshot. This added to their confusion with the blood and tissue being sprayed about in the restricted space. The ones not incapacitated by the pellets and bone fragments wanted out of this kill box in the worst way.

The shotgun was empty, she snapped open the action of the Savage and the two spent twelve gauge shells, were ejected over her right shoulder with a pop. Instead of reloading she slid the shotgun up to the crook of her left arm and she pulled the Smith & Wesson, model 640, five shot, 357 mag pistol from the black nylon belt holster at her hip. She raised the small stainless steel revolver and fired double action into the crowd. She methodically fired with care, picking the centre mass of the dark shapes. Moonlight had turned on them, instead of a big help, it silhouetted them in the entrance way. The pistol jumped in her hand and the results of the shots and the hits were spectacular. The detonations in the confined space were phenomenally loud, the light coloured walls reflected the light of muzzle blasts. The hits by the 158 grain pistol rounds did substantial damage to the first target. But with the retained velocity and energy continued through the first man, on the next and in some cases the next man after that. The wounded and soon dead tried to claw past the still standing, trying to escape her fire but were met with resistance from the balance of their number trying to get inside inside the entrance in panic as well. Apparently they weren't having a good time waiting on the stairs outside.

At the same time the looters forced the front door the teen-aged girl walked out onto the balcony over the garage, well separated from the attacker below her she helped the looters pay for their crimes. She fired her Marlin 1894 lever action, nine shot, 357 mag rifle into the heads and backs of the men on the steps leading into the house. The combined attacks of the two women equated to a crossfire, it chewed up the looters. They fell down the stairs or over the edge of the railing like a water fall of bodies. The Mother's Smith ran out first, she grabbed the still smoking pistol with her left hand as she opened the action of the gun with her right hand. With the cylinder out, she dumped the still smoking spent cases onto the floor, by depressing the plunger several times. With her right hand she reached down to her belt and took out a SKS push / pull speed loader and dropped the new rounds into the cylinder.

With the firing from inside the door way ceasing the remaining few looters stumbled into the entrance to avoid the fusillade from the girl on the balcony. One started to ascend the first set of stairs momentarily forgetting the woman inside. She dropped the speed loader and grabbed the butt of the small revolver, snapping the cylinder in place with her right index finger. She raised the pistol and straighten her arm. She looked down the sight line and fired point blank into the head of the man climbing the stairs. The other men trying to avoid the shooting from outside were sprayed with the brains and skull fragments of their compatriot. The girl on the balcony moved back against the wall of the house and reloaded the rifle. It required both hands and a great amount of concentration to force the shells past the loading gate in the near dark conditions. She could hear the bark of her mother's Smith and the screams of the dying. As the last round exited the two and a half inch barrel of the S&W, young girl leaned over the balcony and fired a round into the top of the head of the last standing bad guy on the stairs. He fell to his knees and added his mass to the pile in front of the broken in door.

She then walked to the front of the balcony and began searching for targets on the street. Like her mother, the young girl had never shot a living thing before but had practised extensively with the firearms, dry firing them to get used of the actions. She had the training to sight the looters on the street and deal them. Her distances where set by her father and in the small circle of houses corrections for elevation were not required. Some of the hits were not lethal blows, but at least they were bad enough to incapacitate the recipients and leave them writhing on the ground in a puddle of their fluids.

Seeing the lack of new opponents, the woman reloaded her Smith and Wesson and placed it in it's holster. Then she picked up the speed loader she dropped and put them in the pouch it had originated from. She stuck her right hand into her pants pocket and pulled out two more shotgun shells and dropped them into the savage and snapped it closed with a quick motion of her left hand.

She turned and ran down the stairs to the second level to the back of the house and carefully looked through a gap between two pieces of wood that covered the window. She could see that no one had ventured into the back yard so far. This was a very good thing from her perspective defending both entrances would most likely lead to failure. As it was was guaranteed that even if they survived the night and the house was still standing, the following night a distinct reversal of this outcome was inevitable. This was scenario that they had discussed for years and now the time had come. It was with great regret that she prepared to leave her home and abandon what remained of their lives.

She pulled two of the three pack sacks that were in the family room on that level of the house, into the bedroom next to it. She knew that it would be unlikely that the third pack would make it through the night but it was the only note she could leave that might be able to tell the story that the two of them had survived.

In the corner of the bed room was a desk, she pulled it away from the wall. It was hinged and pivoted easily away from the recess, revealing a trap door. It led to a hand dug tunnel to the far side of the alley behind the house. Her husband had dug it, shovel full by shovel shoring the walls and roof as he went. It was not big enough to stand but sufficient to bring in supplies and move out of their cul-de-sac clandestinely. It had proved to be structurally sound and weather proof over the years. Designed to be the method they used to come and go when they wanted to avoid detection. Now it was their only salvation and their last hope.

The young girl chose her last target and fired into the centre of the dark shape. She could see the remaining marauders trying to get close with torches with out exposing themselves to the young girl's wrath. After the last case was ejected from the receiver she abruptly turned and walked into the house. She pulled the yellow disposable ear plugs out and even though her ears were slightly ringing she heard her mother calling her from the lower level, “Molly we are out of here”. As she walked through the living room the first torch flew onto the balcony. She reloaded the rifle as she travelled though the house. Looking around at the home she had lived in all her life.

They left through the tunnel and walked north, the supplies in their packs would last a month and they would not stop until then.

#my novel

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celestialmazer · 6 years ago

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The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class

With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

By Pankaj Mishra

Mr. Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.” SOURCE

Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler,” came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain’s rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country’s rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a “Remainer,” Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament.

Such a pattern of egotistic and destructive behavior by the British elite flabbergasts many people today. But it was already manifest seven decades ago during Britain’s rash exit from India.

Mountbatten, derided as “Master of Disaster” in British naval circles, was a representative member of a small group of upper- and middle-class British men from which the imperial masters of Asia and Africa were recruited. Abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, they were nevertheless allowed by Britain’s brute imperial power to blunder through the world — a “world of whose richness and subtlety,” as E.M. Forster wrote in “Notes on the English Character,” they could “have no conception.”

Forster blamed Britain’s political fiascos on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country’s elitist public school system. These eternal schoolboys whose “weight is out of all proportion” to their numbers are certainly overrepresented among Tories. They have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before.

From David Cameron, who recklessly gambled his country’s future on a referendum in order to isolate some whingers in his Conservative Party, to the opportunistic Boris Johnson, who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to secure the prime ministerial chair once warmed by his role model Winston Churchill, and the top-hatted, theatrically retro Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fund management company has set up an office within the European Union even as he vehemently scorns it, the British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.

Even a columnist for The Economist, an organ of the British elite, now professes dismay over “Oxford chums” who coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise.” “Britain,” the magazine belatedly lamented last month, “is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise.” In Brexit, the British “chumocracy,” the column declared, “has finally met its Waterloo.”

It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition — the British Empire’s ruinous exit strategy — has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England’s first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.

It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security checks along the British-imposed partition line.

The re-imposition of a customs and immigration regime along Britain’s only land border with the European Union was always likely to be resisted with violence. But Brexiteers, awakening late to this ominous possibility, have tried to deny it. A leaked recording revealed Mr. Johnson scorning concerns about the border as “pure millennium bug stuff.”

Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Businesspeople everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.

The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers was precisely prefigured during Britain’s exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The British government had announced that India would have independence by June 1948. In the first week of June 1947, however, Mountbatten suddenly proclaimed that the transfer of power would happen on Aug. 15, 1947 — a “ludicrously early date,” as he himself blurted out. In July, a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was entrusted with the task of drawing new boundaries of a country he had never previously visited.

Given only around five weeks to invent the political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan, Radcliffe failed to visit any villages, communities, rivers or forests along the border he planned to demarcate. Dividing agricultural hinterlands from port cities, and abruptly reducing Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the new border to a religious minority, Radcliffe delivered a plan for partition that effectively sentenced millions to death or desolation while bringing him the highest-ranked knighthood.

Up to one million people died, countless women were abducted and raped, and the world’s largest refugee population was created during the population transfers across Radcliffe’s border — an extensive carnage that exceeds all apocalyptic scenarios of Brexit.

In retrospect, Mountbatten had even less reason than Mrs. May to speed up the exit clock — and create insoluble and eternal problems. Just a few months after the botched partition, for instance, India and Pakistan were fighting a war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. None of the concerned parties were pushing for a hasty British exit. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann points out, “the rush was Mountbatten’s, and his alone.”

Mountbatten was actually less pigheaded than Winston Churchill, whose invocation stiffens the spines of many Brexiteers today. Churchill, a fanatical imperialist, worked harder than any British politician to thwart Indian independence and, as prime minister from 1940 to 1945, did much to compromise it. Seized by a racist fantasy about superior Anglo-Americans, he refused to help Indians cope with famine in 1943 on the grounds that they “breed like rabbits.”

Needless to say, such ravings issued from an ignorance about India as intractable as that of the Brexiteers about Ireland. Churchill’s own secretary of state for India claimed that his boss knew “as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.” Churchill displayed in his long career a similarly imperial insouciance toward Ireland, sending countless young Irishmen to their deaths in a catastrophic military fiasco at Gallipoli, Turkey, during World War I and unleashing brutal paramilitaries against Irish nationalists in 1920.

The many crimes of the empire’s bumptious adventurers were enabled by Britain’s great geopolitical power and then obscured by its cultural prestige. This is why images cherished by the British elite of itself as valiant, wise and benevolent could survive, until recently, much damning historical evidence about these masters of disaster from Cyprus to Malaysia, Palestine to South Africa. In recent years, such privately educated and smooth-tongued men as Niall Ferguson and Tony Blair could even present the British as saviors of suffering and benighted humanity, urging American neoconservatives to take up the white man’s burden globally.

Humiliations in neo-imperialist ventures abroad, followed by the rolling calamity of Brexit at home, have cruelly exposed the bluff of what Hannah Arendt called the “quixotic fools of imperialism.” As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain’s bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans. More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cosseted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was.

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

Correction: Jan. 17, 2019

An earlier version of this article erroneously attributed a distinction to the 1998 peace agreement. It did not result in the removal of customs checks on the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border; those had been removed previously, in 1993, with the introduction of the European Single Market.

Correction: Jan. 18, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Mr. Mishra's most recent book. It is "Age of Anger," not "Age of Extremes."

#Pankaj mishra #india #partition #ireland #the New York times #brexit #politics

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hallsp · 3 years ago

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Opinion

GRAY MATTER

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race'

By David Reich

March 23, 2018

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

To get a sense of what modern genetic research into average biological differences across populations looks like, consider an example from my own work. Beginning around 2003, I began exploring whether the population mixture that has occurred in the last few hundred years in the Americas could be leveraged to find risk factors for prostate cancer, a disease that occurs 1.7 times more often in self-identified African-Americans than in self-identified European-Americans. This disparity had not been possible to explain based on dietary and environmental differences, suggesting that genetic factors might play a role.

Self-identified African-Americans turn out to derive, on average, about 80 percent of their genetic ancestry from enslaved Africans brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. My colleagues and I searched, in 1,597 African-American men with prostate cancer, for locations in the genome where the fraction of genes contributed by West African ancestors was larger than it was elsewhere in the genome. In 2006, we found exactly what we were looking for: a location in the genome with about 2.8 percent more African ancestry than the average.

When we looked in more detail, we found that this region contained at least seven independent risk factors for prostate cancer, all more common in West Africans. Our findings could fully account for the higher rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans than in European-Americans. We could conclude this because African-Americans who happen to have entirely European ancestry in this small section of their genomes had about the same risk for prostate cancer as random Europeans.

Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.

While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.

But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.

It is not yet clear how these genetic variations operate. A follow-up study of Icelanders led by the geneticist Augustine Kong showed that these genetic variations also nudge people who carry them to delay having children. So these variations may be explaining longer times at school by affecting a behavior that has nothing to do with intelligence.

This study has been joined by others finding genetic predictors of behavior. One of these, led by the geneticist Danielle Posthuma, studied more than 70,000 people and found genetic variations in more than 20 genes that were predictive of performance on intelligence tests.

Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.

To understand why it is so dangerous for geneticists and anthropologists to simply repeat the old consensus about human population differences, consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.

Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.)

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females. The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material — a Y chromosome that males have and that females don’t, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don’t.

Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)

How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

It is clear from the inequities that persist between women and men in our society that fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward. And if this is the case with men and women, then it is surely the case with whatever differences we may find among human populations, the great majority of which will be far less profound.

An abiding challenge for our civilization is to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.

It is important to face whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings. Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.

David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” from which this article is adapted.

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nataliesnews · 4 years ago

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The Silence of the Israeli Media's Occupation Lamb 15.2.2021

Analysis |

The Silence of the Israeli Media's Occupation Lambs

Both print and electronic outlets are supporting the project of crowding Palestinians into Bantustans so that most of the West Bank will be annexed and the Jews will benefit from cheap real estate

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Demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Yatta. Media silence normalizes the expulsion the army, Civil Administration, Jerusalem Municipality and Interior Ministry are carrying out.Credit: Anadolu Agency

Amira Hass

Which New York newspapers reported the fact that on May 26, 1838, about 7,000 U.S. soldiers started to expel thousands of members of the Cherokee Nation from their homeland, as per the Native American Removal Act signed by President Andrew Jackson? What did the newspapers in Johannesburg report on February 10, 1955, a day after some 2,000 armed police officers expelled Black families from their homes in the Sophiatown neighborhood? How many were satisfied with a reminder that the act of expulsion was carried out as mandated in the Group Areas Act?

We’ll leave that investigation to others, and pose a different question: How many and which Hebrew-language Israeli media outlets reported last week that the Civil Administration demanded that members of the Khirbet Humsa community in the northern Jordan Valley “voluntarily” uproot themselves from the area where they have been living for decades – and then demolished and confiscated their shacks, pens and belongings? The answer is easy: the online newsmagazine Siha Mekomit (Hebrew “sister” of the English 972 site) and Haaretz.

Israel’s print and electronic media excels at reporting on internal Palestinian scandals, on armed Palestinians before and after their arrest, and on breaches in the separation barrier that enable people to seek a livelihood on the other side. But this time it remained silent. Just as it usually remains silent in the face of the cruel bans on construction and development that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, and in the face of the frequent demolitions and confiscation operations it launches against them.

As opposed to the past, today there is WhatsApp and the internet and drones, which help to report on goings-on in real time. Israeli journalists are not in danger of persecution and arrest as their colleagues are in Russia and China, or as was the case in racist South Africa. But the Hebrew-language media remains silent because it willingly accepts the official lie, that operations such as that in Khirbet Humsa are legitimate enforcement activities. By its silence it is normalizing the slow and ongoing expulsion that the Israel Defense Forces, the Civil Administration, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Interior Ministry are carrying out against the Palestinians.

In these cases, the media serves the basic master plan of Israel’s governments: crowding the Palestinians into Bantustans, so that most of the West Bank will be annexed to Israel and so that the Jews will benefit from the cheap real estate there. This silence moves between cowardice and deliberate collaboration with the crimes and the material gains that they yield.

The firing exercise held by the IDF last week on land belonging to the villages of Jinba, Mirkez, Bir Al-Eid and Tawamin are part of the master plan for “open space,” as the South Hebron Hills Regional Settlements Council said – its intention being “Arab-free space.” Here too Israeli journalists kept quiet.

It’s true that there are major differences between the expulsion here and the other expulsions mentioned above. The criminal acts in the United States were perpetrated before international conventions determined what is self-evident today: that expulsion, colonization and apartheid are crimes. The African National Congress and the International Solidarity Movement didn’t allow the crimes of Pretoria to be removed from the agenda.

ICC approves probe into possible war crimes by Israel, Hamas in Palestinian territories

Israel destroys and seizes structures in Khirbet Humsa, leaving over 30 Palestinian minors without a roof

A cluster bomb that Israel's High Court of Justice will hopefully neutralize

As opposed to Jackson and the Afrikaner prime ministers – Daniel Malan, Hans Strijdom and Hendrik Verwoerd – the Israeli governments of Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors, including Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, have been carrying out the expulsion of Palestinians bit by bit since 1967 (as opposed to the mass expulsions of 1948-1952). Haaretz and even Siha Mekomit don’t report every demolition of a Palestinian home either.

The Israeli expulsion today is not bloody like the campaigns to uproot native peoples in the United States in the 19th century, or overt like what happened in Johannesburg – but it is effective. The number of Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley communities and in the villages of Masafer Yatta (a cluster of Palestinian villages in the southeastern West Bank) remains small, compared to the rate of natural population growth and the agricultural potential of their land. Not many people can constantly live in the specter of demolition orders or tolerate the ongoing Israeli hunt for every sheep pen that is built, and every water faucet and solar panel installed.

We will shout out once again: The creeping transfer to the Bantustans was and is made possible by declaring sprawling military live-fire zones, confiscation of possessions, building of settlements on the land of Palestinians who were abroad in 1967, bans on Palestinian construction and frequent demolitions of their homes, and the growing violence of residents of ostensibly illegal Jewish outposts, which receive official and semi-official funding in order to take root, expand and expel. And are enabled by the Israeli public, whose reactions range from indifference to enthusiastic acceptance. No means is created in isolation. Every means is related to another one, and those involved are overt and covert partners to an ongoing crime of forced uprooting.

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Let us once again remind you: Major expulsions, by means of trucks and bayonets and the like, were carried out in 1985, in the mid-1990s and in 1999 against more than a dozen villages and communities. The resilience of Bedouin communities and Palestinian villages, along with the involvement of human rights organizations, Israeli lawyers and left-wing activists, have sabotaged the plan to uproot them entirely and people returned to the lands where they had been living for generations – although the families of Susya are not allowed to return to the original site of their village.

Justices on the High Court – and I have written about this repeatedly as well – are supposed to decide this year between meting out justice or acceding to the demand by the Jewish real-estate lobby that thousands of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta be crowded into Yatta. In other words, to determine whether the Palestinians have a right to remain on their land, develop their villages and be connected to infrastructure, or be forced to abandon their way of life and their livelihood.

This repeated writing is a call to countries that are still committed to international law: Don’t wait for the International Criminal Court in the The Hague. Use your power to prevent the crowding of the Palestinians into Bantustans – even if Jewish judges may approve it.

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The Silence of the Israeli Media's Occupation Lamb 15.2.2021

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saraseo · 4 years ago

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sa-waai · 7 years ago

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Interesting read.

Here's Why African History is being suppressed and ignored by white scholars. RACISM, HISTORY AND LIES

Max Dashu

Some doctrines of racial supremacy as classically taught in Euro/American institutions, textbooks and media:

PHYSICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: In which white anthropologists treat people as racial specimens, measuring "cephalic indices" and attempting to prove superiority of the "white" brain. Ugly racist terminology: "prognathism," "platyrhiny," "steatopygous," "sub-Egyptian." Mug-shot lineups of "the Veddan female," "Arapaho male, "Negroid type," "Mongoloid specimen" characterize this approach. Out of favor in the mid-20th-century, it has enjoyed a revisionist comeback with sociobiology and works claiming racial differentials in intelligence, such as "The Bell Curve."

TECHNOLOGICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: Insists on forcing archaeological finds as well as living cultures into a grid of "development" based on whether tools, materials and techniques valued by "Western" scholars were in use. Example: "They were a stone age civilization who never discovered the wheel!" This model forces cultures into a progressional paradigm: Old and New Stone Ages, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Space Age. This classification ignores the complexity of culture, and the fact that metallurgic technology and military might are not the ultimate measure of advanced culture.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE: The assumption that "primitive" cultures represent lower "stages" in historical evolution, and have yet to attain advanced forms of culture. One English scholar referred to "the child-races of Africa." Usually, social hierarchy, militarization and industrialization are taken as prime measures of "advanced" civilization. In the 19th century, scholars openly used the terms "savage," "barbarian," "civilized." Though these offensive words have (mostly) been dropped, the underlying assumptions are still quite influential. (For a good discussion of how the insistence on talking about "tribes" distorts African history, see http://www.africaaction.org/bp/ethall.htm. )

SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION DOCTRINE: Credits all achievements to conquering empires, assuming their superiority in science, technology, and government. Adherents are usually incapable of perceiving advanced earth-friendly systems of land management, agronomy, medicine, collective social welfare networks, healing, astronomical knowledge, or profound philosophical traditions among peoples considered "primitive" by dominant "Western" standards.

PASSING OF THE TORCH DOCTRINE: Claims a chain of cultural transmission from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece to Rome to western Europe to the USA, leaving vast gaps where the history of the rest of the world should be. (And the discussion never returns to Egypt or Iraq to consider what happened there after the fall of their ancient empires.) Most of the planet's cultures are discussed only in relation to the European conquest, if mentioned at all. As a result, few people have any idea of the history of Sumatra, Honduras, Niger, Ecuador, Mozambique, Ohio, Hokkaido, Samoa, or even European countries such as Lithuania or Bosnia.

IF IT WAS GREAT, IT MUST HAVE BEEN WHITE: If advanced science, art, or architecture is found in Africa or South America, then Phoenecians, Greeks, Celts, Vikings (or, in the extreme case, space aliens) must be invoked to explain their presence. (Here, whiteness often functions as a relative concept, as "lighter than.") This bias gives rise to a pronounced tendency to date American or African cultures later than warranted, and as a result dating for these regions is constantly having to be revised further back into the past as evidence of greater antiquity piles up.

Corollary: IF IT WAS WHITE, IT MUST HAVE BEEN GREAT. Thus, the conqueror Charlemagne was a great man, in spite of his genocidal campaign against the Saxons, but the Asian conquerors Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were simply evil. Stereotypes of head-hunters picture Africans (in the absence of any evidence for such a practice there) but never Celtic head-hunters in France and Britain -- much less Lord Kitchener making off with the Mahdi's skull in Sudan, or U.S. settlers taking scalps and body parts of Indian people. This doctrine also underlies the common assumption that European conquest must have improved life for subject peoples.

A 19th century French engraving imagines the conquest of Algeria as a showering of the benefits of superior civilization on abject, genuflecting North Africans.

IF IT WAS NOT WHITE, AND ITS GREATNESS IS UNDENIABLE, THEN IT MUST BE DEPRECATED IN SOME WAY: Example:The Epic of Man, published in the '60s by Time/Life Books, says of the advanced civilization of ancient Pakistan: "It is known that a static and sterile quality pervaded Indus society." It used to be the academic fashion to call ancient Egypt a "moribund" civilization which "stifled creativity." Similar writings dismissed the "Incas" (Quechua) as "totalitarian," or the Chinese as "isolated" and "resistant to change," ignoring their interchange with steppe societies as well as Southeast Asian cultures.

The AFRICAN GAP DOCTRINE: After examining the first humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, this historical approach completely skips over most of the African archaeological record. It discusses ancient Egypt but ascribes its civilization to "the Middle East," denying its African identity and archaeological connections with Saharan and southern Nilotic civilizations. Saharan civilization, Ile-Ife or Mwanamutapa are not discussed at all. Africa is simply dropped from historical consideration until the era of European slaving and colonization, when it is portrayed as culturally and technologically deficient. The existence of female spheres of power in Africa is ignored.

The BERING STRAIT DOCTRINE insists that all indigenous American peoples came across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, filtering down through Central America into South America. Problem: numerous archaeological sites in the Americas predate any possible Bering Strait migration by many thousands of years. Access from Alaska to the rest of North America was blocked for millennia by two great ice sheets that covered Canada. An narrow opening that might have allowed passage appeared much too late (about 13,500 years ago) to explain the growing evidence that people were living in both North and South America much earlier than these "first" migrations.

By 1997-98, the tide of opinion began to turn: several scientific conclaves declared that a majority of attending scholars rejected the Bering Strait theory as a full explanation of how the Americas were peopled.The long-doctrinal hypothesis of Clovis hunters as the first immigrants is crumbling before the new dating, as hundreds of pre-Clovis sites pile up: Cactus Hill, Virginia (13,500 BP); Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania (14,000 - 17,000 Before Present); Monte Verde (13,500 BP); Pedra-Furada, Brazil (15,000 BP, and possibly as old as 32,000 BP).

Bering Strait diehards discount the oral histories of indigenous Americans. In spite of the huge diversity among the American peoples and differences between most Americans and east Asians, all are declared to be of "Mongoloid racial origin." After the initial press stampede declaring "Kennewick Man" to be "white," study of the genetic evidence shows something entirely different. Instead, it appears that there have been several waves of migration: from central China, from the ancient Jomon culture of Japan, from south Asia or the Pacific islands. And "Luzia," an 11,500-year-old female skeleton in Brazil "appeared to be more Negroid in its cranial features than Mongoloid," in the stodgy anthropological terminology of the New York Times (Nov 9, 1999). (Actually she most closely resembles aborignal Australians.) But there is also a uniquely North American X-haploid group of mitochondrial DNA, which has yet to be explained.

THE POWER OF NAMING

STEREOTYPING entire peoples as mad, uncontrollable threats: "Wild Indians," "Yellow Hordes" or "the Yellow Peril." As inferior nonhumans: "primitives," "savages," "gooks," "niggers" -- this last term used not only against African-Americans, but also by 18th-century English colonizers of Egypt and India. Even the word "natives," which originally meant simply the people born in a country and by extension the aboriginal inhabitants, took on heavy racist coloration as an inferior Other.

POLARIZATION: "Scientific thought" vs. "primitive belief"; "undeveloped" vs "civilized"; or "the world's great religions" vs. "tribal superstitions," "cults," "idolatry" or "devil-worship." Depending on where it was created, a sculpture could either be a "masterpiece of religious art" or an "idol," "fetish," or "devil." Few people realize that "Western" scientists did not match the accuracy of ancient Maya calculations of the length of the solar year until the mid-20th century.

Indians who resist colonization and land theft are commonly portrayed as evil in popular media, which applies negative labels such as "Renegades." Here indigenous people are Other; the intruders in their country are The Good Guys. The white hero is named after the Texas Rangers, systematic killers of Indian families. His Indian sidekick's name, Tonto, means "fool, stupid person" in Spanish. RENAMING: Dutch colonists called the Khoi-khoi people "Hottentots" (stutterers). Russians called the northwest Siberian Nentsy "Samoyed" (cannibals). These are blatant examples, but many nationalities are still called by unflattering names given by their enemies: "Sioux" (Lakota); "Miao" (Hmong); "Lapps" (Saami); "Basques" (Euskadi); "Eskimos" (Inuit). European names have replaced the originals in many places: Nigeria, Australia, New Caledonia, New Britain, etc. (But "Rhodesia" bit the dust, after a revolution.)

DEGRADATION OF MEANINGS: "Mumbo jumbo" has become a cliché signifying meaningless superstitions, but it comes from a Mandinke word -- mama dyambo -- for a ritual staff bearing the image of a female ancestor. (Look it up in any good dictionary.) "Fetish" now connotes an obsessive sexual fixation, but originated as a Portuguese interpretation of sacred West African images as "sorcery" (feitição). The holy city of Islam is often appropriated in phrases like "a Mecca for shoppers."

DOUBLE-THINK: Conquest becomes "unification," "pacification,""opening up," and conquered regions are dubbed "protectorates." The convention is to use Europe as the standard, writing texts from the viewpoint of the conquerors / colonizers. Thus, a Rajasthani rebellion against English rule was termed the "Indian Mutiny." A peculiarity of this thinking is the tendency to refer to times of bloody invasions and enslavement with respectful nostalgia, as in "The Golden Age of Greece" and "The Glory That Was Rome," or "How the West Was Won." British subjugation of southern Nigeria is recast as The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

A contributor to Men Become Civilized, edited by Trevor Cairns, explains it all to children:

"When the king of one city conquered others, he would have to make sure that all the people in all the cities knew what to do. He would have to see that they all had rules to follow, so that they would live peacefully together."

Double-think finds ways to recast genocide as regrettable but necessary, due to failings of the people being killed, who are somehow unable to "adapt." Distancing the agent is key here, obscuring the violence with the idea that some kind of natural process is at work: "vanishing races," "by that time the Indians had disappeared."

THE POWER OF IMAGES

Hollywood tomtoms beat as fake Indians jump up and down, uttering brainless cries and grunts. There's the "squaw" complex in literature and cinema, the faithful Indian sidekick, and Robinson Crusoe's "Man Friday." John Wayne as the Western movie hero, saying: "There's humans and then there's Comanches." Or in real life, the actor tried to justify the settler theft of Indian countries: "There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

This picture appeared in an insurance ad.

Advertising is an important transmitter of historical misrepresentation. It draws on colonial mythologies such as the notion that the Dutch "bought" Manhattan for the equivalent of $24 in trade goods --in spite of the fact that the Indians did not think of land as something that could be sold. The role of violence is completely obliterated. Even history books do not go into the massacres of Native people. On Staten Island settlers slaughtered the people they called "Wappingers," and afterward played football with their severed heads. Tarzan goes up against witch doctors and eye-rolling African chiefs. The Caribbean is shown as full of fearful, superstitious natives and zombies, Arabs who have nothing to do all day but loll around in harems, or cheat the white hero. Seductive Suzie Wongs, thieving Mexicans, and shiftless and sexually insatiable African-Americans. Movies commonly depict the Chinese as obsequious and deceitful, Arabs as treacherous, Africans as ignorant and barbaric.

COUNTERPOINT

The Mande were farming millet and other crops in West Africa in 6500-5000 BCE.

Temples in Peru and Sudan are much older than the Parthenon.

People in Mississippi, Illinois and Mexico traded with each other and exchanged ideas and symbols, as the the sea-faring Ecuadorians did with Costa Rica and western Mexico.

A small-statured Black people built the oldest civilization in southeast Asia, leaving megalithic temples and statuary in south India, Cambodia, Sumatra and other Indonesian islands.

Archaeology shows that the earliest formative influences on ancient Egypt came from Sudan and the Sahara, not the "Middle East."

The oldest megalithic calendar in the world has recently been discovered in the Egyptian Sahara, dating back to 7000 years ago. European megaliths may have an African origin.

Polynesian mariners had begun navigating by the stars and settling the vast ocean expanses of the Pacific islands before the time of Moses.

WHAT GETS DEFINED AS HISTORY?

In the last half century, the boundaries of "acceptable" history have been expanded by a multidisciplinary approach, including sources previously dismissed: orature (oral tradition), linguistics, anthropology, social history, art, music and other cultural sources. More recently, the social locations of historians have come under consideration as a factor shaping their perspectives, along with a sense that there is no absolutely "objective" view of history. Past claims of objectivity have biases clearly visible today, notably in siding with European settlers and slavers against non-christian cultures, and the almost total eclipse of female acts and experience from historical accounts.

A reader who might react negatively to a blatant expression of racism often misses perceiving one cloaked in scholarly language, in assumptions, judgments and misinformation most people have not been educated to catch. It does not occur to many people to question a pronounced overemphasis on Europe, the smallest continent (actually, a subcontinent of Asia.) If a chapter or two on African and Asian history is inserted in a textbook, publishers go ahead and call it a world history. Typically, media depictions of history have not caught up with information now available in specialized academic sources, and continue to present the old stereotypes and distortions as fact.

More on Racism, History and Lies

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

In the early '90s a hue and cry was raised in the national media against "multiculturalism." It threatened the very foundations of Western Civilization, explained an outpouring of magazine articles and newspaper columns which shed much heat but little light. A Newsweek cover blared: "THOUGHT POLICE: There's a 'Politically Correct' Way to Talk About Race, Sex and Ideas. Is This the New Enlightenment -- Or the New McCarthyism?" As if this wasn't heavy-handed enough, it adds a warning, "Watch What You Say." (December 24, 1990)

"In U.S. classrooms, battles are flaring over values that are almost a reverse image of the American mainstream. As a result, a new intolerance is on the rise." William A. Henry III, "Upside Down in the Groves of Academe", Time Magazine, April 1, 1991

"'It used to be thought that ideas transcend race, gender and class, that there are such things as truth, reason, morality and artistic excellence, which can be understood and aspired to by everyone, of whatever race, gender or class.' Now we have democracy in the syllabus, affirmative action in the classroom. 'No one believes in greatness.' Bate says mournfully. 'That's gone.'" Gertrude Himmelfarb, Op-Ed in New York Times Magazine, June 5, 1991

"If there is insufficient authentic African culture to meet the demands of self-esteem, then culture must be borrowed from ancient Egypt. No black pharaohs? A few must be invented. Not enough first-rate women poets? Let second-raters be taught instead." --James Kilpatrick, "Poisoning the Groves of Academe," San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1991

The assumption that were are no great women poets, no black pharaohs, no other greatness than the usual diet of "Western Civilization" is so ingrained that it is regarded as incontrovertible. Protesting the monochrome, all-male landscape of classic pedagogy becomes "intolerance." But what then are we to call the refusal to open up media and educational horizons to the full spectrum of human achievement?

A response to John Baines' review (August 11, 1991) of Cheikh Anta Diop's Civilization or Barbarism and Martin Bernal's Black Athena:

To the Editor, New York Times Book Review:

Mr. Baines' review of Diop and Bernal express alarm that their books "attack modern conceptions of the origins of Western Civilization" by showing the anteriority of African (especially Egyptian) achievements. It seems to me that he would like to deny the context of the whole discussion, which has been centuries of exalting the Greeks as the fount of Western Civilization and denying the role of Africa in the ancient world. Egypt is treated as part of the "Middle East," and her relations with the rest of Africa ignored. In this context, to demand an "intellectual contribution that will stand without reference to issues of race" is to perpetuate an injurious status quo.

This denial is especially ludicrous in the frequently-heard claim that because Egyptians were "ethnically mixed," they were not black. Southern African peoples are ethnically mixed, yet it would occur to no one that they are other than black. More to the point, if an ancient Egyptian were to find herself in the United States, she would fall within the range of colors we describe as "black." This business of reddish-brown-skinned men and golden-skinned women was a convention in Egyptian art (and one adopted by the Cretans, Greek vases, and Etruscans, bearing out the hypothesis of Egyptian influence). If Mr. Baine wants to take the golden women as a racial marker for light-skinned Egyptians, is he also willing to concede dark-brown-skinned Etruscan men? His claim that considering the race of the Egyptians is "unhelpful"--and the many others who declare it irrelevant--is coy and evasive.

Max Dashu, Suppressed Histories Archives

[The Times did not publish this letter.]

See Ibrahim Sundiata's excellent article, Afrocentrism: The Argument We're Really Having, for more discussion of the African-ness of the Egyptians and racialist agendas of denial.

Here is a recent example of how the pernicious ideas described in this article percolate into popular consciousness. An October 18, 2005 post to an Illinois Museum site reacted to the one of the greatest sculptures in Indian America (known as the "Birger figurine") falls back on the Technological Calibration model:

"The Cahokia Indians never made it out of the stone age, not even to the primitive level of metal working found in the Mayan, Toltec, and Inca societies further south... [If they had left a written record, we would know more] but since they never made it that far, we have to rely on their works." [from the site Indian History: Unearthed artifacts from Cahokia]

More food for thought from Peggy McIntosh, who wrote White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1988)

“I have met very few men who were truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me [meaning white feminists concerned with male domination] is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation….

“Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a 'white skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.”

Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D. from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School

Suppressed Histories Archives

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ara-la · 7 years ago

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Racism 101

More from my 1995 book. The specific cast of characters may have changed, but a lot of the arguments are still the same.

RACISM 101

For the past several years, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) have been claiming that they are not racists. They say they are not motivated by hate, but simply proponents of "white rights." Duke, Thom Robb and Shawn Slater of the KKK, Tom Metzger of WAR (White Aryan Resistance) and others say they are trying to redress what they claim is current discrimination against white people.

Some people have been seduced by these arguments. But their essential dishonesty should be evident. No white racists, claiming that Black people now enjoy unfair advantages, would be willing to exchange their own conditions of existence and their own supposed "oppression" for the situation of Black people in America, or that of most Africans, Mexicanos, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders or Native people.

Yet even though the specious nature of these claims is evident, many white people claim that they "don't see what Black people are always complaining about." A lot of white people say that they themselves are not racists and they don't see that racism is such a big problem. They wish that Black people would stop making such a big fuss about "past discrimination."

Perhaps this is only a case that, once again, none are so blind as those who will not see. But in the interests of taking at face value these arguments and protestations of ignorance as to what the problem is, and in hopes that, by treating them as sincere, such ignorance may be dispelled, let's look at a summary of the material reality of racism, in particular as it regards Black people in the U.S. Such a summary will demonstrate that racism is rooted in colonial power relations.

RACISM AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:

The racial skew in U.S. courts and prisons is so extreme that it is not an exaggeration to assume that the system is expressly designed to criminalize Black people. A study in the 1980's in L.A., for example, showed that Black people go to state prison about 20% more often than white people arrested for the same crimes, and serve sentences of from one to two years longer, on average. This is so despite another study by the Rand Corporation which showed that higher percentages of Blacks and Latinos than whites were released after being arrested because of insufficient evidence to substantiate the charges.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, ruling it is legal even though there is a racial disparity in its application. The death penalty is much more likely to be imposed if a victim was white than if the victim was Black. The prison population in the U.S., the largest in the world, is disproportionately Black, Latino and Native American, and the disproportion is even greater on Death Row. U.S. Blacks are more than three times as likely as South African Blacks to go to prison; eight times more likely than white Americans. Current statistics show that one in three Black male youths are in custody or under some form of parole or probation.

It is these underlying realities against which the acquittal of the white police who brutalized Black motorist Rodney King, and the decision of a judge not to impose any prison time on the Korean woman grocer who killed Black teenager Latasha Harlins, ignited the 1992 L.A. uprising. They underlined the extent to which the "justice" system is designed to victimize Black people, not protect them. Such discrimination is a manifestation, among other things, of the comparative exclusion of Blacks from the legal profession and from the judiciary.

Only in 1992, for example, did the Justice Department begin to apply the provisions of the Voting Rights Act to the drawing of districts for the election of judges, which have long been designed to diminish the chances of Blacks to win judgeships. Moving the L.A. police brutality case to suburban Simi Valley, with virtually no Blacks in the jury pool, was only a more blatant manifestation, by a panel of judges and the white cops' defense attorneys, of a common prosecutorial habit of excluding individual Blacks from juries.

George Bush, for example, once tried to appoint to the federal appeals court a man whose job had been to defend death penalty convictions on appeal. He defended as justified, cases where the D.A. had divided jurors into four groups: strong, acceptable, weak, and Black. In New York, it was recently disclosed that white jurors from suburban areas of Long Island were brought in to Brooklyn courthouses that were drawing substantially Black and Latin juries; whereas the opposite is never the case, even though juries in Nassau and Suffolk are predominantly white, and Black and Latin jurors from Brooklyn would provide the corresponding "balance."

The drug war is another example. Surveys consistently show illegal drug use is, if anything, more extensive among whites than Blacks. Yet in both media portrayals and reality, Blacks are a disproportionate percentage of those arrested and convicted for drug crimes. In federal courts, enhanced penalties for sale are overwhelmingly sought against Black and Latino offenders. Sentencing for possession of crack cocaine, generally used by poor Blacks, is much more severe than for powdered cocaine, generally used by rich Blacks.

A visit to the criminal courts is a lesson in the nature of race-based colonialism. The law-makers, law enforcers, jurists and jurors, are predominantly white; the defendants, predominantly Black and Latino.

RACISM AND ECONOMICS

It is widely recognized, even in official unemployment figures, that unemployment is always at least twice as high among Black people as among whites. Official figures undercount also the larger percentages of under-employed and "discouraged" Black workers. This gap persists during good times and bad. It tends to get worse when the economy contracts or stagnates, but sometimes it worsens even when the economy improves. In Milwaukee, WI, for example, as total employment rose in the 80's, it shifted from manufacturing to non-manufacturing. Unemployment among whites dropped from 5.3% to 3.8%. But among Blacks, official unemployment rose from 17% to over 20%. Actually, among inner city Black and Hispanic youth around the country, joblessness is over 50%.

Black men's earnings, even when comparably employed, are lower than those of white men; Black women's lifetime earnings are the lowest, even in comparison with those of white women. These differentials too have persisted in the years since civil rights ordinances and affirmative action have outlawed employment discrimination. This is because affirmative action is at best an individual solution to a collective and institutionalized problem, although it is certainly justified. Far from reducing standards or abilities, affirmative action provides access to the talents and abilities of people previously excluded from the system. But it directs Black people seeking economic improvement into competition for a place in the white corporate and government power structure, and is no substitute for community based economic development.

Nor has affirmative action created a bias in favor of Blacks in hiring. A study by the Urban Institute in Chicago and Washington DC in 1991 showed that in roughly 500 audits of pairs of Black and white young men who were closely matched in education, age, size, experience and other attributes, the Blacks faced discrimination 20% of the time. In comparison, only 7% of the whites were denied equal treatment.

In fact, income and employment differentials understate the extent of Black-white economic differences. A study of wealth, a more accurate measure of economic well-being, showed based on the 1990 census, that whites on average were three times as wealthy as Blacks. White households' wealth was four times their income; Blacks' assets amounted to only 2.5 times income (in addition to being based on a lower income). White wealth was more heavily in financial assets (which make money). What wealth Blacks possess is mainly in household goods (homes and cars).

What's more, poor Black and Hispanic people are tightly concentrated; recent census figures show that over 80% of poor African Americans live in poor census tracts. Sixty to seventy percent of poor Latinos live in poor areas. But among whites, only 30% of the poor live in poverty-stricken areas. Relatively speaking, the white poor are dispersed among other white people, while poor Blacks and Latinos are isolated not only from whites and the larger society, but even from better off members of their own nationalities. Again, this is a manifestation of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Poor whites live with rulers of their own nationality; members of the colonized groups who collaborate with the colonial regime disassociate themselves physically from the colonized.

What is less widely recognized is the extent to which all other discriminatory economic conditions intensify this colonial situation. People who expressed puzzlement about how African American youth could destroy "their own" community in the L.A. rebellion, fail to understand that the community was not their own. Black areas had 30% fewer businesses per capita to start with than other areas of L.A., yet even many of those were not owned by Black residents. What's more, those areas had a disproportionately high concentration of liquor stores compared to other parts of the county (and those liquor stores therefore formed a vastly larger percentage of all the businesses). Black areas are redlined for insurance, loans, and housing, driving out those Blacks with some economic wherewithal to other areas where they will at least face less discrimination from banks and insurance companies.

This discrimination is practiced not only in L.A., and not only for housing; a study of industrial development in the south showed that corporations have avoided areas with large Black populations. During this same period, Blacks lost their farmland at a rate 2-1/2 times higher than small white farmers. More than 95% of all Black farms have been lost since 1920, compared to a 54% decline in white operated farms in the same period.

Again, these are manifestations of a system that must be described as colonialism. Black people do not control their own economic circumstances, land or labor. As a result, they are forced to pay more for shoddier goods, and work harder for less pay.

RACISM AND HEALTH

The health and medical situation of Black people in America is so dismal that it reduces the life expectancy and raises the infant mortality rate overall for the entire U.S. population. Despite an overall decline in infant mortality rates, Black babies are almost twice as likely as white infants to die in the first year of life. In 1950, the Black infant death rate was 61% higher than that for whites; by 1979, it was 91% higher. Even among well-to-do Blacks, infant mortality is high, apparently due to disproportionately low birth weight. Infant mortality in poor inner city communities in the U.S. such as Detroit is higher than in many third world countries, including much of Central America.

This reflects the absence of medical care and the exclusion of Blacks from medicine. While medical school enrollment increased by 50% in the U.S. between 1972-82, it remained virtually flat among Blacks. The total number of Black physicians increased slightly, but declined as a percentage both of all doctors and of the Black population. Again, such disparities are a manifestation of colonialism. The medical schools, hospitals, and insurance companies are outside of Blacks' control and do not respond to their needs. And since government also reflects this colonial dynamic, government services do not improve matters. One recent federal study, for example, showed that for 30 years, Blacks with serious ailments have been much more likely than whites to be rejected for disability claims under Social Security, especially on appeal.

Disparities show up in every area of medical care. Whites, for example, are 3-1/2 times more likely than Blacks to receive potentially life-saving coronary artery bypass surgery. Life expectancy for Black people has actually been dropping steadily. Until 1984, Black life expectancy, while shorter than that for whites, increased at roughly the same rate and narrowed the gap in actual years. But since 1985, as white life expectancy has continued to inch up, the average life span for both Black men and women has grown shorter. In other words, a bad situation for Blacks is getting worse even while the situation for whites is improving.

Blacks in America do not suffer only in comparison to whites. Because colonialism persists within America, the situation is often worse than in some "Third World" countries. Black men in Harlem are less likely to live to age 65 than men in Bangladesh -- 55% of Bengali men, but only 40% of Black men in Harlem live to reach 65 years. Infant mortality rates among Blacks in Detroit are worse than those in Honduras.

A study of U.S. Black death rates compared to U.S. whites in the 1980's showed an annual excess of 59,000 Black deaths over the number than would have died if the white death rate had applied. This excess represented 42% of all deaths of Black people annually. In L.A., for example, Black and Latino gay men have been diagnosed with AIDS at twice the rate of whites. Recent studies have shown that Black and Latino AIDS patients are much less likely than whites to receive life-extending medicines and other therapies. Government cuts in medical care fall disproportionately on communities of color, leading to the revival in these communities of virulent strains of tuberculosis and many childhood ailments that had been thought conquered.

RACISM AND IMMIGRATION:

For many generations, immigration to the U.S. was limited on a consciously racist basis. For many Asians, immigration was either outlawed entirely for long periods or restricted to men. Women were not allowed in, so the U.S. could take advantage of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino laborers, while preventing them from establishing families or having children in this country.

Immigration throughout most of the last century was controlled by laws written while the KKK was at the height of its power as a mass organization, and which reflected the Klan's anti-immigrant politics. The explicit bias in what immigration was allowed was towards northern Europeans, by establishing quotas for admission to the U.S. from each country based on the percentages of the U.S. population from those countries in the previous century. The U.S., for example, closed its doors to most Jewish refugees from Hitler's terror (while later happily admitting a host of nazi collaborators who had desired scientific or espionage skills).

More recent reforms modified the open racism of U.S. immigration policy, and allowed increased immigration from Asia and Latin America, to fill jobs this country needs to have done but can't fill from among the ranks of white labor. But this has only sparked a new wave of explicitly racist anti-immigrant organizing. Visa lotteries and new immigration laws have restored a bias in favor of northern Europeans. Studies conducted under the Immigration Reform and Control Act have shown that such measures as employer sanctions have resulted in wholesale discrimination against all Hispanics and Asians. This is because the hostility toward "illegals" is focused on a racially selective basis, ignoring Irish, Eastern Europeans and others who enter or stay illegally, targeting "non-whites."

In fact, U.S. immigration policy has always been two-faced. The history of importation of people of color to do the back-breaking work is central to U.S. development, beginning with the slave trade, and proceeding through the use of Asian and Mexican labor on the railroads, mines and fields of the west. Illegal U.S. immigrants to Mexico, who refused to abide by that country's ban on slavery, fomented first Texas independence and then the U.S. war on Mexico. They wanted to expand slavery and make the U.S. into a continental power (thereby setting the stage for both the U.S. Civil War and the subsequent Indian Wars). Having incorporated a massive and resource rich section of Mexico, imposing a new border, the U.S. can hardly be surprised to find that the border is porous. To this day, illegal immigration of third world workers is an economic enterprise akin to the drug trade. It is made illegal not to prevent it, but to keep it more profitable as a black market, and to keep the workers more easily exploitable, less able to defend their rights and organize.

RACISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The recent global ecology summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focused attention on the relationship between protection and restoration of the environment and the set of issues referred to as the "North-South" conflict, between the developed and the developing nations. The real issue here is a history of race based colonialism. Western economic growth and environmental devastation has been based on a history of land theft and genocide of native peoples in all corners of the globe by the European powers and their settler colonists.

Vast areas of the world were and continue to be dedicated to growing crops desired by the Europeans. The threat to the rain forest, presented by the need for land on which to graze enough cattle to produce another billion hamburgers, had its origins in "mono-culture." One-crop economies were imposed on the Third World by companies like United Fruit and immortalized in such song lyrics as "there's an awful lot of coffee in Brazil." Today, adding insult to injury, the U.S. and other developed nations want to export their waste and their toxic industries to the Third World.

What's more, this pattern is reproduced within the U.S. Toxic waste dumps and polluting industries are located disproportionately in communities of color. In a city like L.A., where it would seem that air pollution would not discriminate, the existence of toxic hot spots which correspond to areas with predominantly Black and Hispanic populations demonstrates that even the air which we breathe can be the vehicle of discrimination. A recent study of Black and Latino youth from south L.A. who had died of non-medical causes (mostly violence) showed that these teenagers were already losing their lung capacity to pollution-caused lesions; had they lived, they would've been candidates for severe lung diseases like emphysema or cancers by their 30's. Such situations are repeated around the country, from uranium mining on Native reservations to pesticide poisoning of mostly Mexicano farm workers and their families.

Of course, in the long run, none of this race-related ecological destruction can be confined to one group. The classic case of the massively devastating effects of colonialism might be Oklahoma. Land hungry white settlers swept into this beautiful, green, forested Indian territory. They stripped the land of its ancient and "unproductive" forests to create private agricultural holdings. Within a couple of generations, the loss of the forest affected the climate of the region and produced a sustained drought. The precious topsoil, without the trees to anchor it, dried up and blew away, in the famous "Dust Bowl" of the 30's, driving the white Oklahomans before it.

The issues that are gripping California and the country -- "jobs vs. the environment," crime, immigration -- can all be seen to have roots in systematic and institutional racism and colonialism. The disparities we have touched on here are not statistical flukes, or fadings remnants of earlier discrimination, but evidence of a worsening crisis of racist oppression and exploitation, of marginalization. Similar, and sometimes even worse comparisons can be drawn with the educational, environmental, economic, medical and judicial discrimination against Mexicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; Native Americans, Alaskan Inuits, or indigenous Hawaiians; Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Samoans and other Asians and Pacific Islanders. To ignore this racism and colonialism, or to buy the racist line that whites are now the oppressed minority, is to be incapable of solving any of the problems facing our society.

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stjohnsglobal · 6 years ago

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One of the main themes highlighted by St. John’s University’s Study abroad programs is migration.

There is something amazing about being able to see the sights of Europe: The Eiffel Tower, The Colosseum, Sagrada Familia, and so on. And while I enjoyed getting to see the rich history here and learn all about these historical and sacred places, the thing that I’ve taken away most from my trip abroad is the volume of current things going on in Europe that I simply had no idea, or only a vague idea, about. My theology professor here has been living in Italy for eight years or so, and she says that she remembers how different it is in The United States. It’s like being in your own world entirely, so far removed from other countries. Because of the proximity and relationships within the European Union (EU), I think that it simply isn’t as easy to be disconnected from the rest of the world here. When you add in the size of The United States and relationships with the rest of North America and South America, Europe barely stands a chance to truly enter our news network.

For all of the places I visited, I both intentionally and unintentionally learned more and more about the issues that citizens of the countries were facing. I have been fortunate enough to travel to Paris, Barcelona, Zurich, Edinburgh, Bucharest, and, of course, Rome and around Italy. In this post, I hope to help you to travel with me and see what I’ve learned about these places and their trials. While most of the information has been compiled throughout the semester, I linked some fact-checkers and ways to read/watch more about these issues below.

One of the main themes highlighted by St. John’s University’s Study abroad programs is migration. It is integrated into every class possible, and this has helped me understand the issues. With the current climate all across Europe, there couldn’t be anything more appropriate. The first place I would like to focus on is France. My first stop in Europe was in Paris, France, and I was immediately amazed by its wonder and beauty.

However, there is no question about the political and social turmoil that has been occurring there for years. While many of us have heard about the attacks on Paris and Nice, there is a much deeper disdain toward foreigners that is not far removed from these attacks. In the United States, we refer to ourselves as a melting pot, a blending of cultures to create a diverse society. In France, it couldn’t be more the opposite. A dirty word in American history, assimilation, is their reality. When you are immigrating to France, you are expected to become French. While I’ve noticed that this is a theme around Europe and the hyphenated identities (African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, etc.) of the US don’t exist here, it runs deeper in France. A culture that is not their own is washed away here, especially when it comes to religion. In 2004, French began the consideration of outlawing wearing burqas, hijabs, kippahs, and large displays of crosses. The one that came into effect is of any sort of face-veil, which directly targets Muslims, but it is widely encouraged to not wear any religious symbols and make yourself a target. Outside of religion but not far from it, immigrants tend to be living in suburbs or lower socioeconomic areas of Paris. They isolate themselves because they don’t feel welcome, and they create their own communities that are segregated from the whole of Paris and therefore France. While this brings in the question of open- vs. closed-borders and integration, it also creates a breeding ground for terrorists. In fact, the Paris attacks of 2015 had French natives involved. One of my classes studied how people can feel drawn to join a terrorist group and act when they feel that they are not being represented. In a society where culture erasure is meant to create a unified whole, it instead has created tense relations that have lead to attacks. In the US, we can obviously relate with recent immigrant issues at the forefront of politics.

Rome, and Italy as a whole, had similar issues with immigration. Italy quickly has become the liaison between the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries to the rest of Europe. Many people from MENA countries will enter into Italy through the Mediterranean with the intention of staying until they can make it further north. This has caused a great strain on the economy and relationships between natives and the new demographic. In this country, strict self-segregation can also be seen. In my economics class, we took a trip to a town called Torpignattara, which has been dubbed “Banglatown”. This town is full of heavily concentrated immigrants, many from Bangladesh as implied by the name, and they have made more of a town of their own than become a part of Rome. Their town is filled with stores with their native clothing, food, and other goods. They support their own small economy, not the whole of Rome. Rather, they send a majority of their money home. All of these issues have brought immigration to the forefront of Italy’s political atmosphere. There have even been talks of leaving the EU to allow them to have more ability to control their immigration laws. Another effect that has happened to Italy is called ‘The Brain Drain’. Basically, well-educated individuals are leaving the country in search of better job opportunities. This makes it hard for the country to continue to develop and westernize since the best of the best are leaving.

By far the most interesting thing to learn about was the potential secession of Catalonia from Spain. Catalonia is to Spain what, for example, Pennsylvania is to The United States. While it is just a region, it functions more as a state with its own government. This region includes Barcelona, a city that was my first international trip leaving Rome. Upon arriving, it was clear that there was some strong political movement going on. Every single apartment building had plenty of windows donning the Catalonian flag (which I initially thought were weathered Puerto Rican ones) and signs along the lines of “we won’t be silenced” and “free Catalonia”. Out of intrigue, I did some research while there to try to figure out what was going on. Catalonia is the richest region in Spain, and because of this, they pay high taxes. However, much of that tax money they don’t see coming back to their own region. Rather, it is used for other regions in Spain. Aside from this main issue, Catalonia has an entirely different culture and even their own language, Catalan. Catalan is more similar to Italian and French than Spanish, which definitely threw me off while I was in Barcelona. I am by no means a Spanish speaker, but I think that everyone in the US picks up a few things. Having traveled to Puerto Rico not long ago, I thought I could at least order french fries (papas fritas), but even that wasn’t immediately recognizable (patates fregides). The most interesting part of this whole thing to me was the numbers about who really wants this. 90% of the population that chose to vote in the referendum said that they wanted to secede. There is much more that goes into this whole issue, including violence, some people in jail or in hiding in other countries, and some lost votes. Overall based on what I saw and what the numbers show this is a very real and pressing issue in this area. Because Spain is a country that is in the Western world and there was violence involved, I assume that this is something that I would have heard of. It just enlightened me even further to how little I am in touch with the rest of the world.

When traveling to Switzerland, I figured that this would be an amazing experience to see a flourishing society. While Switzerland is best known for being neutral, making watches, and having thousands of bank accounts, I think that in general it is regarded as a country that has itself together. I know in the past I’ve heard it referred to as the world’s happiest country, so how could it possibly have issues? However, I happened to be in Zurich and fell into the middle of a women’s rights protest. Surprisingly, it was actually quite alarming. While I haven’t attended a women’s march in the United States, I have never seen images of police barricading streets at one of these. That’s usually shown in photos from much more violent events. However, trying to get off the main street where the parade arrived, it was nearly impossible. Police completely lined the surrounding streets with full barricades, even blocking off bridges. While it didn’t seem like it was meant to aggressively prevent violence and maybe rather to keep them on course, it certainly seemed much more like they were expecting a proper riot to begin. Police barricading streets and a large political protest aren’t something that you’d expect from the world’s happiest country in the slightest. When I looked into it, Switzerland was extremely late to the game in allowing women to vote. They did it in 1971. In the US all women and men were not actually allowed to vote until 1964, which isn’t that far off from this time, but at least the premise of women being allowed was introduced earlier. In 1985, a law passed that enforced that husbands no longer legally own their wives, which looking at it from a 2019 lens is absolutely insane. These dates are concerningly late, but the difference in Switzerland is the speed with which things are changing. Since the 1970s, laws about equal pay, equal opportunity, abortion, maternity leave, and more have been coming into place. So, with it’s issues, perhaps Switzerland is the happiest country in the world because of its ability to adapt and learn quickly.

My next stop was Edinburgh, Scotland. At this point, I would say that hopefully most Americans at least have heard of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. Especially with it meaning to be enacted in March and being pushed back, it has been in the news more and more as of late. Still, I wouldn’t say the light is shed on it in America like it was around the time of the original referendum. However, here in Europe it is everywhere. Any time I have been in a place with a radio or the news on, no matter what country I’m in, I have heard the word “Brexit” even if I don’t understand anything else being said. When being in Scotland, you could see posters around either supporting or being against it. There was even a group of guys standing at a popular intersection holding a sign saying “Honk to Stop Brexit!”. In my travel plans, I made sure to have my trip occur before the date they were meant to leave the EU, simply because I didn’t know how it would change me travelling from Italy to the UK. Because I have friends that live in the UK and hope to one day study there, Brexit is something that I have been trying to follow as it goes on. Interestingly, I learned more about what the issues are through my Current Terrorist Movements government class I’m taking here. I was assigned an essay about the issues between England and Ireland in the past, which are still strongly rooted in today’s issues. With Northern Ireland being a part of the UK and Ireland not being a part of it, the biggest issue with Brexit at the moment is how trade will continue between these two regions. When that border has been closed in the past, it has led to great violence. Both of these countries being a part of the EU was a great solution because of the free movement of people and goods. While trade with the rest of the world is in question as well, this specific issue is one of the main reasons that the British Parliament has had issues with actually leaving the EU. Each deal that has been proposed either will lead to this chaos or won’t lead to a proper secession from the EU in the long run. Like I said, I have been keeping some track of this issue, but I think that it has quickly fallen out of the American mainstream media since the referendum. Great Britain is a global superpower and has always had strong ties with The United States, so any issues in their economy and global status will massively affect ours and other countries.

With my time in Europe, it was important for me to visit some part of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe has a rich and complicated past, and the effects of it are still incredibly impactful on these countries today. I would say that I have never really properly learned about the real issues there other than “the USSR was bad, and we still might not be a fan of Russia.” This trip was very enlightening for me to see a little bit more about at least one place there. I was able to visit Bucharest, Romania, which is formerly communist, supported by although not officially a part of the Soviet Union. On a tour, I learned all about their history, and I found it incredibly interesting. Romania has only been a unified country since the 1860s. Everyone calls America a baby of a country, but this is even more so by a century. They decided to have a monarchy, but their monarchy fell not long after it was put into place. Their last king was forced to renounce his crown by the communist party that came into place. After the communist party was taken down through the execution of the leader and his wife, the people actually wanted the last king to come back and to resume the monarchy. However, the crooked government that is currently in power had exiled the king, therefore not allowing him to come back into power despite the people’s want. Their current government is run by the Social Democratic Party, but the party is not favored by the people. In 2017, they saw intense riots revolving around the corruption in the country. There was a law attempted to be passed that would erase charges and free prisoners that were charged with government corruption. In easy terms, they were trying to pass a corrupt law to free corrupt friends that had just been charged with their crimes. While their issues with corruption are slowly getting better, they have been called one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. My tour guide noted that there is not a single day that there is not a protest outside of their parliament; even if it is just a few people, there is always something.

So what is the point of all of this? The United States needs to be more in touch with the rest of the world. While, of course, we should focus on our own issues, the unity of Europe is something to be desired. They all know what is going on in their surrounding countries, whereas I couldn’t even tell you what’s happening in most of the whole of America. Even one tour that was in Italy had made a joke about Barcelona and whether or not they will be a part of Spain soon, and I was proud that I was actually able to follow along. Having this knowledge makes you have a greater worldview and perspective on politics. In fact, by knowing more about what other countries are dealing with and laws and measures they have put into plan, we can take a look at our own country and scrutinize and change laws to make it a better country. St. John’s University has four words in its mission: Catholic, Vincentian, Metropolitan, and Global. The first three are things that I had experienced while studying in New York, but I couldn’t be more grateful to have gotten in touch with the global aspect. There is only so much World News with David Muir can cover, so education systems, international news sources, and most importantly individuals need to make a point to learn more about what’s going on in the world. While I still would say I’m highly ignorant to South America, Africa, and Asia, at the very least I have started my knowledge journey here in Europe and intend to continue it.

Rebeka Humbrecht, Spring 2019

Social Media Ambassador

Further Readings:

France

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/08/europe/2015-paris-terror-attacks-fast-facts/index.html

http://theconversation.com/the-long-troubled-history-of-assimilation-in-france-51530

Italy

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/835661/Italy-migrant-crisis-EU-Europe-borders-immigration-issue

Spain

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/oct/01/catalan-independence-referendum-spain-catalonia-vote-live

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/09/29/the-referendum-in-catalonia-explained/

Switzerland

https://www.thelocal.ch/20170308/12-fascinating-facts-about-the-history-of-womens-rights-in-switzerland

United Kingdom

(These are more biased, but do a really great job at laying it out.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgKHSNqxa8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyVz5vgqBhE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBQfSAVt0s

Romania

http://time.com/4660860/romania-protests-corruption-problem/

https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/romania/

#internationaleducation #sjurome #studyabroad #sjuparis #exploreeurope #globalstudies #sjuglobal #migrationineurope #discovereurope #internationalstudies

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to-learn-of-living · 8 years ago

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SPACE WARS!

Episode XLV - A New Hope?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

There are few movie series as iconic as Star Wars. With the original trilogy George Lucus showed the world that science fiction doesn't have to be B grade movies with laughable special 'effects'. He gave us a galaxy full of races, an ancient religion, and well crafted characters to both love and hate.

In the original movie we meet Luke Skywalker, a teenager with a boring life, who joins a group of rebels and goes on adventures after his family are murdered. The movies paint an overly simplistic view of who's good and bad - you’re on the 'light side’ or the ‘dark side'! We know that in A New Hope our rag tag team of rebels are ‘good’ while Darth Vader and his cronies are ‘bad’. It’s that simple.

But real life is never that simple.

When we read up on history, we look through our own lens of understanding. Our literature tells us that the good guy always wins, so we often apply that logic unconsciously onto the past.

Why did the allies win the 2nd world war? Because we had the right ideology and God on our side!

Why did the Europeans defeat the North American natives? Because they had the right ideology and God on their side!

Why is Australia the greatest country on earth? Because our culture is the best, and we were founded on Christian Values.

Now I know not everyone reading this believes in God, and certainly not everyone thinks Australia is the best country on earth (although if you’re honest, I'm willing to bet that in at least some point of your life you truly believed your own country was the greatest). But the same basic idea stands. We are so immersed in our own culture that we assume uncociously that it's the best possible culture. We look at our history and see that we were victorious in our battles, so logically, we are the good guys!

A week ago the majority of my country celebrated Australia day. However, a growing number of people each year refuse to take part, not because they are unpatriotic, but because of the disturbing history behind the day.

26 January marks the arrival of the 'First Fleet' of British settlers to Australian shores. This week I've seen many people posting articles about how Sir Arther Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, brought Christianity to Australia in the form of Reverend Richard Johnso who ministered to the convicts and settlers. Johnso built the first school only 5 years later! Sir Arther Phillip built infrastructure and started agriculture. It many ways, if it wasn't for Phillip, modern Australia wouldn't exist! Looking at these facts in isolation, it's easy to see why many Australians see the First Fleet as a great moment of our history!

English: The Founding of Australia, 26 January 1788, by Captain Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove. Original oil sketch [1937] by Algernon Talmage R.A. ML 1222. source: wikimedia

But I’ve also seen many articles on the horrors of the first fleet. Phillip was quite peaceful towards the local Eora Aboriginals, and when he was speared because of a misunderstanding, he ordered his men not to retaliate. However, although not sanctioned by Phillip, many new settlers were outright hostile to the locals from the start. The colonists presence led to the suffering and deaths of many Eora people due to the introduction of smallpox and other diseases that the locals had no immunity to. While this didn't kill everyone, within two generations the Eura people's language, social structure and culture was lost. And that's without going into the brutality of Phillip's successors who orderd full scale irradication of Aboriginal people and/or forcible removal from their tribal land.

We like to paint history with 'heroes' and 'villains', But reality is a lot harder to define than Star Wars. If we look only at the facts, Phillip tried to help people like a Jedi, but his actions caused horrific consequences like a Sith. Don't get me wrong, he probably couldn't comprehend that his actions would lead to the extermination of entire people groups, but that's how history played out. He wasn't a hero or a villain, but exists somewhere in between like all the rest of us regular Joe's.

In Star Wars, like in history, we see a very one sided story. Throughout the series we only see life from the point of view of the republic/rebels/resistance - the 'light side' of the force. It tells a tale of how the galaxy was once a happy place, until an evil Sith manipulates a young Jedi to embrace the dark side and enforce a dictatorship. But let me tell you the story from another point of view.

You live in a galaxy with a so called government, but only one member of each planet can be elected to the senate, and even then only the important planets get any real say in proceedings. The races who own many planets get many seats, while the poor races who share a planet with others may get none.

Crime runs rampant in the outer planets, much like the 'verse of Firefly. Sure there's a galactic police force of amazing space wizards known as Jedi, but there are too few of them to really control the entire galaxy. If you come from an 'unimportant' planet you could wait months for a Jedi to turn up, and even then their roles are so politicised that they may not even be allowed to help you.

Suddenly a member of the senate rises from the ranks. He represents an old marginalised alternate religion. He seizes power and overthrows the old system of government. He implements a proper police force (storm troopers) on every planet. Their methods might be a little harsh, but you can't argue with the results!

Everything’s going well for you for a while, until the terrorists begin their attacks. No one really takes them seriously, at least not until one cell blows up a space station as big as a moon, containing millions of police, business owners, janitors, cooks, and many others. You had friends murdered in their cowardly attack.

The terrorists get more and more daring until they eventually break into Palpatines’ chamber and murder him in cold blood - at least that's what Jenny heard from her cousins friend... They attempt to start a new government. But successful rebellions usually cause political turmoil. In fact the fall out confirms that you were far better off under the emperor, especially because crime is now running rampant!

Then you hear about a resistance group called ‘The First Order’. They seek to restore the empire like in the good old days. They're even trying to reinstate the police force. Maybe you should encourage your firstborn son Flynn to enlist...

…Ok so it’s a big stretch to forgive all of that murder Darth Vader and Siddious committed, but in a gigantic galaxy there would be very few people who’ve actually met either of them. Their actions would probably turn into urban myths. 'Eat your vegetables dear or Darth Vader will get you'.

source: Google Images

The weird thing about Star Wars, and a lot of stories for that matter, is that we applaud the same behaviour that we despise in real life. We are happy when the Jedi kill people and blow stuff up, because they’re the good guys. But we can’t tolerate that behaviour in the Sith... or any rebellious behaviour from liberals/conservatives/democrats/republicans/Christians/atheists/Muslims/ anyone who is not like us.

‘If I can't see the problem, it doesn't exist. Therefore the other side are just being babies who need to get over themselves!’

For many conservatives, Obama was an evil dictator who created a race problem in America by pandering to each passing fancy of the black community. But to many African-Americans, Obamas presidency was a huge disappointment, and they feel like the systematic racism in America is just as bad now as it was 8 years ago.

To some, Donald Trump a saviour who is restoring goodness and order to America. To others he is akin to hitler, tearing apart the hard won rights of minorities everywhere. Both sides shout at the other ‘you don't understand the facts'.

But just because you can't see a problem, it doesn't mean it’s not real.

I've written before about how our inbuilt biases shape our view of the world, and shared pieces showing reality from both sides. I’ve also written a piece pleading with liberals to not let their fear turn into hate. These are all problems that need to be addressed. But this week I'm far more disappointed in conservative Christians.

Let me be clear, I know the women's march contained fowl language and violence from some members. I know you are scared about the security of your nation. I know you think we should celebrate the arrival of the first fleet. But by complaining about dissenters without trying to understand why they're so upset, you fail to show them the love of Christ.

So what if they're violent/angry/treat you badly. It's Christians who are mandated to live lives of love, not anyone else! Most people only turn to extreme measures when they've given up hope of their problems being resolved any other way.

This week I saw Christians complain that the 'woman's march doesn't represent them’, instead of sitting with hurting women and trying to understand what they're going through. I heard Christians shout at indigenous Australians for being ‘unpatriotic’, instead of validating their hurt and seeking forgiveness for their ansestors atrocities. I saw Christians who have been demanding the government adapt a 'biblical view' on gay marriage and abortion for years, despite there being no direct scripture on those subjects, do a 180 degree turn and say helping refugees is ‘not a biblical issue’. In reality almost every book of the bible talks of taking care of immigrants and/or careing for widows and orphans, and the Holy Family were refugees in Egypt!

Many Christians point to the story of Sodom and Gemorrah as 'proof' that same-sex practices are bad. But read the story again - nowhere in Genesis does God ever say what the sin of those cities was. But God tells us Sodem's sin when he compares Jerusalem to an adulterous spouse in Ezekiel. I'm ashamed to say this could easily have been written to either American or Australian Christians this week.

“Your older sister was Samaria, who lived to the north of you with her daughters; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you with her daughters, was Sodom. You not only followed their ways and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways you soon became more depraved than they. As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they, and have made your sisters seem righteous by all these things you have done. Bear your disgrace, for you have furnished some justification for your sisters. Because your sins were more vile than theirs, they appear more righteous than you. So then, be ashamed and bear your disgrace, for you have made your sisters appear righteous.”

Ezekiel 16:46-52 (NIV) - emphases mine

But in the darkness this week, I've seen the love of Christ shine in different ways. Like these lawyers who rushed to airports to provide free legal services to travels detained even though they had legal visas. Like Freemantle in Western Australia, who's council chose to move their Australia Day celebrations in an attempt to include everyone. Like my friends who are pro-life Christians, yet chose to march in solidarity with hurting women, because they wanted to show God's love.

I want to finish by sharing the words of a friend of mine. You can read his whole post here.

"I did not march in protest of anything, I marched to show love, support and compassion with those who feel none. I marched because I wanted my daughter to know that she could participate in a peaceful march like this, without hate or violence, and stand with those who hurt. We don’t have to share peoples convictions, beliefs or lifestyle, but it doesn’t mean that we, the church, shouldn’t be in the same spaces that these people are in, standing side by side with people who don’t look like us, act like us, talk like us or believe like us. In fact, those are the places we need to be.

The event was beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. There were signs of hope, raised beside signs of hatred and anger. There were people cheering and full of joy, standing beside others who were hopeless and tearing others down. There were things that I was proud for my daughter to see, and things that I wish she never had to see, or see again. There were people booing Trump for his policies, asking for a better America, and highlighting their conviction of pro choice over pro life. It was a beautiful mix of love and hate that Jesus was right in the middle of, and that my daughter and I were in the middle of as well."

#Donald Trump #obama #Christianity #australian christian #mystic #christian mysticism #star wars #the force #darth vader #luke skywalker #women's march #republican #democrat #cuture #australia day #change the date #death star #sorry #aboriginal

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manwithasociologyblog · 6 years ago

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This is an interview with my grandmother who is from Cuba but has lived in North America and Europe. She was a Marxist activist when she was younger and a history teacher, and later a nurse. I translated and rephrased the dialogue as we discussed these things in Spanish. I decided to conduct and interview with her to see her opinions about how youth in the nations she's live in treat their elders, what changes can be made, and her thoughts about my project.

Me: Hello, abuela [grandma] I will ask you a few questions if you don't mind.

Abuela: Please, go ahead.

Me: You have lived both in Cuba and Canada, do you see a difference between how elders are treated in both nations?

Abuela: Yes, of course. In Canada you don't see many elderly people outside enjoying the joys of life. They do not get much respect from the youth and are shoved away from the mainstream. Often isolated. Often placed into nursing homes. In Cuba the elderly are everywhere conversing in the streets, with both old and young. They are welcomed in many venues. They are invited to street parties by the young. They play dominoes with both old and young neighbours. The young enjoy listening them sing and play son and guajiras.

Me: You also lived in Europe too, specifically Spain. In class we learned that in "Hispanic cultures" there is an emphasis on respect to elders, do you agree?

[My grandma is confused what Hispanic actually means, since the notion of Hispanicness is something that's only widespread among Anglo Americans. The term Hispano in Cuba was actually only used to refer to white Cubans, and not mixed, Afro or Asian-Cubans who made up the rest of the population.]

Abuela: The Spaniards are different than those in the Caribbean who are different than those in south America. We here in the Caribbean and south America have got our culture from Spain but in Cuba we also have got it from Africans. In Peru they have from Incas. So all our cultures are different. I believe its true that the Spanish culture from Europe was the strongest and had the most impact on us, but if anything Spain itself has changed very. To consider the culture of Spain similar to that of Cuba is akin to considering the culture of Jamaica to that of England.

Me: So do you think Spaniards and Cubans differ in their views of the elderly?

Abuela: My father was born in rural Catalonia [Spain] and he would always say that in Catalonia people worshipped their elders, and he unfortunately didn't see that in Cuba. Cuba in the late 1950s was developing quickly and a lot of traditional values like love for the grandparents that originated in Spain were disappearing in Cuba. It may be because the revolution that Cuba went back to traditional norms or maybe it was his preception in differences between the rural Catalan area opposed to the Cuban city-life, or what it meant to respect the elder because for my father it was a sin to even speak against his parents, but the culture in Spain as of now is not the same as it was. Spain has become like other western European countries, where their is more worship of self, material, and youth and older people are not respected as they were. I still think it is still more traditional than Canada just like France is, but I think the wealthier countries have all become similar in their disregard for the old.

Me: I see

Abuela: You mentioned Hispanos [again Hispanos in her mind refers to white people; as Anglo is generally used to refer to white Americans], well I do think there is something to it. The Hispanos of western Cuba were becoming similar to that of the North American and Western European people, and that's possibly what my father saw. Cuba was heavily Americanized before the revolution and this was especially true of western Cuba and upper strat of western Cuba dominated by whites. Spain was changing in that time and millions of Spaniards, many fromt he cities, were immigrating to Cuba, particularly the west and they were bringing those additional values too. So my fathers views of Cuba's more richer white population might've been what made gave him that pov. I think that once these countries start becoming richer and the focus becomes on egotism and materialism, that's when elders are forgotten. I lived also in Ukraine and the values there are similar to Cuba even now.

Me: In what way do you think they're the same and why?

Abuela: the respect for the elder and the place of the elder among people, even the youth is there. Ukrainian people are very respectful of their grandparents and they love learning their traditions from them. This is why Cuba and Ukraine to me are very similar. Spain to me has become as foreign as Canada.

Me: But what do you think makes both Cuba and Ukraine so different than Spain and Canada?

Abuela: Both Cuba and Ukraine are poor and both have a history of communism. In communist societies there was a push the revere the old, as there was a push to revere the contribution of all people in the nation. In the end too Cubas culture is largely European and Christian and so all four of those countries have similarties, but I think the economic development in Canada and Ukraine is what made them change. Cuba and Ukraine retain those old European values from times past. In western Cuba it was the Palestinos who helped reawaken those values which had started to change before the revolution. If it wasn't for the revolution Cuba would probably be no different.

[Palestinos is a Cuban term for post-revolutionary migrants from Eastern Cuba to Western Cuba, a large influx of them have come to the more economically developed western Cuba, especially Havana since the exile and emigration of much of the middle and upper-class (white) Cuban population left a lot of uninhabited areas in the region. Historically, Western Cuba was predominately white, while Eastern Cuba was predominately mixed and black, much of the Palestino population is Afro-Cuban]

Me: That's kind of odd to hear you say that Palestinos, who are largely Afro-Cuban would be the ones who brought back "traditional European values."

Abuela: People from the Oriente [Eastern Cuba] were largely poor and illiterate, they only knew what they had been taught for hundreds of years, whether black or white. The Spaniards repressed the Africans they brought to Cuba of their native cultures and assimilated them into their own, this is the reason why. However, respect of elders is not just not found in European cultures but also in African ones. In fact I don't think it was only Spanish values but also the values found in Lukumi (an Afro Cuban religion my grandmother practices), where the ancestors are seen as deities and the elder babalawos (priests). Many Cubans now both white and black practice Lukumi and in fact maybe these ideas have helped maintain that respect as well in the general culture.

Me: Maybe, do you.. [she cut me]

Abuela: But what I wanted to make a point to say that it goes beyond European or African and in all cultures there was a respect for elders. Its in modern times that the richer western countries have began to lose that respect.

[after explaining the difference between individualist and collectivist cultures to her]

Me: do you think the lingering forms of collectivism in Cuba and Ukraine have played a role in this?

Abuela: Exactly. In Cuba and Ukraine people still often live with their families, the traditional familiar roles are still established, so the elders are always seen as the most respected in the household and this carries on to other parts of the society. The "indepdendence" [individualist] culture of Canadians doesn't maintain those family units. Kids are kicked out of their homes at the age of 18 and families do not live together. There are not such tight bonds and familial roles as in there are in our countries.

Me: How about the rise in technology, do you think that plays a part?

Abuela: Yes that too. When we were young we learned from our parents and grantparents, books could only tell so much and many rural people in Cuba couldn't read. Computers were not around. My grandmother would take me mushroom foraging and she would know which mushrooms were poisonous by the smell alone. We relied on our elders for many life skills, now people turn to skype and other things.

Me: Skype, lol? Do you mean google?

Abuela: Yes, that thing [in a vulgar way; she's not too fond of the internet]

Me: What things do you think elders could teach young people about the modern world?

Abuela: Many things!

Me: Like what?

Abuela: Well young people are crazy about nature [the environment] and saving the planet. They don't like chemicals in food. And other things, they want to be more natural, those in your generation. They want to go back living how we did [in terms of health]. God forbid, but I realized a lot of young people in Canada do not even know how to cook. I'm positive many Canadian elders know how to, so elders could help teach them. Young people complain that they don't have time, but there are many old ways of naturally perserving things, all it takes is dedicating a day and you can eat jared things for a month instead of going to McDonalds daily.

Me: What types of foods do you have in mind?

Abuela: Vegetables, Fruits, even meats. Cereals are easy to preserve and don't take long to prepare, I don't think the excuse of time is a good one. Going back to these old ways could not only be efficient but the healthy choice young [something akin to health-nuts?] are looking for. These skills can be taught by elders who knew these methods.

Me: A lot of environmentalists are also fond of the idea of growing their own fruits and vegetables..

Abuela: That is a good thing! And that is another thing elders can teach them.

Me: Which reminds me how you and abuelo taught me to properly cut and plant sugar cane with all the correct techniques.

Abuela: Yes, while your brother couldn't even keep a house plant alive now.

Me: [laughing] ... I told you about the plans for my projects, what do you think of my idea for creating such organizations that would bring elders and youth in communities together?

Abuela: I love the idea, I wish it could be visualized in real life.

Me: I do believe there are many organizations that are trying to do just that, though.

Abuela: I'm happy to hear, I wish them the best of luck. It will be tough.

Me: Anyways, do you think elders around the world face prejudice and discrimination, and if so in what way?

Abuela: Yes, of course! There are many ways but largely when it comes to employment and health. People see us as fragile and don't take us seriously when we want to work, they disregard us and complain that we are taking up spaces for the young. But many of us still need to work.

Cris: You also said health, what do you mean?

Abuela: Oh, yes. In the health sector many elders face abuse, discrimination, and neglect. Doctors do not take our concerns seriously, and many don't want to treat us the way they would younger people, because of our old age. We are not treated as equals by them in the way younger people are. This is in Cuba as much as in Canada.

Me: What do you think stands in the way of elders in Canada being given the respect they once had or at least becoming more present in Canadian society?

Abuela: I think there's many things. One problem is how diverse Canada is now...

Me: Diverse? But Cuba is also diverse and you say it doesn't have the same problem, so what do you mean?

Abuela: Yes Cuba is like Canada, with many races but all Cuban. My friends and neighbours are black, they're white, Mulatos [term for mixed race in Cuba], Chinitos [term for Asian Cubans], Turcos and Rusos even [Turks and Russians, both incorrectly used for mostly Lebanese Arabs and Eastern Europeans in general]... but in Cuba we had a strong push for nationalism and cultural homogenity. My father didn't teach me Catalan but only Spanish. Most Cubans who have parents or grandparents from non-Castillian [Spanish] areas were pushed to assimilate to Cuban culture. For this reason Cubans do not have much cultural tensions, because we are different races but all Cuban and all share Cuban culture. In Canada its not the same.

Me: So you're saying that Canada's multiculturalism is an issue?

Abuela: It's only one of them, but yes. I personally like the idea of multiculturalism and don't like the fact that my father and my grandfather were pressured to give up their cultures, but it did create a larger overall communal feeling. I don't see that in Canada unfortunately. This is especially so with older people. They often feel isolated, particularly if they don't speak English. So they stay within their communities if they are immigrants. Its difficult in Canada because as long as you have people speaking different languages, I don't think there could be true cultural unity among people and this will always cause splinters and make it hard to organize such things. Even when I lived in Canada I felt very isolated when your parents and siblings or the rest of the family were not around. I did not feel very welcome or the sense of community I feel in Cuba or even in Europe. Canadians can be occasionally helpful but I feel they are cold people. If you could reach out to the older people who are not part of the mainstream society, that could help a lot.

Me: I see. What other factors stand in the way?

Abuela: the general modern attitudes and culture, people are glued to their computer screens, they have little time for each other, let alone older people. I fear the same will happen in Cuba as the country develops and becomes wealthier.

Me: I told you about the replacement rates in countries like Cuba and Canada and how they're much, much lower than they should be. What do you think could happen if these attitudes aren't changed?

Abuela: It hurts my heart to think about it. The west will be filled with abandoned and neglected old people, suffering from depressions, and other aliments. This is why I think things have to change and the youth must think about the elders again, because eventually one day they will be in the same positions as us.

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touristguidebuzz · 8 years ago

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President Obama’s U.S. Travel Legacy After Eight Years as Tourist-in-Chief

President Obama's tourism legacy is mostly positive but key challenges remain. Pictured is Obama touring the Treasury in the ancient city of Petra, Jordan in 2013. Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press

Skift Take: Few other presidents have done as much for the U.S. travel industry as President Obama and by many measures he will hand Donald Trump a healthy and growing industry. But some of the Obama Administration's tourism goals — programs and initiatives — while steps in the right direction, still leave plenty to be desired and require renewed efforts.

— Dan Peltier

No matter which side of the aisle you stand on, there’s no arguing that some of the most memorable moments of U.S. President Barack Obama’s presidency involve his more than 156 trips abroad to more than 50 countries.

In the past year, the president made historic visits to Hiroshima, Japan; Havana, Cuba; and Hanoi, Vietnam that embodied the unofficial “tourist-in-chief” moniker he’s earned during his eight years in office. He’s logged more than half a million miles of travel on Air Force One and last year brought U.S. National Parks back into the spotlight for their centennial anniversary when the First Family visited Yosemite National Park in June.

Under Obama and his administration, the Travel Promotion Act that created Brand USA — the country’s first national marketing arm — was signed into law in 2010, more countries joined the visa waiver program, visa wait times were slashed, the TSA PreCheck program was created and the Global Entry program was expanded, and the number of international travelers entering the U.S. each year between 2009 and 2016 has grown by more than 40 percent, for example.

In 2012 the president also announced a plan to help attract more than 100 million international travelers to visit the U.S. each year by 2021.

For U.S. citizen international travel, some 38.8 million U.S. travelers took trips overseas or to Canada or Mexico during the height of the Great Recession in 2009 and nearly 80 million likely traveled internationally last year (more than a 100 percent increase) as totals for November and December haven’t been released.

He also eased restrictions on travel between the U.S. and Cuba for the first time in six decades.

But can the Obama Administration take credit for all of these tourism achievements such as the overall growth of travel within and into and out of the U.S. during the past eight years?

As President Obama leaves office this week and hands the keys to Donald Trump and his incoming cabinet, Skift talked to three tourism and hospitality professors at U.S. colleges and universities, the U.S. Travel Association, and Brand USA for their opinions on the matter and what kind of legacy the Obama Administration will leave behind in the travel industry and the tourism challenges that remain.

President Obama’s Evolution on the Travel Industry

Unlike many countries, the U.S. doesn’t have a ministry of tourism to help promote its cities and states abroad.

The Travel Promotion Act gave cities and states a national marketing arm to work with and many previously had no global marketing exposure, said Kristin Lamoureux, associate dean of New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. “For the first time you were seeing a unified tourism message coming out of the U.S.,” she said.

“We certainly spent enough time talking about [the Travel Promotion Act] and that was probably the crowning moment for Obama as far as tourism legislation. We also now have a deputy director of tourism,” said Lamoureux.

Obama showed a relatively fast revolution in how he regarded the importance of the travel industry from when he took office in January 2009, said Lamoureux. “You have to remember back in 2009 when the president first came into office it was a bit of a rocky time,” she said. “There was negative press regarding meetings and events. You had a president who came in and said we need to look at government spending at government events and now he’s gone full circle and has talked about travel’s value to the economy.”

Obama also signed the Native Travel Act in September 2016 that requires the department of commerce, the department of the interior, and federal agencies with recreational travel or tourism functions to update their management plans and tourism initiatives to include Indian tribes, tribal organizations, and Native Hawaiian organizations.

“National Parks and Native American communities are number one after gateway cities for U.S. destinations that international travelers want to visit,” said Lamoureux. “This law tells federal agencies to come up with a strategy for how they’ll support tourism at the tribal level.”

“I think when you see a president traveling around the world and sharing that experience but also traveling around the U.S. in the national parks when we’re at a critical time for the environment and that topic is often in the news, I think we can’t underestimate that,” she said.

Promoting the U.S. Abroad and at Home

The president met with travel industry organization and brand CEOs four times during his two terms, according to Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. “This administration understood that travel is a way to create jobs,” said Dow. “About 972,000 jobs in travel have been added since 2009 and that’s 17 percent faster than the overall U.S. economy.”

Brand USA’s president and CEO Christopher Thompson, in an interview with Skift earlier in 2016, said the fact that the organization was reauthorized a year ahead of schedule demonstrates the bipartisan support for the travel industry that has grown under Obama.

“We have one-on-one conversations, at the invitation of members of Congress, who ask us to come in and tell us what we’re doing,” said Thompson. “We’re able to go in there, virtually for every state, and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing in an umbrella. Marketing and promotion of all 50 states, five territories, and the District. Here’s specifically for your state and for your constituents.'”

There’s also been a shift in the past 10 years in U.S. destination marketing organizations from being mainly sales organizations to marketing organizations, said Bryan Lavin, a professor at Johnson & Wales University’s school of hospitality.

“DMO value proposition has shifted, but not necessarily because of Obama,” said Lavin. “Destination marketers have also shifted marketing efforts to attract people to move to cities and live there. The thinking is, ‘if we attract the young hip, startups, for example, we have them for life.'”

Obama Vs. Past Presidents on Travel

Barack Obama was the first sitting U.S. president to sit down with the travel industry around a table and discuss the challenges facing tourism.

“President George W. Bush had also done good things related to tourism but Obama realized that travel is the only export that you consume at the point of production,” said Lamoureux.

Dow said Obama added nine visa waiver countries since taking office, more than his predecessors Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “When South Korea was added visits from that country went up 18 percent, for example,” he said. “I also think the administration did a very good job on China. They put in place a 10-year visa for Chinese travelers and that took about 40 percent of Chinese travelers to the U.S. out of visa lines.”

Obama made fewer international trips than his Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and visited fewer countries than both Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama also visited China, the world’s largest outbound market three times during his presidency compared to George W. Bush’s four visits and Bill Clinton’s one visit.

Obama: The Tourist-in-Chief

President Obama made it a point to build in time to sightsee on many of his foreign trips and state visits, which is nearly the opposite of his predecessor George W. Bush, The New York Times reported in October.

Obama, like many business travelers, tried to soak up local culture during his trips and connect with local people. In May 2016 the president shared a bun cha dinner with Anthony Bourdain at a restaurant in Hanoi, Vietnam for Bourdain’s show “Parts Unknown.”

“The Hanoi dinner was a very very unique moment,” said Lamoureux. “We tend to think of the presidency as having a lot of state travel but not really getting down to the local people. It’s impressive for the president of the U.S. to sit down in a people’s restaurant where normal people eat.”

The Obama-Bourdain dinner helped break down the stereotypes of the dangers of travel, said Lamoureux. “It takes away the fear that you have to isolate yourself from locals when you travel.”

But Obama demonstrated his break-down-barriers-to-travel theme much earlier in his presidency, said Dow. “With the gulf oil spill in 2010, the president took one of his daughters to the gulf and hopped in the water,” he said. “Many people probably thought, ‘if president is in the Gulf, how bad can it be?'”

The First Family’s visit to Havana, Cuba in March 2016 was symbolic for family travel, Lamoureux said. “There’s a video clip of the trip with Malia Obama translating to a waiter for her father at a restaurant the First Family had dinner at,” she said. “It was really such a unique moment in time — he’s one of the most powerful people in the world and his daughter is supporting his inter-cultural communication. Yet it was a very informal moment and conversation and to me it was a really powerful message for the value of family travel and how special that can be.”

The significance of the first African American First Family also can’t be overlooked, said Lamoureux. African American travelers were one of the fastest growing U.S. traveler demographics in 2015, according to Mandala Research, a hotel and tourism market research firm. Some 17 percent of African-Americans take one or more international trips per year and spend $48 billion on travel each year.

Where Did Obama Fall Short on Tourism?

The U.S. travel industry is in a better place in 2017 than it was eight years ago, according to everyone interviewed for this story. But the Obama Administration will leave behind unfinished tourism business that must be addressed.

First, the future of the visa waiver program. “The visa waiver program is an incredibly important program with a very bad name,” said Lamoureux. “The 38 countries that make up the program fees from these visitors is offsetting the cost of marketing the U.S. There was significant opposition to the program even though people didn’t really know what it was.”

There are programs like TSA PreCheck and Global Entry, which Dow said still aren’t where they need to be and have struggled to grow membership. Brand USA is also having trouble reaching its tourism goals, hampered this year by a stronger dollar.

The Obama Administration also couldn’t settle the debate over Open Skies between U.S. and gulf carriers. “The administration didn’t make a decision on Open Skies but they held it off,” said Dow.

Obama’s announcement on January 19, 2012 of an executive order to increase travel to the U.S. and bolster the visa waiver program is one of the only tourism achievements of the administration, said Abraham Pizam, dean of the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “With the exception of the visa waiver program, all the other initiatives were good intentions and good words…but the federal government can’t really take any credit for much else as far as travel,” he said. “These were very similar talks to previous administrations.”

Pizam feels the U.S. federal government doesn’t have a lot of influence in promoting the tourism industry. “There are officials in other countries that travel to promote their tourism industry,” he said. “The only thing the federal government can claim credit for is making the visa process more efficient, something that the federal government actually did do.”

Much of the developed world eventually bounced back from the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 that led to more money for travel to the U.S., which Obama can’t entirely peg to his efforts.

The U.S. also isn’t a member of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) which the U.S. previously withdrew from. “It would have been great if we had been able to reenter the UNWTO,” said Lamoureux. “There are a lot of countries part of UNWTO talking about tourism strategy and the U.S. isn’t at that table. We have an affiliate membership but not a national membership.”

And then there is Americans’ vacation problem. A Skift survey from September found more than half of Americans took little to no vacation last summer, for example. “Unused time-off is a liability on the books for companies, said Lamoureux. “I think, however, that more Americans are at least aware of taking time-off and it’s now on the national radar.”

The long-term impact — and Obama’s role in helping the no vacation nation dilemma — is uncertain. “It continues to get easier to travel,” said Lamoureux. “It’s fairly easy for Americans to travel abroad and costs of travel remain fairly stable. But Americans are still faced with a bit of a challenge with taking time-off.”

Obama’s Meetings and Events Legacy

After coming out as a foe to conferences and events, at least those attended by federal employees, Obama’s comments early in his presidency helped the meetings industry grow stronger since he took office, said Lavin.

Lavin, who has worked with Meetings Professionals International and worked to promote meetings and events at Choose Chicago and the Providence, Rhode Island Convention & Visitors Bureau during the Obama years, said Obama’s comments about how federal employees shouldn’t go to Vegas on the taxpayer’s dime was a turning point for the sector.

“The Vegas comments helped people understand the impact that conferences are having on their destinations,” said Lavin. “When Obama first came into office the meetings industry wasn’t doing a good job at telling the story of who we were so those comments made sense to make. So they became the rallying cry for our industry to pull itself together.”

Smaller cities like Providence now get more consideration from meeting planners, said Lavin. “I think it’s no longer a buyers or sellers market, I think it’s right down the middle with meetings and events,” he said.

U.S. Tourism After Obama

After eight years of Obama all eyes are on Donald Trump and his incoming administration as to what pieces of Obama’s tourism legacy will be picked up.

One thing is certain — there’s never been a hotelier as president. “For the travel industry, there are reasons to be optimistic,” said Lamoureux. “Will Trump promote tourism as his own industry? For the first time a tourism president is actually the president of the U.S.”

Dow feels Trump could help bring more jobs to the travel industry. “He understands the hospitality business,” he said. “But when it comes to immigration and his proposals in that area it could have a negative impact on travelers that come to the U.S.”

Domestic travel is one area Trump can really focus on, too, said Dow. “It looks like infrastructure is a priority for Trump and we certainly need upgrades to our nation’s airports,” he said.

Global travel will naturally continue to increase and more travelers will likely continue to visit the U.S. with or without the help of the Trump Administration. Combine the rise in travel with streamlined visa processes that have proven effective and it’s clear President Obama will hand Trump a healthy and vibrant industry.

Below is a clip of Anthony Bourdain discussing his dinner in Vietnam with Obama.

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