On Obama's Birth Certificate

I was going to blog about President Obama releasing the long version of his birth certificate yesterday but my friend from Nigeria did it a lot better than I ever could:

I am a firm believer in the inner goodness of every human being in spite of their colour. I approached this country and people with the same open mindedness and was – like everyone else around the world – ecstatic and absolved when Obama was elected in 2008 in spite of what many considered his biggest obstacle: the colour of his skin. And then, from then, disappointed as to how every criticism of his policies seemed to come with something more than just a mere disagreement with economic policies. The press conference by Mr. Trump exemplified for me an unfortunate culmination of an underlying culture of intolerance. . . I don’t think that many Americans realize just how bad this reflects on the country to the rest of the world, and that makes it a little more unfortunate. I’m not American and may never try to be one. But seeing how the country treats its own and one of its best leaves very much to be desired. 

You can read the post in its entirety here.

A Confederate Handbag

I'm sorry that the picture is blurry. It was quite dark in
the store, and I did the best I could with my cell
phone camera

I wanted to buy a little handbag for my niece who is almost 14 months old. So I saw what looked like a cute toddler handbag in a store and grabbed it. I almost bought it when I realized that its bow was in the colors of the Confederate flag. There was also a little appliqued picture saying "The South Will Rise Again." I'm glad I caught it in time, and didn't bestow such a weird gift on my little niece.

It's unbelievable to me how much Missouri's past of slavery is still present everywhere around here. I'm still kind of new to these cultural realities, but the Confederate handbag for toddlers seems quite disturbing. But if I'm overreacting, and it's a completely normal practice, feel free to tell me.

Arizona: Going Deeper Into Psychosis

Arizona is not in a good way. Jared Loughner shoots up a crowd, an elementary school paints over a mural that depicts children considered a shade too brown for the liking of Arizona's racists, laws persecuting people who might be suspected of being immigrants are introduced making the entire world think that the American Constitution is now officially dead, barbaric anti-choice laws are being passed: the state of Arizona is unraveling before our very eyes. It's scary to observe such an instance of mass psychosis happening in front of one's own eyes. When I discovered that one of my blog's craziest stalkers was from Phoenix, Arizona, I wasn't surprised at all. Arizona is really not in a good way.

The most recent instance of Arizona's racism-fueled insanity is a bill that would make my field of knowledge banned in that state:

A new law banning ethnic studies programmes has gone into effect in the southwestern US state of Arizona. The state's Latino community claim the law targets them and say similar programmes in African American, Asian and Native American studies are not affected.

Arizonian racists who have been driven completely nuts by living in this barren, scary place (I am yet to meet a person born in Arizona who doesn't refer to their native state as "a hell-hole"), are now suggesting that the field of Hispanic Studies (to which they have obviously not had any actual exposure due to their irrepressible ignorance) is dangerous:

The state claims that the Latino program is more about creating future activists and less about education.

Activists, of course, are scary. Arizona's political leaders realize that the only people who will buy into their racist insanity are those who have been rendered completely passive by stupidity and ignorance.

I don't think there is any hope for Arizona at this point. They will start burning witches soon. But, hell, I'm one of those scary Hispanists whose goal in life is to turn people into political activists, so who cares what I think?

P.S. If you have any respect for human rights, please join those of us who hate Arizona's racist policies and boycott this state. Make you outrage known to Arizona's politicians, boycott Arizona's goods and services, don't visit this horrible state. Let the people of Arizona know that no decent person can respect their leaders' racist policies.

An Ethical Issue: Blackface

So let's say a group of white students dress in blackface and don dunce caps for a fraternity party. Stupid, offensive, wrong - obviously. There's nothing to argue about here. Now, my question is: should the university punish these students?

On the one hand, these are adults who have decided to entertain themselves in their free time in this insensitive, offensive manner. As stupid as this decision is, it's their decision. Should we be able to police what students do and how they choose to entertain themselves in their time off? Will the next step be to police how the teaching faculty spends their free time?

On the other hand, though, if it was a fraternity party, it was conducted on university property. Should that in any way influence the way in which the university responds to what these students did? If these actions are not punished in any way, it looks like the university is endorsing them. Then again, if we take this attitude, then we are privileging property ownership over people's individual rights.

I really don't know what the right course of action here is. Any thoughts?

A Christian Minister Uses Evolutionary Psychology to Justify Racism

Everybody today is a specialist. Learn a couple of multi-syllable words, work out a message that the ignoramuses are dying to hear, and you are guaranteed a publication. A guy who has no idea what literary criticism is about writes an article for The NYTimes bashing literary critics. A bigoted minister thinks that a badly digested reading of Jung qualifies him to publish an article in Psychology Today, arguing that racism is inherent to all human beings.

Banding around words like "archetype" and "evolutionary history," the minister tries to convince the readers that racism is "natural." Whether you are black or white, he says, you are "predisposed" to dislike dark-skinned people:

Racism itself is a consequence of literalizing this universal, (archetypal), instinctive set of associations, not a direct cause. We human beings, regardless of skin color, age, gender, language, culture, and passionately held convictions (or the lack of them) are inherently predisposed to feel relaxed and cheerful in the presence of warm illuminating light, and increasingly anxious and uncomfortable in the midst of cold, impenetrable darkness. We also have a distressing tendency to literalize these associations and apply them "in an unconscious blink of the eye" to skin color. This primary instinctive response to "light" and "dark" in our shared environment and evolutionary history is not racism in itself; it is the unconscious source of racism. It is because it is unconscious that the problem of racism is so ubiquitous, "automatic", and difficult to overcome.

This tortured passage offers a justification to any racist. Of course, all of this is based on insane generalizations that have very little meaning. Just think, though, how many uses evolutionary psychology can be put to by all kinds of bigots. All you have to say to explain your hatred and bigotry is that it's an archetype and a biological imperative. Then you sigh deeply, roll your eyes, and add that as much as you'd love not to be a racist (a male chauvinist, a xenophobe, and anti-Semite, etc.) you simply can't help it because Jung said so. Besides, all those brown people hate themselves too, which means it perfectly OK to hate them.
The progressives in this country have long bemoaned the rejection of the evolution by religious institutions. Little did we know that acceptance of evolution by racist ministers would be a lot scarier.

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Racism in Russia

Racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia have always defined both external and internal politics of Russia. The Russian Empire was notoriously oppressive towards the peoples it subjected and exploited. Pales of settlement for the Jews, prison sentences for Ukrainians who dared use their own language in the classroom, ridiculous accusations of human sacrifices against the Udmurts, the list can go on forever. Still, the Russian intellectuals, writers, thinkers, artists hated racism and saw it as a painful reality of their country that needed to be changed.

Neo-nazism in Russia is on the rise

Today, things have changed. Russia is plagued by a profound sense of inferiority caused by its tragic XXth century history. The result of this is an insistent cultivation of the idea of Russian exceptionality. This idea is not new, of course. Educated, intelligent people in Russia, however, always ridiculed those who insisted on the exceptional nature of their country. Nowadays, it has become fashionable even among the most educated, liberal-minded people to proclaim Russia's superiority to everybody else.

This way of thinking is, of course, accompanied by the rise of racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia. You can barely visit a Russian website, read a blog, watch a television program without being bombarded by a string of vicious and ridiculous statements imbued with hatred towards some group of people that is not Russian.

Racism is fashionable today in Russia. It is as if people almost competed in who could come up with a greater degree of hatred and with the most sophisticated kind of insults towards every other ethnic group in the world.

I can't begin to tell you how much this saddens me.

Arizona's Racism Now Persecutes Artwork

We all know that Arizona's racism is out of control. Still, recent manifestations of its racism have been so completely insane that it's scary. In one of recent cases that have made the news worldwide, an elementary school asked a group of artists to lighten the skin tone of children depicted on one of the school murals. The point of the change is, of course, to make the children look less Hispanic. (You can read more here.) I don't think that anybody can really deny that being bothered by Hispanic faces in a mural is very, very unhealthy.

What has been happening in Arizona is shameful. We can't keep putting up with this explosion of racist insanity if we want to keep being considered a civilized country. I call on all readers of this blog to participate in the Boycott Arizona! project. Let's boycott this semi-fascist abomination of a state until they repeal SB1070 (the law that makes police officers request documentation from people to ascertain whether or not they are undocumented.)

Seriously, people, after this crazy law the logical next step is to ask certain inhabitants of the state to wear a yellow star (or its equivalent) on their chest. A policy similar to Arizona's SB1070 exists in the totalitarian and notoriously racist Russia which is ruled by a former KGB agent. Do we really want to turn the US into another Russia?

African? We Don't Need Your Blood!

We've had a Red Cross truck parked on campus all day today. People were encouraged to come by and donate blood, which, of course, is a great initiative per se. But what happened to my colleague Kola, who is our Fulbright scholar from Nigeria, is not so great.

As you can discover from his most recent post, Kola was denied the opportunity to donate blood simply because of his place of origin. For some reason, being from Nigeria or even having sexual relations with a Nigerian disqualifies you from giving blood in the US. As Kola discovered, this happens because in some bigoted minds Nigeria is firmly linked to the HIV.

So is it true that a Nigerian is more likely to be HIV positive than an American? Here are some statistics: "In Nigeria, an estimated 3.1 percent of adults between ages 15-49 are living with HIV and AIDS." (More information here.) In the US the percentage of people infected with HIV is actually very similar: "In March 2009 Washington DC reported an HIV prevalence of at least 3% among people over 12 years - similar to rates in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa." (More information here.) Actually, as I was walking past the blood bank I heard two American students talking about donating blood. They both said that it was a good idea but they couldn't participate right now because neither of them could guarantee that they were not HIV positive.

My colleague was told that the blood bank's refusal to accept his blood has to do with FDA requirements. It's easy to blame such things on the FDA. When we consider the matter, however, it becomes obvious that the only reason for anybody to be be more suspicious of Nigerian blood than of American blood is racism.

Race in America

I only managed to watch a small portion of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings on television. The part I saw was the speech by one of the New Haven firefighters who feels unjustly persecuted on racial grounds by Judge Sotomayor. I have to confess that it was pretty surreal to see a young white male more or less accuse a Latin woman of racism. The firefighter (whose name I unfortunately failed to catch) was on the verge of tears when he talked about being racially discriminated in America.

Today, I saw a replay of the same attitude by yet another white male. This time, it was a New York Times journalist Ross Douthat who decided that somehow his perspective on racism is valuable enough to be shared with thousands of readers. In his article "Race in 2028," Douthat takes on the issue of affirmative action. Of course, no white person who is against the affirmative action will ever honestly tell you what really bothers them about the concept. The arguments against affirmative action always follow the same scenario. "Of course, I hate racism," says the white person (who now, at least in some cases, thankfully omits to say that some of his closest friends are... you know). "But we have to keep in mind," the white person in question immediately adds, "that there are inherent dangers that always accompany this practice."

The ingeniousness of these imaginary "dangers" ranges from simply bizarre to outright freaky. Douthat's justification for his dislike of affirmative action, Sonia Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama (don't the conservatives just love the president's middle name) is corruption. "A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority," he says and later continues: "But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed — and we will all have been corrupted by it." Of course, there is no explanation of how he manages to connect affirmative action and corruption except a hint towards "the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor." For anybody who has lived in New Haven (as I did for several years) the idea of some kind of African-American mafia that influences the mayor and corrupts court proceedings in that city sounds outlandish.

Racism in New Haven is palpable. It's something you live and breathe every single day. That's why it was so shocking to see the white firefighter who somehow managed to dissociate his speech at the confirmation hearings from the everyday reality he experiences in his town. I look at people like the firefighter and Douthat and I wonder how it is even possible for them to avoid the simple realization that absolutely everything they have, do, and experience is the result of centuries of racial discrimination in America.

Affirmative action must come "with a statute of limitations" claims Douthat. It needs to be "phased out" very soon or the white folks will start to get upset and it will turn into "a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population." It's curious to observe that Douthat honestly believes that it's the white population who has a cause for "permanent grievance." Note the weird, convoluted logic here. Centuries of slavery and segregation only deserve a couple of years of redress. The existence of affirmative action for several decades, however, will justifiably provoke a permanent sense of grievance on the part of folks like Douthat.

Another thing that bothers me in the discussion about affirmative action is this idea that affirmative action is something that racial minorites need and we, the kindly white people, give to them out of sheer niceness. Albeit in different ways, racism hurts every one. It's not the problem of African-Americans or Hispanics. It's the problem of the entire society. It's not a question of what "we" do for "them". It's a question of what all of us should do for ourselves, our society.

I'm very much in favor of affirmative action for my university. I want African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American students in my class. But not because I'm so nice and kind and want to do something good for them. As a teacher, I need these students desperately. I need their contribution, their perspective, their knowledge, their presence, and their talent. I hate Douthat and Co's attempts to coopt my voice as a representative of the "shrinking and permanently aggrieved white population." Racism is what permanently aggrieves me, not affirmative action.