Saswat Blog
All that's Left!
'Crash' Course from Kenneth Eng: Racism defines America
By Saswat Pattanayak
AsianWeek controversy has been quite an upset. For one, it claims to be the voice of the Asian Americans, and then goes on to publish an article written by a racist bigot who has absolutely no knowledge of his own history, and then the paper goes on to apologize while refusing to single out editors.
If only Kenneth Eng would have been the problem of it, the problem would have been solved by now, considering that he has been fired and even his article has been withdrawn from the AsianWeek website. On the contrary, bloggers are highlighting how immensely published is Eng and how his arguments might have some merit or how disgusted they are at this character. Now we have his photographs appearing on several sites and discussions on his student days in a New York film school. For someone who loves limelight (and any PR charmer can tell you any publicity is good publicity), Eng is having a field day. Amidst all this diplomatic efforts to showcase how not-so-racists we are in comparison to Kenneth Eng, the question must be redirected at the holier of the factions.
The truth of the matter is Kenneth Eng is a product of our system, not a creator of it. Just as Michael Richards was. Has Richards’ apologies helped any bit more than would Eng’s? Or did Mel Gibson really lose out all that deal after his apologies? Such politics of apologies are aimed at individual ‘atonement’s, not at social remedies.
Eng/Gibson/Kramer are trying to say something. And so also those who bear with these bunch. And again those of us readers who comment at the end of the blog entries reinforcing their myopic views. Now, deleting their comments and their articles and apologizing for the same is not the solution. Far from it, such responses are what I would say constitute the “Crash” actions. Remember that movie which won Oscar last year and promised everything was fine on the racial front and that Dubois was inherently wrong.
No, Dubois was not wrong. In fact he is more relevant today than ever before. America, the metamorphosed country of illusions lulling its “diverse” people to sound amnesia by preaching “equality and liberty” is condemned to grapple with its color-lines. Any amount of diplomatic legerdemain by community “leaders” and public figures, college professors and filmmakers cannot hide this reality. The problem of 21st century America is the problem of Capitalism that thrives on inequalities based on several of its social locations. How else does one justify the continued consolidation of most wealth and power in the hands of a few white men in this country? How does one justify the saga of discriminations against people of color in the workplace? How does one justify the annual raise of bonuses to the tune of two hundred percent for the owning class while the workers beg for a five percent up?
Individualism leading to Community-ism
In hostile situations of cut throat capitalistic competitions, everyone is up for the battle of interests. In place of individual rights that this country so proudly enshrined in its constitution that merely focussed on the wealthy and powerful (only the truly free enjoyed the rights, not those they enslaved), the group rights started forming impressions following several reformist movements last century.
Group reformist movements, just like the individual rights movements, engage in competing to garner support from those from whom the rights flow. The ruling classes who devise and define individual rights to their interests (for example it is alright to be a Christian, but not alright to be a Communist; its your right to have family, but not to have it if you are not heterosexual) also describe the scope of group rights. However just as illusive are individual rights, so are the group rights, in a capitalistic setup where the romance of rights are not inherent, but gifted.
To preserve the gifts (‘scope of rights’ that come with charity, although rights themselves may have been fought for, within limits set by the capitalists), groups often tend to resort to squabble, mud-slings and outright racism. People like Kenneth Eng are products of such society divided into groups competing to attract favors from charity masters. Even as the Engs hate racism targeted against them, they rarely stop to find out the true reasons behind the same.
Its utter ignorance of some people about their own history that leads to culmination and growth of racism in our world. Are young students like Kenneth Eng taught in their school about the role of black people in shaping the free America? Are young black students taught about the systematic biases that continue circulating against Asian-Americans in mainstream entertainment industry? Are young south asian students told of the role of black Muslims in enlightening the conscience of this country when it was deep asleep in evil contentment? Are young white students taught of the role of Latino working class in wealth creation of the superpower at the cost of their own exploitation over debates surrounding minimum wage? Are the minority students taught about how majority of white workers indeed are at receiving end of en exploitative economic system?
Need of the hour:
What needs to be done at this juncture is not for black commentators attacking Asian press or South Asian commentators condemning Kenneth Eng. For all we know, Eng could well become a celebrity in a few months. The root cause of racism is not one bigoted mind. Its capitalism that we largely let go unchecked for in its practice. We must address the manner in which private capital creation safeguards specific group interests rather than working for the betterment of the world. The racial tensions in the US are economic in nature. There is no place for moral preachings here. No place for Crash finale!
Lets admit and accept that as long as we refrain from critiquing the capitalist causes (private monopolies) we will have to accept racism as part and parcel of the deal. Till now, people other than white are being called in their suffixes. American history is differently noted than African-American history! How will we expect Engs of the world to even feel grateful for immense sufferings of generations of black people that must be acknowledged at every mention of America even as an idea? How will we expect white people to understand that Columbus was not after all some hero and that this land was indeed “made for you and me”, and not just for the English speaking elites. Such expectations will bear fruit only if people are treated equally irrespective of race in this country and elsewhere. However that would mean perhaps to quote Paul Robeson, “adopting the nature and politics of Soviet Union where people are treated as people, not as black or white”. Even adopting one-tenth of former Soviet policies would entail the reversal of centuries-old capital accumulation policies that are in place in a flourishing capitalism. As long as a society is built on bedrock of money as the only thing that matters--to buy health insurance to higher education--people will always be treated as secondary subjects. And where people need to be treated as secondary subjects, to refrain those very people from fomenting a revolution against their secondary status, it becomes imperative for the capital masters to wage a divide and rule policy that keeps people ignorant about their collective struggles in everyday lives. While at it, the economic system goes unchecked in its biases against working class by deliberately playing one group against another when it comes to economic parity, share holding and accountability. No wonder, thousands of discrimination cases at the workplace are filed every week based on racial disparities.
We need to shed our racialisms and embrace the collective history of struggles of working class people of this country and the world against their class antagonists in our everyday observations. Careful and conscious efforts must be made towards deconstructing problems such as Eng’s while observing the need for such racism not to take place again.
One thing is to condemn racism, which is all good, but entirely useless. Since we know no one can feel unscathed from racist attacks under capitalism which bases itself on human inequality, today’s condemned group will become the condemner tomorrow. The other thing is to actually ensure that we do not produce a new generation of racists in our own households. There would be no end to this Ghettopoly-Tsunami saga, if we did not really address the issues critically. That some Blacks despise some Asians, some Asians despise some Blacks, and some Whites despise some immigrants and vice versa is a well known fact. How many Indian families actually encourage their doting daughters to make friends with Blacks and Muslims? How many of us actually stop thinking about people beyond their colors the moment we fail to receive our due share? How long will the “good” people refuse to acknowledge that? How long we will keep condemning Kenneth Eng?
We must make every efforts to acknowledge collective contributions to working class struggles. White people should be educated about Whiteness history that must detail not the struggle of black people alone, but also the struggle of good white people while dealing with slavery and racism. Neither slavery nor racism should be treated as subjects of the past, for both are going to remain in full function as long as there is an owning class of minority people--those that traditionally were slaveowners and who own us mentally now with their monopoly media misinformation tirades.
South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) which is composed of really nice people some of whom I have had the opportunity to have interacted with, must make every effort to include black people on its editorial board. No issues of journalism that pertains to people of South Asian origin precludes people of other races. Likewise good Asian folks at the AsianWeek should include Latino people on their boards. The black television programs that have been accused of making fun of some Asians should include some enlightened Asians in their team. And together all of them should include some white people in their efforts to understand and strengthen collective efforts to uproot racism from this country.
Although racism, like sexism, is a byproduct of capitalism, capitalism will not vanish as long as we do not treat these diseases on a preventive manner. If we really wish to eradicate racism, and not merely talk about it, we must look beyond our own group interests and then we shall be able to address racism among our own communities in a more informed manner. Accusing the ‘other’ becomes easier when we are refusing to look outside our ‘own’ comforted walls. It is perhaps more true when we are dealing with a subject such as race--one that will not go away, but one we must deal with.
Time has come to look beyond our own races, and look for commonalities with the others in order to find the links that have been deliberately kept missing. Until then, we will be demanding an apology, not the solidarity. Because until then we are perhaps intending to let capitalism succeed at any cost in enslaving us while giving us an illusion of freedom, because we refuse to look beyond the windows to understand why some of us out in the rain will continue to suffer at the hand of the same system that can turn us against each other. For racism to go, we need to embrace human beings, not private wealth monopolists. For that to happen, we need to address issues of capitalism at its systematic level, not at its symptomatic level.
AsianWeek controversy has been quite an upset. For one, it claims to be the voice of the Asian Americans, and then goes on to publish an article written by a racist bigot who has absolutely no knowledge of his own history, and then the paper goes on to apologize while refusing to single out editors.
If only Kenneth Eng would have been the problem of it, the problem would have been solved by now, considering that he has been fired and even his article has been withdrawn from the AsianWeek website. On the contrary, bloggers are highlighting how immensely published is Eng and how his arguments might have some merit or how disgusted they are at this character. Now we have his photographs appearing on several sites and discussions on his student days in a New York film school. For someone who loves limelight (and any PR charmer can tell you any publicity is good publicity), Eng is having a field day. Amidst all this diplomatic efforts to showcase how not-so-racists we are in comparison to Kenneth Eng, the question must be redirected at the holier of the factions.
The truth of the matter is Kenneth Eng is a product of our system, not a creator of it. Just as Michael Richards was. Has Richards’ apologies helped any bit more than would Eng’s? Or did Mel Gibson really lose out all that deal after his apologies? Such politics of apologies are aimed at individual ‘atonement’s, not at social remedies.
Eng/Gibson/Kramer are trying to say something. And so also those who bear with these bunch. And again those of us readers who comment at the end of the blog entries reinforcing their myopic views. Now, deleting their comments and their articles and apologizing for the same is not the solution. Far from it, such responses are what I would say constitute the “Crash” actions. Remember that movie which won Oscar last year and promised everything was fine on the racial front and that Dubois was inherently wrong.
No, Dubois was not wrong. In fact he is more relevant today than ever before. America, the metamorphosed country of illusions lulling its “diverse” people to sound amnesia by preaching “equality and liberty” is condemned to grapple with its color-lines. Any amount of diplomatic legerdemain by community “leaders” and public figures, college professors and filmmakers cannot hide this reality. The problem of 21st century America is the problem of Capitalism that thrives on inequalities based on several of its social locations. How else does one justify the continued consolidation of most wealth and power in the hands of a few white men in this country? How does one justify the saga of discriminations against people of color in the workplace? How does one justify the annual raise of bonuses to the tune of two hundred percent for the owning class while the workers beg for a five percent up?
Individualism leading to Community-ism
In hostile situations of cut throat capitalistic competitions, everyone is up for the battle of interests. In place of individual rights that this country so proudly enshrined in its constitution that merely focussed on the wealthy and powerful (only the truly free enjoyed the rights, not those they enslaved), the group rights started forming impressions following several reformist movements last century.
Group reformist movements, just like the individual rights movements, engage in competing to garner support from those from whom the rights flow. The ruling classes who devise and define individual rights to their interests (for example it is alright to be a Christian, but not alright to be a Communist; its your right to have family, but not to have it if you are not heterosexual) also describe the scope of group rights. However just as illusive are individual rights, so are the group rights, in a capitalistic setup where the romance of rights are not inherent, but gifted.
To preserve the gifts (‘scope of rights’ that come with charity, although rights themselves may have been fought for, within limits set by the capitalists), groups often tend to resort to squabble, mud-slings and outright racism. People like Kenneth Eng are products of such society divided into groups competing to attract favors from charity masters. Even as the Engs hate racism targeted against them, they rarely stop to find out the true reasons behind the same.
Its utter ignorance of some people about their own history that leads to culmination and growth of racism in our world. Are young students like Kenneth Eng taught in their school about the role of black people in shaping the free America? Are young black students taught about the systematic biases that continue circulating against Asian-Americans in mainstream entertainment industry? Are young south asian students told of the role of black Muslims in enlightening the conscience of this country when it was deep asleep in evil contentment? Are young white students taught of the role of Latino working class in wealth creation of the superpower at the cost of their own exploitation over debates surrounding minimum wage? Are the minority students taught about how majority of white workers indeed are at receiving end of en exploitative economic system?
Need of the hour:
What needs to be done at this juncture is not for black commentators attacking Asian press or South Asian commentators condemning Kenneth Eng. For all we know, Eng could well become a celebrity in a few months. The root cause of racism is not one bigoted mind. Its capitalism that we largely let go unchecked for in its practice. We must address the manner in which private capital creation safeguards specific group interests rather than working for the betterment of the world. The racial tensions in the US are economic in nature. There is no place for moral preachings here. No place for Crash finale!
Lets admit and accept that as long as we refrain from critiquing the capitalist causes (private monopolies) we will have to accept racism as part and parcel of the deal. Till now, people other than white are being called in their suffixes. American history is differently noted than African-American history! How will we expect Engs of the world to even feel grateful for immense sufferings of generations of black people that must be acknowledged at every mention of America even as an idea? How will we expect white people to understand that Columbus was not after all some hero and that this land was indeed “made for you and me”, and not just for the English speaking elites. Such expectations will bear fruit only if people are treated equally irrespective of race in this country and elsewhere. However that would mean perhaps to quote Paul Robeson, “adopting the nature and politics of Soviet Union where people are treated as people, not as black or white”. Even adopting one-tenth of former Soviet policies would entail the reversal of centuries-old capital accumulation policies that are in place in a flourishing capitalism. As long as a society is built on bedrock of money as the only thing that matters--to buy health insurance to higher education--people will always be treated as secondary subjects. And where people need to be treated as secondary subjects, to refrain those very people from fomenting a revolution against their secondary status, it becomes imperative for the capital masters to wage a divide and rule policy that keeps people ignorant about their collective struggles in everyday lives. While at it, the economic system goes unchecked in its biases against working class by deliberately playing one group against another when it comes to economic parity, share holding and accountability. No wonder, thousands of discrimination cases at the workplace are filed every week based on racial disparities.
We need to shed our racialisms and embrace the collective history of struggles of working class people of this country and the world against their class antagonists in our everyday observations. Careful and conscious efforts must be made towards deconstructing problems such as Eng’s while observing the need for such racism not to take place again.
One thing is to condemn racism, which is all good, but entirely useless. Since we know no one can feel unscathed from racist attacks under capitalism which bases itself on human inequality, today’s condemned group will become the condemner tomorrow. The other thing is to actually ensure that we do not produce a new generation of racists in our own households. There would be no end to this Ghettopoly-Tsunami saga, if we did not really address the issues critically. That some Blacks despise some Asians, some Asians despise some Blacks, and some Whites despise some immigrants and vice versa is a well known fact. How many Indian families actually encourage their doting daughters to make friends with Blacks and Muslims? How many of us actually stop thinking about people beyond their colors the moment we fail to receive our due share? How long will the “good” people refuse to acknowledge that? How long we will keep condemning Kenneth Eng?
We must make every efforts to acknowledge collective contributions to working class struggles. White people should be educated about Whiteness history that must detail not the struggle of black people alone, but also the struggle of good white people while dealing with slavery and racism. Neither slavery nor racism should be treated as subjects of the past, for both are going to remain in full function as long as there is an owning class of minority people--those that traditionally were slaveowners and who own us mentally now with their monopoly media misinformation tirades.
South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) which is composed of really nice people some of whom I have had the opportunity to have interacted with, must make every effort to include black people on its editorial board. No issues of journalism that pertains to people of South Asian origin precludes people of other races. Likewise good Asian folks at the AsianWeek should include Latino people on their boards. The black television programs that have been accused of making fun of some Asians should include some enlightened Asians in their team. And together all of them should include some white people in their efforts to understand and strengthen collective efforts to uproot racism from this country.
Although racism, like sexism, is a byproduct of capitalism, capitalism will not vanish as long as we do not treat these diseases on a preventive manner. If we really wish to eradicate racism, and not merely talk about it, we must look beyond our own group interests and then we shall be able to address racism among our own communities in a more informed manner. Accusing the ‘other’ becomes easier when we are refusing to look outside our ‘own’ comforted walls. It is perhaps more true when we are dealing with a subject such as race--one that will not go away, but one we must deal with.
Time has come to look beyond our own races, and look for commonalities with the others in order to find the links that have been deliberately kept missing. Until then, we will be demanding an apology, not the solidarity. Because until then we are perhaps intending to let capitalism succeed at any cost in enslaving us while giving us an illusion of freedom, because we refuse to look beyond the windows to understand why some of us out in the rain will continue to suffer at the hand of the same system that can turn us against each other. For racism to go, we need to embrace human beings, not private wealth monopolists. For that to happen, we need to address issues of capitalism at its systematic level, not at its symptomatic level.
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No Worker Is Illegal!
By Saswat Pattanayak
Where would one read all this at one point?
1. Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, JF Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Freedom & Unity, You!, and Me!
2. Chicano Power!
3. We did not cross your borders—The border crossed US!
4. Dignidad!
5. Bush is the real criminal. Not us!
6. Bush & Fox Build a North America with Open Borders! Reform USA, Mexico, Canada.
7. All Americans are immigrants to this country—USA! Increase peace and love to all people of color
8. Arnold—Back to Hollywood
9. We are the People
10. My Hands built America Each Day. I am not a Criminal. We are not terrorists
11. You say Immigrants, like it’s a bad thing!
At today’s rally where more than a half a million people took to streets to denounce the HR 4437 (aimed at amending the Immigration and Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance border security, and for other purposes).
What the president says on Thursday as "I urge people who like to comment on this issue to make sure the rhetoric is in accord with our traditions” is being interpreted on Saturday as violating the real American tradition of being a country of immigrants. What’s the real issue then?
Well the issue is actually beyond the rhetoric. The President in 2004 had proposed a change to the existing immigration laws. And this was even way before the polls. He said: “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job… We should not give unfair rewards to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process or disadvantage those who came here lawfully, or hope to do so.” He proposed then that the workers should be asked to leave. Not as an entirely ungrateful gesture, the workers should be given incentives. For example, retirement benefits in their land of births.
The heartening thing here is that the highest officials in America realize that there are certain jobs that “American citizens are not willing to take”. Like cleaning the dishes, standing by the fast food counters, handing gas stations, working at 7-Elevens, selling goods to immigrants speaking their language, road constructions, building repairs, or even installing cables for telecom giants.
And yet, these are the strenuous jobs that build any country. Without these works being done by the “illegals” and “aliens” that provide food, clothing and shelter to “American citizens”, this country would not be imaginable. The image of America worldwide is synonymous with huge roads, big buildings, and trendy people. This image would have changed long back if not for the ablest helps coming from the immigrants—legal and otherwise.
Of course, the country is not unequivocal about it. As the post 9/11 experience clearly showed, America was no more the country of the immigrants. It was suddenly a country blessed by God meant for Americans. Large scale distrusts were permitted to flow towards people who did not affix that bumper sticker with “God Bless America” despite the fact that people had to shave their beards so as not to look like followers of different types of Gods.
Today, many immigrants of the earlier generations have been convinced by a rhetoric of “what constitutes an American” that they—who form a majority among the minorities, more than 41 million people—are believing that they are now more Americans than the prospective immigrants. Simply because they have been recognized as thus, and are being rewarded for being thus. In an entire movement which should be directed at understanding the underprivileged 11 million “illegals”, today even their own counterparts are prompt to condemn them. These benefited immigrants now do not consider the issues of the illegals as an “American issue”. For them, it’s just an “immigration issue” which they have overcome already in their life! The common shared struggles of all people of color in this country is now being deliberately wiped off the collective memory by categorizing them into different resident status, thus weakening the already weak further. This divides not just a movement to reclaim what’s due to them, considering the arduous hourly jobs they have done with honesty and in return paid paltry sums, of which 40 per cent goes to unknown quarters, it also defeats any amount of potential discourse that can be held regarding the sensitive issue.
“Guest Worker” is the real rhetoric, and the country should have an understanding of it. If the president wants people to believe that being American is a lifelong experience, not a process of legal naturalization (“An understanding of what it means to be an American is not a formality in the naturalization process, it is essential to full participation in our democracy&rdquo
, then it is obvious that living in
America to tirelessly labor and serve is part of
that lifelong experience. 11 million people
residing in this country are being considered as
illegal, which also means they have been living
in a state of despair (low wage, no work
benefits). The proposed law merely aims at
“legalizing” them, not “Americanizing” them.
Years of their cheap labor have always been
perpetrated by the employers who have been full
American citizens. The onus must not lie so much
on the disadvantaged $6/hr worker as it should
be on the billion dollars/year profiteering
multinationals that have hired them at that.
Agreed that’s little more than the minimum wage,
but the minimum wage standards in this country
have not been revised at par with the profit
scales of the monopolists.
There are just two ways of working at it. One, to grant citizenship to the people who are willing to stay in this country and continue to work laboriously--of course after their minimum wages are increased. Or, two, to let them stay and work in their present status quo—where they have at least a liberty of social mobility without being discriminated against by a system that distrusts immigrants to begin with. (How many more Law and Order episodes will show immigrant hookers and how many more awards will Crash movie receive for stereotyping Chinese as “human smugglers”?)
The middle ground, which is being proposed now, is quite fishy. Maybe by documenting the illegals now, it is easy for the administration to keep a track of them. But at the same time, since they are not going to get privileged by their “participation in American democracy” (of casting a vote, basically---many of which as we know were not even counted at crucial juncture that would have saved all these posts today), they are clearly going to be discriminated against--‘systematically’ this time. Once someone is branded as an entity that’s not going to evolve into higher stages of humanly dignified life of being acknowledged in the country of work, the employers sure know how to throw their weights around. Not that the case is any different now. Now the undocumented ones are clearly facing wrath. The politicians who do not come out of the Hill should take a public transport sometimes just to see the state of those people—standing in a queue for daily wage works at Langley Park squares—15 minutes from the Downtown DC! But if the undocumented ones are allowed to work undocumented, the only difference would be that they keep their money in their own pockets, and not in a bank for direct withdrawals.
Apart from the emotions involved in this issue (which is why it is so sensitive)—and the emotions must be considered while dealing with deprived human beings (oh come on, I know capital, not society that takes precedence here, but with all the talks about God, at least it should be a good ethical try)—there are direct economic issues at stake here. There are no guarantees that once these people go back to their countries, they will receive their ‘incentives’. I mean, not only are there no previous examples of this kind, but there are ample evidence to suggest that not all regimes everywhere in the world actually are friendly with the current Bush administration to agree to its proposal. And certainly not the opposition parties in those countries, who after coming to power will stop recognizing any such deals. Thirdly, if those countries were wealthy and willing enough to accommodate these people, the people would not land up here. Fourthly, and the most basic one, is the rightful claim of the workers. They have so far toiled hard in bettering this country, by managing, repairing, amending this country. They have always tried to learn how to make sense of different accents of American English spoken with variety of tones, often laced with racial slurs, slangs and sexual overtones. The least claim they can make is to get a parity. A full participation in the democratic process of the country, as the President said. The question is if they are made devoid of eventual citizenship, their legal claims to grey areas will still remain inaccessible. Without citizenship, any of their claims can land them in a way that may still lead to their deportation. And now, all the baseball and basketball fans of the land know, that is not fair. Heads they lose, tails they lose?
The movement of more than 500,000 people at LA is a symbolic protest against the long line of unfair treatment. However, it’s not such a Catch22 as it is made out to be. The choice is clear in this case. People, who are already citizens, who are otherwise legal immigrants, and the clearly privileged yet sensitized Americans must realize that the accrued benefits do not need to be at the cost of inflicted injustice. At that point, silence becomes unethical.
A flyer on my table top reads: “We put food on the table and clothing on people’s backs and do the work most Americans don’t want to do for less money than many Americans will work for; and now they want me to say I’m thankful because they’re giving me amnesty, even though most of the people I know won’t get it. Just because I am legal all of a sudden doesn’t mean I’ll forget those who aren’t.”
This should wake the fellow immigrants to make it a 41-million legalized support for another 11 million illegals. And the rest of over 250 million people who realize that we all are immigrants to the country at one point or another (and in not so distant past!) should lend a strong support to either completely naturalize the unfortunates, or let them not pay as taxpayers to prolonged hawkish causes.
And for the fellow jubilated privileged immigrants who every now and then feel they deserved to get the ticket to the polling booths, they should realize it’s merely incidental. So incidental that they cannot even “fully” participate in democracy to challenge a presidential candidate simply on the grounds that they were not born in this land. Now if that’s incidental, why can’t the “illegalities” of the “aliens”? Because it’s written on the wall of a system?
No Worker can be Illegal. Its the ones who do not work and instead live off the labor of others who need be put to test. "First they came for the illegals, but we were not one!...?" Look out!
Where would one read all this at one point?
1. Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, JF Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Freedom & Unity, You!, and Me!
2. Chicano Power!
3. We did not cross your borders—The border crossed US!
4. Dignidad!
5. Bush is the real criminal. Not us!
6. Bush & Fox Build a North America with Open Borders! Reform USA, Mexico, Canada.
7. All Americans are immigrants to this country—USA! Increase peace and love to all people of color
8. Arnold—Back to Hollywood
9. We are the People
10. My Hands built America Each Day. I am not a Criminal. We are not terrorists
11. You say Immigrants, like it’s a bad thing!
At today’s rally where more than a half a million people took to streets to denounce the HR 4437 (aimed at amending the Immigration and Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance border security, and for other purposes).
What the president says on Thursday as "I urge people who like to comment on this issue to make sure the rhetoric is in accord with our traditions” is being interpreted on Saturday as violating the real American tradition of being a country of immigrants. What’s the real issue then?
Well the issue is actually beyond the rhetoric. The President in 2004 had proposed a change to the existing immigration laws. And this was even way before the polls. He said: “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job… We should not give unfair rewards to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process or disadvantage those who came here lawfully, or hope to do so.” He proposed then that the workers should be asked to leave. Not as an entirely ungrateful gesture, the workers should be given incentives. For example, retirement benefits in their land of births.
The heartening thing here is that the highest officials in America realize that there are certain jobs that “American citizens are not willing to take”. Like cleaning the dishes, standing by the fast food counters, handing gas stations, working at 7-Elevens, selling goods to immigrants speaking their language, road constructions, building repairs, or even installing cables for telecom giants.
And yet, these are the strenuous jobs that build any country. Without these works being done by the “illegals” and “aliens” that provide food, clothing and shelter to “American citizens”, this country would not be imaginable. The image of America worldwide is synonymous with huge roads, big buildings, and trendy people. This image would have changed long back if not for the ablest helps coming from the immigrants—legal and otherwise.
Of course, the country is not unequivocal about it. As the post 9/11 experience clearly showed, America was no more the country of the immigrants. It was suddenly a country blessed by God meant for Americans. Large scale distrusts were permitted to flow towards people who did not affix that bumper sticker with “God Bless America” despite the fact that people had to shave their beards so as not to look like followers of different types of Gods.
Today, many immigrants of the earlier generations have been convinced by a rhetoric of “what constitutes an American” that they—who form a majority among the minorities, more than 41 million people—are believing that they are now more Americans than the prospective immigrants. Simply because they have been recognized as thus, and are being rewarded for being thus. In an entire movement which should be directed at understanding the underprivileged 11 million “illegals”, today even their own counterparts are prompt to condemn them. These benefited immigrants now do not consider the issues of the illegals as an “American issue”. For them, it’s just an “immigration issue” which they have overcome already in their life! The common shared struggles of all people of color in this country is now being deliberately wiped off the collective memory by categorizing them into different resident status, thus weakening the already weak further. This divides not just a movement to reclaim what’s due to them, considering the arduous hourly jobs they have done with honesty and in return paid paltry sums, of which 40 per cent goes to unknown quarters, it also defeats any amount of potential discourse that can be held regarding the sensitive issue.
“Guest Worker” is the real rhetoric, and the country should have an understanding of it. If the president wants people to believe that being American is a lifelong experience, not a process of legal naturalization (“An understanding of what it means to be an American is not a formality in the naturalization process, it is essential to full participation in our democracy&rdquo
, then it is obvious that living in
America to tirelessly labor and serve is part of
that lifelong experience. 11 million people
residing in this country are being considered as
illegal, which also means they have been living
in a state of despair (low wage, no work
benefits). The proposed law merely aims at
“legalizing” them, not “Americanizing” them.
Years of their cheap labor have always been
perpetrated by the employers who have been full
American citizens. The onus must not lie so much
on the disadvantaged $6/hr worker as it should
be on the billion dollars/year profiteering
multinationals that have hired them at that.
Agreed that’s little more than the minimum wage,
but the minimum wage standards in this country
have not been revised at par with the profit
scales of the monopolists.
There are just two ways of working at it. One, to grant citizenship to the people who are willing to stay in this country and continue to work laboriously--of course after their minimum wages are increased. Or, two, to let them stay and work in their present status quo—where they have at least a liberty of social mobility without being discriminated against by a system that distrusts immigrants to begin with. (How many more Law and Order episodes will show immigrant hookers and how many more awards will Crash movie receive for stereotyping Chinese as “human smugglers”?)
The middle ground, which is being proposed now, is quite fishy. Maybe by documenting the illegals now, it is easy for the administration to keep a track of them. But at the same time, since they are not going to get privileged by their “participation in American democracy” (of casting a vote, basically---many of which as we know were not even counted at crucial juncture that would have saved all these posts today), they are clearly going to be discriminated against--‘systematically’ this time. Once someone is branded as an entity that’s not going to evolve into higher stages of humanly dignified life of being acknowledged in the country of work, the employers sure know how to throw their weights around. Not that the case is any different now. Now the undocumented ones are clearly facing wrath. The politicians who do not come out of the Hill should take a public transport sometimes just to see the state of those people—standing in a queue for daily wage works at Langley Park squares—15 minutes from the Downtown DC! But if the undocumented ones are allowed to work undocumented, the only difference would be that they keep their money in their own pockets, and not in a bank for direct withdrawals.
Apart from the emotions involved in this issue (which is why it is so sensitive)—and the emotions must be considered while dealing with deprived human beings (oh come on, I know capital, not society that takes precedence here, but with all the talks about God, at least it should be a good ethical try)—there are direct economic issues at stake here. There are no guarantees that once these people go back to their countries, they will receive their ‘incentives’. I mean, not only are there no previous examples of this kind, but there are ample evidence to suggest that not all regimes everywhere in the world actually are friendly with the current Bush administration to agree to its proposal. And certainly not the opposition parties in those countries, who after coming to power will stop recognizing any such deals. Thirdly, if those countries were wealthy and willing enough to accommodate these people, the people would not land up here. Fourthly, and the most basic one, is the rightful claim of the workers. They have so far toiled hard in bettering this country, by managing, repairing, amending this country. They have always tried to learn how to make sense of different accents of American English spoken with variety of tones, often laced with racial slurs, slangs and sexual overtones. The least claim they can make is to get a parity. A full participation in the democratic process of the country, as the President said. The question is if they are made devoid of eventual citizenship, their legal claims to grey areas will still remain inaccessible. Without citizenship, any of their claims can land them in a way that may still lead to their deportation. And now, all the baseball and basketball fans of the land know, that is not fair. Heads they lose, tails they lose?
The movement of more than 500,000 people at LA is a symbolic protest against the long line of unfair treatment. However, it’s not such a Catch22 as it is made out to be. The choice is clear in this case. People, who are already citizens, who are otherwise legal immigrants, and the clearly privileged yet sensitized Americans must realize that the accrued benefits do not need to be at the cost of inflicted injustice. At that point, silence becomes unethical.
A flyer on my table top reads: “We put food on the table and clothing on people’s backs and do the work most Americans don’t want to do for less money than many Americans will work for; and now they want me to say I’m thankful because they’re giving me amnesty, even though most of the people I know won’t get it. Just because I am legal all of a sudden doesn’t mean I’ll forget those who aren’t.”
This should wake the fellow immigrants to make it a 41-million legalized support for another 11 million illegals. And the rest of over 250 million people who realize that we all are immigrants to the country at one point or another (and in not so distant past!) should lend a strong support to either completely naturalize the unfortunates, or let them not pay as taxpayers to prolonged hawkish causes.
And for the fellow jubilated privileged immigrants who every now and then feel they deserved to get the ticket to the polling booths, they should realize it’s merely incidental. So incidental that they cannot even “fully” participate in democracy to challenge a presidential candidate simply on the grounds that they were not born in this land. Now if that’s incidental, why can’t the “illegalities” of the “aliens”? Because it’s written on the wall of a system?
No Worker can be Illegal. Its the ones who do not work and instead live off the labor of others who need be put to test. "First they came for the illegals, but we were not one!...?" Look out!
Now that Crash won, and We lost
Please click here for an abridged version of this
article, published by New American Media.
By Saswat Pattanayak
(This was written long before Crash won the Oscars. I am so happy I was right. It was important for Crash to win, because the system looked from the privileged views needed to prevail over the experiences of the unheard immigrants, because thats the only way the system needs to justify its (in)justice...And for the rest of us, we all know what's Oscars all about! )
“We made a choice to deal directly with race. We just kept digging at the truth and just did not care what it sounded like. We knew it was ugly. But if it’s truthful, if it’s real, if it’s right, if it serves the story we could do it. We just didn’t allow ourselves to be put off by its ugliness. Race is nothing if it’s not ugly, and no one is going to pay any attention to the storytelling if we try to get round that.”
--Bobby Moresco, Writer, “Crash” (In an interview from the DVD).
Crash is indeed ugly, feel some members of the immigrant families and I agree. Over last few months, I have been talking to people who watched the bootlegged versions before the DVD was out, to the administrators who are promoting diversity at workplace, to students who are assigned to write a paper after the campus screenings get done. Unequivocally, no movie in recent history has affected people like this one. Wondering if it was for better or worse, I juxtaposed my own perspectives to the narrative below.
The first clue came from a South Asian friend, and software engineer based in Virginia: “I think it tells us that we are all capable of our prejudices. But should we all profess them? Should we just laugh at bigotry and then forget conveniently?”
A good point for an unforgettable movie. If mainstream cinema educate and entertain at the same time, what did Crash have to say? What did it teach the immigrants about their shared histories of conflicts, and their unique backgrounds of confrontations? About their levels of assimilation, acculturation and adaptations? Regarding the identity crisis in a pluralistic society?
A scholar from the Middle East was apparently infuriated after screening of the movie was done at University of Maryland last week. “This movie misleads. There was considerable shock at the way Iranians were mistaken for Arabs. Why should the anti-Arab sentiments be flared up without any defense?”
Not only the affirmations of identities have become quintessential for the movie, but they have been achieved through replays of pigeonholes. There is a psychological numbing of the rebellious, and an uncanny triumph of the conformists. For example, Anthony is the rebel, the only potential revolutionary in the movie. He epitomizes the angry black youths, who are disenchanted by the existing system. The director even gets him to name the top Black Panthers to justify his sentiments. He talks issues around white supremacy. He talks about black stereotypes. Quite right.
But when it comes to life, what does he do throughout the movie? He steals cars. He abandons a “Chinaman” after running a stolen car over him. Quite paradoxical till this point in the movie, considering that he had been shown having a concern over how the poor are relegated to large windows of public buses for humiliation sake.
And then this same character who talks about Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton becomes the fallen guy of Crash. A successful black television producer who makes every attempt to fit well within the system says Anthony that he “embarrasses” his own self. Not only has he been portrayed in a stereotyped manner to represent the young rebel who mends his ways for the better even while he talks about the Panthers, he focuses on all things abjectly wrong.
The moral of the story for Anthony is that it’s better to fit well within the framework than to protest. Not out of any defeat, but from realization that he had been plain wrong. To prove that point, the director has Anthony displaying his mended ways by freeing the Thai/Cambodian people and by enjoying a bus ride in the end.
First, Paul Haggis gets away with a gross portrayal of the ideals that Black Panthers stood for. He gets Anthony to cite the black radicals of the 70’s to justify his earlier vents. But omits the actual argument. The Panthers were not fighting to reclaim respect in a racist society. They were demanding a just society based first on economic emancipation. As Fred Hampton, one of Anthony’s heroes in this movie, said in 1968: “We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, and then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that.”
The film gave away an impression that the Panthers must have been wrong somehow even without exploring the theme of capitalism. Nowhere in the movie, is any of the anger ever directed at capitalism. The intersection between socio-economic class and race has simply not been explored. Crash implied we just need more Anthonies, who will behave well and mend their ways and liberate the new tortured immigrants by offering them soups (and not fight the power that enslaved them in the first place).
Events are crucial to a process. So the crimes in the movie (consequently, the stolen car and damaged store) are important. But the understanding of process is even more necessary to contextualize the events. And the film leaves the audience guessing on the process (the root causes of racial tensions, the factors leading to everyday crime). We know that the store of the Persian business family gets ransacked. What we don’t know is why were they being perceived as Arabs. And why was it so wrong to be Arabs in America? Who sows the seeds of hatred and promotes the system. What was the law and order system doing to protect the small businessman’s store? If the district attorney addresses the press over his stolen car, why does the Iranian man not go challenge the police for negligence of security? Why instead he has to go shoot at a working class man? And then feel pacified at his failure to find an answer to the motives behind the crime that affected his entire lot.
The damaged store was portrayed as an act by minority groups who are infuriated by Arabs, not as a negligence of the security forces, nor as an act of terrorism by the power structure that fuels such suspicions. This is a deliberate underestimation of working class intelligence. Immigrants in the US do raise voices against the system every now and then. We just don’t get the message, because comfortable filmmakers continue projecting them as vulnerable, docile subjects incapable of raising class-consciousness.
Several attempts at making the movie comical has made it all the more pathetic. There is no macabre humor. There is just stereotypical mockery. Anthony argues that black waitresses don’t attend to black folks in restaurant much, because they assume there won’t be tips. His friend Peter then asks him “How much did you leave?” Anthony: “You expect me to pay for that service?” Peter roars into laughter along with the audience. Sure, now we are convinced.
Likewise, to push the issue of individual perceptions further, there are two white cops. Between them, one is a proclaimed racist (Officer Ryan, who has apparently spent 11 of his 17 years under a black officer). But he turns out to be the life-savior of the grateful black woman he once molested. And the cop who is aghast at his racism actually is the one to pull his trigger at an innocent black man out of suspicion. So what do we get in the end? Two human beings with “normal” prejudices. And both are “good cops”, by incidence or intent. It’s not the system of law and order that’s purposely biased against the minorities-- the movie says-- it’s just the individuals with different nuances, like any other.
Crash deals with issues, but addresses them through individuals alienated from the larger gamut of systematic circumstances. It deals with serious stereotypes, but normalizes them by ignoring the causes of disparities. In an attempt to portray the “real thing”, it overtly exaggerates the conventional (even a reformed Anthony says in the end with relief: “dopey fuckin chinamen&rdquo.
Indeed, part of the reason why different immigrant groups do not relate to their shared common history of struggles is because they have been portrayed as being antagonistic with each other to begin with. So the only element they need to show allegiance to then becomes the power structure that permits their existence as individual blocks. Rejoicing the diverse cultures make the task all the more difficult for the ethnic minorities to perceive their oneness. Prof. Vijay Prashad says in “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting” (2001): “To respect the fetish of culture assumes that one wants to enshrine it in the museum of humankind rather than find within it the potential for liberation or for change.” He talks of the need of a “horizontal assimilation” among the immigrant groups. “Consider the rebel Africans, who fled the slave plantations in the Americas and took refuge among the Amerindians to create communities such as the Seminoles; the South Asian workers who jumped ship in eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, to enter the black community; Frederick Douglass’ defense of Chinese “coolie” laborers in the nineteenth century; the interactions of the Black Panther Party with the Red Guard and the Brown Berets in the mid-twentieth century; and finally the multiethnic working-class gathering in the new century.”
If Prashad was finding links for liberation, then Paul Haggis, director of Crash, was finding the lineages amidst the same multiethnic working class of new century. And Haggis perfected the art of stereotyping the lineages of hopelessness in Crash.
By Saswat Pattanayak
(This was written long before Crash won the Oscars. I am so happy I was right. It was important for Crash to win, because the system looked from the privileged views needed to prevail over the experiences of the unheard immigrants, because thats the only way the system needs to justify its (in)justice...And for the rest of us, we all know what's Oscars all about! )
“We made a choice to deal directly with race. We just kept digging at the truth and just did not care what it sounded like. We knew it was ugly. But if it’s truthful, if it’s real, if it’s right, if it serves the story we could do it. We just didn’t allow ourselves to be put off by its ugliness. Race is nothing if it’s not ugly, and no one is going to pay any attention to the storytelling if we try to get round that.”
--Bobby Moresco, Writer, “Crash” (In an interview from the DVD).
Crash is indeed ugly, feel some members of the immigrant families and I agree. Over last few months, I have been talking to people who watched the bootlegged versions before the DVD was out, to the administrators who are promoting diversity at workplace, to students who are assigned to write a paper after the campus screenings get done. Unequivocally, no movie in recent history has affected people like this one. Wondering if it was for better or worse, I juxtaposed my own perspectives to the narrative below.
The first clue came from a South Asian friend, and software engineer based in Virginia: “I think it tells us that we are all capable of our prejudices. But should we all profess them? Should we just laugh at bigotry and then forget conveniently?”
A good point for an unforgettable movie. If mainstream cinema educate and entertain at the same time, what did Crash have to say? What did it teach the immigrants about their shared histories of conflicts, and their unique backgrounds of confrontations? About their levels of assimilation, acculturation and adaptations? Regarding the identity crisis in a pluralistic society?
A scholar from the Middle East was apparently infuriated after screening of the movie was done at University of Maryland last week. “This movie misleads. There was considerable shock at the way Iranians were mistaken for Arabs. Why should the anti-Arab sentiments be flared up without any defense?”
Not only the affirmations of identities have become quintessential for the movie, but they have been achieved through replays of pigeonholes. There is a psychological numbing of the rebellious, and an uncanny triumph of the conformists. For example, Anthony is the rebel, the only potential revolutionary in the movie. He epitomizes the angry black youths, who are disenchanted by the existing system. The director even gets him to name the top Black Panthers to justify his sentiments. He talks issues around white supremacy. He talks about black stereotypes. Quite right.
But when it comes to life, what does he do throughout the movie? He steals cars. He abandons a “Chinaman” after running a stolen car over him. Quite paradoxical till this point in the movie, considering that he had been shown having a concern over how the poor are relegated to large windows of public buses for humiliation sake.
And then this same character who talks about Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton becomes the fallen guy of Crash. A successful black television producer who makes every attempt to fit well within the system says Anthony that he “embarrasses” his own self. Not only has he been portrayed in a stereotyped manner to represent the young rebel who mends his ways for the better even while he talks about the Panthers, he focuses on all things abjectly wrong.
The moral of the story for Anthony is that it’s better to fit well within the framework than to protest. Not out of any defeat, but from realization that he had been plain wrong. To prove that point, the director has Anthony displaying his mended ways by freeing the Thai/Cambodian people and by enjoying a bus ride in the end.
First, Paul Haggis gets away with a gross portrayal of the ideals that Black Panthers stood for. He gets Anthony to cite the black radicals of the 70’s to justify his earlier vents. But omits the actual argument. The Panthers were not fighting to reclaim respect in a racist society. They were demanding a just society based first on economic emancipation. As Fred Hampton, one of Anthony’s heroes in this movie, said in 1968: “We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, and then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that.”
The film gave away an impression that the Panthers must have been wrong somehow even without exploring the theme of capitalism. Nowhere in the movie, is any of the anger ever directed at capitalism. The intersection between socio-economic class and race has simply not been explored. Crash implied we just need more Anthonies, who will behave well and mend their ways and liberate the new tortured immigrants by offering them soups (and not fight the power that enslaved them in the first place).
Events are crucial to a process. So the crimes in the movie (consequently, the stolen car and damaged store) are important. But the understanding of process is even more necessary to contextualize the events. And the film leaves the audience guessing on the process (the root causes of racial tensions, the factors leading to everyday crime). We know that the store of the Persian business family gets ransacked. What we don’t know is why were they being perceived as Arabs. And why was it so wrong to be Arabs in America? Who sows the seeds of hatred and promotes the system. What was the law and order system doing to protect the small businessman’s store? If the district attorney addresses the press over his stolen car, why does the Iranian man not go challenge the police for negligence of security? Why instead he has to go shoot at a working class man? And then feel pacified at his failure to find an answer to the motives behind the crime that affected his entire lot.
The damaged store was portrayed as an act by minority groups who are infuriated by Arabs, not as a negligence of the security forces, nor as an act of terrorism by the power structure that fuels such suspicions. This is a deliberate underestimation of working class intelligence. Immigrants in the US do raise voices against the system every now and then. We just don’t get the message, because comfortable filmmakers continue projecting them as vulnerable, docile subjects incapable of raising class-consciousness.
Several attempts at making the movie comical has made it all the more pathetic. There is no macabre humor. There is just stereotypical mockery. Anthony argues that black waitresses don’t attend to black folks in restaurant much, because they assume there won’t be tips. His friend Peter then asks him “How much did you leave?” Anthony: “You expect me to pay for that service?” Peter roars into laughter along with the audience. Sure, now we are convinced.
Likewise, to push the issue of individual perceptions further, there are two white cops. Between them, one is a proclaimed racist (Officer Ryan, who has apparently spent 11 of his 17 years under a black officer). But he turns out to be the life-savior of the grateful black woman he once molested. And the cop who is aghast at his racism actually is the one to pull his trigger at an innocent black man out of suspicion. So what do we get in the end? Two human beings with “normal” prejudices. And both are “good cops”, by incidence or intent. It’s not the system of law and order that’s purposely biased against the minorities-- the movie says-- it’s just the individuals with different nuances, like any other.
Crash deals with issues, but addresses them through individuals alienated from the larger gamut of systematic circumstances. It deals with serious stereotypes, but normalizes them by ignoring the causes of disparities. In an attempt to portray the “real thing”, it overtly exaggerates the conventional (even a reformed Anthony says in the end with relief: “dopey fuckin chinamen&rdquo
.
Indeed, part of the reason why different immigrant groups do not relate to their shared common history of struggles is because they have been portrayed as being antagonistic with each other to begin with. So the only element they need to show allegiance to then becomes the power structure that permits their existence as individual blocks. Rejoicing the diverse cultures make the task all the more difficult for the ethnic minorities to perceive their oneness. Prof. Vijay Prashad says in “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting” (2001): “To respect the fetish of culture assumes that one wants to enshrine it in the museum of humankind rather than find within it the potential for liberation or for change.” He talks of the need of a “horizontal assimilation” among the immigrant groups. “Consider the rebel Africans, who fled the slave plantations in the Americas and took refuge among the Amerindians to create communities such as the Seminoles; the South Asian workers who jumped ship in eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, to enter the black community; Frederick Douglass’ defense of Chinese “coolie” laborers in the nineteenth century; the interactions of the Black Panther Party with the Red Guard and the Brown Berets in the mid-twentieth century; and finally the multiethnic working-class gathering in the new century.”
If Prashad was finding links for liberation, then Paul Haggis, director of Crash, was finding the lineages amidst the same multiethnic working class of new century. And Haggis perfected the art of stereotyping the lineages of hopelessness in Crash.
Who gets to study at the University "System" of Maryland?
By Saswat Pattanayak
The history of my campus is replete with racism. Most of the presidents of the university were decisively racists. Segregation of students based on whiteness/color had been a constant. In a timeline I helped prepare for my office, we discovered even more startling facts, some too gory to carry online.
Well, what’s new, one would say, when ‘everyone was doing it basically the same’ way up until 70’s. You know, folks actually get away with that loose canon. Of course it absolves the guilt of the guilt. The blacks, the asians, the hispanics had no place in white colleges back then, after all.
Back then sounds like a clichéd history. Except that we oftentimes fail to recognize how hysterically historical our contemporary society even is. The majority of population surrounding my campus are Blacks and Hispanics. Indeed, there are scores of communities of Latino population just outside the campus area (less than 100 meters away). Miles of stretches of apartments are inhabited by Latinos and Blacks. It’s like the invisible America of the national Capital.
After all, the visible are the big cities, not their population. The buildings, not the workers. Powerful sites like Washington DC, New York City or Las Vegas. Invisible are their makers: the cheap labor force. Behind all the glory of the Capitol streets, all glitz of the Times Square and glamour of Nevada casinos are the footmarks of the Blacks and Latinos. ‘They’ construct the roads and buildings and yes keep them darn clean.
Same goes with the giant ivory tower of the University of Maryland. The College Park campus alone is located on 1,250 acres of rolling land. The communities surrounding the campus are predominantly Latino. At least 80 percent of them are! Eighty freakin percent! The PG County which houses the College Park university is predominantly black. About 63% of population in PG County are Black (whereas only 27% are White). Likewise, the adjoining Washington DC –the state that houses the most powerful maniacs in political history—has a population of 60% blacks and only 30% whites.
Now let’s look at the largest campus of the area, the flagship public university and how diverse it is—which basically means how much does the university attempt at recruiting from the population that is represented in the area. How reflective is it of the reality and how contrasting are the statistics when we compare between the people who make up the area and the ones who get the elite tickets to higher education. We are not even talking of the rates of retention which is pathetically lower when it comes to students of color. For the purpose, we are to talk only of the recruitment (colored students who at least showed up—no matter if they left the place owing to the great mismatch between lived reality in their living neighborhood and the classroom incongruence).
Here it is, among the undergraduates: White students: 68%! Asians: 14%. Blacks: 12%. Latino: 5.7%.
And among the graduate students: White students: 83%! Blacks: 7%. Rest: 10%
So what we have here is a complete contradictory picture of what is real outside and what’s reflected inside. This is true of all major universities of the US. All big cities are predominantly inhabited by people of color. Just look at the statistics, from the US census: Latinos comprise 27% of New York City, 46% of Los Angeles, 26% of Chicago, 37% of Houston, 36% of Dallas, 30% of San Jose, 59% of San Antonio, 77% of El Paso, 25% of San Diego, and 34% of Phoenix.
Likewise, Blacks comprise, 28% of New York, 44% of Philadelphia, 37% of Chicago, 26% of Houston, 27% of Dallas, 82% of Detroit, 65% of Baltimore, 62% of Memphis, 61% of Washington DC, and 68% of New Orleans.
Now add these figures for all the major cities of the America. Even if we don’t count the Asians, these numbers alone are staggeringly so high that the reality is, the great big cities of the world are actually great because of the contributions of the hard-working people of color who comprise the majority here.
So where are the 77% of Whites of American population?
Well, a small minority of them are in the big cities, alright. And they clout the elite institutions –courts, universities, business empires in major proportions. They don’t deal with the slum problems since they have got people to build huge buildings for them already. They don’t have communities or neighborhoods. Only towers shrouded by private forests where paparazzi have to make a living of. The majority among the rest of them also take a break and don’t have to deal with the problems of the colored people—leading eventually to real segregation of the great contemporary America—one of the lesser pondered truths of modern times.
Huge majority of whites do not reside in the working class population that constructs the modern monuments. The one that is the invisible America in the Hollywood movies (again an example of mismatch—between who appear on screen and who live in Los Angeles), and the invisible America amidst the homeless millions of New York and DC.
In the cities that control the rest of the country, the ones who control the cities are a small minority White population. And that is the grim reality even to this date. And control they do, remotely. Living luxuriously in posh bungalows in richest counties which either exist side by side the largest slums (consider the fact that the country’s 10 richest communities are in the Washington metropolitan area only—where even as less than one-third are White!) or completely are way off in less dense states, demarcating the lines of segregation.
This is called the classic contradiction of capitalism in the political economy. The majority work hard to make the civilizations, for the minority to rule. The class society reinforces a social divide, uses overpowering instruments—dominant religions, mainstream education, standard work ethics, negotiable law and order—to normalize the illusions. It feels good to assume its one country, one America blessed by a Christian God, one culture where we have reduced the indigenous to less than 2 percent, one power fighting one war of terror outside the country and one superpower solving the world’s problems since we are not supposed to have any.
And it certainly makes most of us also forget –to choose sides in the exceedingly polarized two worlds of modern America—the Haves America, and the Have-nots America.
The history of my campus is replete with racism. Most of the presidents of the university were decisively racists. Segregation of students based on whiteness/color had been a constant. In a timeline I helped prepare for my office, we discovered even more startling facts, some too gory to carry online.
Well, what’s new, one would say, when ‘everyone was doing it basically the same’ way up until 70’s. You know, folks actually get away with that loose canon. Of course it absolves the guilt of the guilt. The blacks, the asians, the hispanics had no place in white colleges back then, after all.
Back then sounds like a clichéd history. Except that we oftentimes fail to recognize how hysterically historical our contemporary society even is. The majority of population surrounding my campus are Blacks and Hispanics. Indeed, there are scores of communities of Latino population just outside the campus area (less than 100 meters away). Miles of stretches of apartments are inhabited by Latinos and Blacks. It’s like the invisible America of the national Capital.
After all, the visible are the big cities, not their population. The buildings, not the workers. Powerful sites like Washington DC, New York City or Las Vegas. Invisible are their makers: the cheap labor force. Behind all the glory of the Capitol streets, all glitz of the Times Square and glamour of Nevada casinos are the footmarks of the Blacks and Latinos. ‘They’ construct the roads and buildings and yes keep them darn clean.
Same goes with the giant ivory tower of the University of Maryland. The College Park campus alone is located on 1,250 acres of rolling land. The communities surrounding the campus are predominantly Latino. At least 80 percent of them are! Eighty freakin percent! The PG County which houses the College Park university is predominantly black. About 63% of population in PG County are Black (whereas only 27% are White). Likewise, the adjoining Washington DC –the state that houses the most powerful maniacs in political history—has a population of 60% blacks and only 30% whites.
Now let’s look at the largest campus of the area, the flagship public university and how diverse it is—which basically means how much does the university attempt at recruiting from the population that is represented in the area. How reflective is it of the reality and how contrasting are the statistics when we compare between the people who make up the area and the ones who get the elite tickets to higher education. We are not even talking of the rates of retention which is pathetically lower when it comes to students of color. For the purpose, we are to talk only of the recruitment (colored students who at least showed up—no matter if they left the place owing to the great mismatch between lived reality in their living neighborhood and the classroom incongruence).
Here it is, among the undergraduates: White students: 68%! Asians: 14%. Blacks: 12%. Latino: 5.7%.
And among the graduate students: White students: 83%! Blacks: 7%. Rest: 10%
So what we have here is a complete contradictory picture of what is real outside and what’s reflected inside. This is true of all major universities of the US. All big cities are predominantly inhabited by people of color. Just look at the statistics, from the US census: Latinos comprise 27% of New York City, 46% of Los Angeles, 26% of Chicago, 37% of Houston, 36% of Dallas, 30% of San Jose, 59% of San Antonio, 77% of El Paso, 25% of San Diego, and 34% of Phoenix.
Likewise, Blacks comprise, 28% of New York, 44% of Philadelphia, 37% of Chicago, 26% of Houston, 27% of Dallas, 82% of Detroit, 65% of Baltimore, 62% of Memphis, 61% of Washington DC, and 68% of New Orleans.
Now add these figures for all the major cities of the America. Even if we don’t count the Asians, these numbers alone are staggeringly so high that the reality is, the great big cities of the world are actually great because of the contributions of the hard-working people of color who comprise the majority here.
So where are the 77% of Whites of American population?
Well, a small minority of them are in the big cities, alright. And they clout the elite institutions –courts, universities, business empires in major proportions. They don’t deal with the slum problems since they have got people to build huge buildings for them already. They don’t have communities or neighborhoods. Only towers shrouded by private forests where paparazzi have to make a living of. The majority among the rest of them also take a break and don’t have to deal with the problems of the colored people—leading eventually to real segregation of the great contemporary America—one of the lesser pondered truths of modern times.
Huge majority of whites do not reside in the working class population that constructs the modern monuments. The one that is the invisible America in the Hollywood movies (again an example of mismatch—between who appear on screen and who live in Los Angeles), and the invisible America amidst the homeless millions of New York and DC.
In the cities that control the rest of the country, the ones who control the cities are a small minority White population. And that is the grim reality even to this date. And control they do, remotely. Living luxuriously in posh bungalows in richest counties which either exist side by side the largest slums (consider the fact that the country’s 10 richest communities are in the Washington metropolitan area only—where even as less than one-third are White!) or completely are way off in less dense states, demarcating the lines of segregation.
This is called the classic contradiction of capitalism in the political economy. The majority work hard to make the civilizations, for the minority to rule. The class society reinforces a social divide, uses overpowering instruments—dominant religions, mainstream education, standard work ethics, negotiable law and order—to normalize the illusions. It feels good to assume its one country, one America blessed by a Christian God, one culture where we have reduced the indigenous to less than 2 percent, one power fighting one war of terror outside the country and one superpower solving the world’s problems since we are not supposed to have any.
And it certainly makes most of us also forget –to choose sides in the exceedingly polarized two worlds of modern America—the Haves America, and the Have-nots America.
The Journalistic Use Of The Word "Refugee"
06/09/05 15:17 Filed by Saswat Pattanayak in:
Reference
Recalling this Independence Day
By Saswat Pattanayak
I celebrated the independence day fine.
Well that’s the India’s freedom from the British Raj, I am referring to. August 15th midnight hours were the times of the “trysts with destiny” as Nehru proclaimed. And I am just going to reflect on the layers of destinies in store now.
Switched on the television set to find if there was any anti-colonial flavor, any celebration of a multi-cultural society willing to adopt welfare socialist economy or a people nostalgic of huge dreams, broader visions.
Of course it was a disaster. Instead all I could notice was the running advertorials on grand marshals of Indian freedom: Anil Kapoor, Karisma Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor, Babita Kapoor etc are the chief guests to celebrate India’s day of freedom in New York about to be organized on August 20 instead (why? Ask Karisma what courtroom drama she is into these days, that’s why).
Its better to be off to office, I thought. Took the entire office folks to the Tiffin, an Indian restaurant.
Thought there would be fanfare inside the restaurant. Some special smiles. Some warmer greetings. Some big balloons.
Well there was nothing of that nature anywhere. Business as usual. My colleagues and I ended up sharing some unique heritages of freedom struggles in our respective lands. And wished more power to Indian people on the day.
Could not blame the restaurant much. You see, although the owners may be of India origin, almost all people who work there are from Nepal. And I don’t think there is any special reason for Nepalese workers to celebrate independence of their Indian bosses.
Caught a cab to take my new friend and her papa to dinner where we were all invited. The driver was from Pakistan. “Happy belated Independence Day”, I said. He was quick to wish me the same back. And then, said “today is yours”. I said, “but of course we are not such different people that we have to rival each other in celebrating. Remember we both together ousted the British from our land.” He also agreed that while it was true, the fact is the partition was the most painful byproduct anyway. That was true. But does he feel anyway proud?
“What rubbish? I am hiding in the US from being prosecuted in Pakistan. Hence driving cab. Otherwise I used to be a Catholic priest in Pak.”
Had excellent dinner, a very memorable one. I called it the Independence Day dinner. Only that we did not recall the sacrifices of people without whom the day would not have come to such a pass.
Depending on where one comes from, the day will be perceived. For the cab guy, the day was not just bitter, but it never leaves his shadows. No amount of talk would convince him that all religious leaders have used gullible people to further their politics of hatred. “But there is nothing called Christian fundamentalism”, he retorted. I explained for an hour and gave up. But he was sure we were not going to celebrate anything. No matter what.
The fault is not with him. Indeed the way we have crafted the history of struggles with the British domination and how we have carried forth the heritage is the cause of distress. Instead of correctly looking back at the freedom struggle as a secular one where people of all color/religions/castes had taken part to eliminate the oppressive rulers, we are looking back at it as a Hindu struggle to create Hindustan and Muslim struggle to create Pakistan. What we have been taught to forget is the contributions of the peasant class, the industrial workers, the lower rungs in the military, the naval strike, the secular nature of Indian National Army, the atheism of Bhagat Singh and revolutionaries. The Maulana Azad, the Kaifi Azmi. The Progressive Writers Movements, the Indian Peoples’ Theatres (IPTA), the Aruna Asaf Alis and the Quit India Movement which in 1942 was led by no leader, but orchestrated by the entire masses of people who boycotted the British and challenged them to “Quit” India. Never before and never after has such a call been so pronouncedly made. Just when we were to win, the British had a map ready. We lost big time.
We have now been reduced to religious symbols in the world. Far from being hailed as the founders of the anti-colonial peoples’ struggles, we are today a Muslim poverty called Pakistan and a Hindu bomb called India. And we are the cheapest tech-slaves of the 21st century. The biggest consumer market, the largest slum-dwellers, the saddest communal fanatics.
And we don’t have heroes. Not one in real life. Why blame the cab guy?
I celebrated the independence day fine.
Well that’s the India’s freedom from the British Raj, I am referring to. August 15th midnight hours were the times of the “trysts with destiny” as Nehru proclaimed. And I am just going to reflect on the layers of destinies in store now.
Switched on the television set to find if there was any anti-colonial flavor, any celebration of a multi-cultural society willing to adopt welfare socialist economy or a people nostalgic of huge dreams, broader visions.
Of course it was a disaster. Instead all I could notice was the running advertorials on grand marshals of Indian freedom: Anil Kapoor, Karisma Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor, Babita Kapoor etc are the chief guests to celebrate India’s day of freedom in New York about to be organized on August 20 instead (why? Ask Karisma what courtroom drama she is into these days, that’s why).
Its better to be off to office, I thought. Took the entire office folks to the Tiffin, an Indian restaurant.
Thought there would be fanfare inside the restaurant. Some special smiles. Some warmer greetings. Some big balloons.
Well there was nothing of that nature anywhere. Business as usual. My colleagues and I ended up sharing some unique heritages of freedom struggles in our respective lands. And wished more power to Indian people on the day.
Could not blame the restaurant much. You see, although the owners may be of India origin, almost all people who work there are from Nepal. And I don’t think there is any special reason for Nepalese workers to celebrate independence of their Indian bosses.
Caught a cab to take my new friend and her papa to dinner where we were all invited. The driver was from Pakistan. “Happy belated Independence Day”, I said. He was quick to wish me the same back. And then, said “today is yours”. I said, “but of course we are not such different people that we have to rival each other in celebrating. Remember we both together ousted the British from our land.” He also agreed that while it was true, the fact is the partition was the most painful byproduct anyway. That was true. But does he feel anyway proud?
“What rubbish? I am hiding in the US from being prosecuted in Pakistan. Hence driving cab. Otherwise I used to be a Catholic priest in Pak.”
Had excellent dinner, a very memorable one. I called it the Independence Day dinner. Only that we did not recall the sacrifices of people without whom the day would not have come to such a pass.
Depending on where one comes from, the day will be perceived. For the cab guy, the day was not just bitter, but it never leaves his shadows. No amount of talk would convince him that all religious leaders have used gullible people to further their politics of hatred. “But there is nothing called Christian fundamentalism”, he retorted. I explained for an hour and gave up. But he was sure we were not going to celebrate anything. No matter what.
The fault is not with him. Indeed the way we have crafted the history of struggles with the British domination and how we have carried forth the heritage is the cause of distress. Instead of correctly looking back at the freedom struggle as a secular one where people of all color/religions/castes had taken part to eliminate the oppressive rulers, we are looking back at it as a Hindu struggle to create Hindustan and Muslim struggle to create Pakistan. What we have been taught to forget is the contributions of the peasant class, the industrial workers, the lower rungs in the military, the naval strike, the secular nature of Indian National Army, the atheism of Bhagat Singh and revolutionaries. The Maulana Azad, the Kaifi Azmi. The Progressive Writers Movements, the Indian Peoples’ Theatres (IPTA), the Aruna Asaf Alis and the Quit India Movement which in 1942 was led by no leader, but orchestrated by the entire masses of people who boycotted the British and challenged them to “Quit” India. Never before and never after has such a call been so pronouncedly made. Just when we were to win, the British had a map ready. We lost big time.
We have now been reduced to religious symbols in the world. Far from being hailed as the founders of the anti-colonial peoples’ struggles, we are today a Muslim poverty called Pakistan and a Hindu bomb called India. And we are the cheapest tech-slaves of the 21st century. The biggest consumer market, the largest slum-dwellers, the saddest communal fanatics.
And we don’t have heroes. Not one in real life. Why blame the cab guy?
Am I an American?
08/08/05 06:11 Filed by Saswat Pattanayak in:
Reference
Am I an American?
I’m—just – an
Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian,
Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian,
Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian,
Greek and Turk, and Czech
And double-Czech American.
And that ain’t all,
I was baptized
Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic,
Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh-Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker,
Christian Scientist
--and lots more!
Writer, lyricist John Latouche, 1940
Ignorance 007-- Part I
By Saswat Pattanayak
Histories can be telling. Especially when they are told by the mainstream American media.
The country of concentrated wealth also has the knowledge distribution centralized and no wonder from John Stewart to Michael Moore, the public humorists often cite how many Americans think Canada is another Hawaii (but now since they are required to carry passports to Niagara Falls, some among them have started believing Canada is a separate country)! Indeed, in a recent chat conversation, a woman from California asked me where I was chatting from? “Maryland”, I said. “You are funny. Mary-land? Ok now, tell me which state?” She of course took offence when I asked if she knew where Washington DC was. She knew where DC was….so ok, now gotcha.
Next incident may sound even more incredible. While buying fresh fish at Whole Foods in Silver Spring, our man at the counter asked me, “So are you from Argentina?” No, I said. I am from India. “Yeah but where are you originally from?” I wondered about that, since from experience I knew it’s difficult for some Americans to believe “immigrant-looking” people to be Americans. Hence I did not say him that I was from a nearby city called Adelphi, but that I had actually come from India to do the shopping. “You know although I stay in Maryland, I am originally from India,” I reiterated. He was not buying that. “Oh, Indiana! You look so much different”. No, not Indiana. I am from India—India as in a country. In Asia. India—the computers, the elephants.
He was looking at me puzzled. He had never heard of India (luckily, he had heard of Indiana State.) I was accompanied by my office boss. She did not believe this. “Where has he been hiding all these years, for not to know about India?” I nodded.
Often times one encounters ignorance of mass proportions in the country of concentrated wealth. People still believe that Columbus actually discovered America, that Russians were a bunch of murderers out there to kill every American and that Bush did not lie about Iraq and the WMD.
This week, yet another of the great lies have been incorporated by the most read, most cited mainstream media. Another leaf from the American history-telling. In the next blog.
Histories can be telling. Especially when they are told by the mainstream American media.
The country of concentrated wealth also has the knowledge distribution centralized and no wonder from John Stewart to Michael Moore, the public humorists often cite how many Americans think Canada is another Hawaii (but now since they are required to carry passports to Niagara Falls, some among them have started believing Canada is a separate country)! Indeed, in a recent chat conversation, a woman from California asked me where I was chatting from? “Maryland”, I said. “You are funny. Mary-land? Ok now, tell me which state?” She of course took offence when I asked if she knew where Washington DC was. She knew where DC was….so ok, now gotcha.
Next incident may sound even more incredible. While buying fresh fish at Whole Foods in Silver Spring, our man at the counter asked me, “So are you from Argentina?” No, I said. I am from India. “Yeah but where are you originally from?” I wondered about that, since from experience I knew it’s difficult for some Americans to believe “immigrant-looking” people to be Americans. Hence I did not say him that I was from a nearby city called Adelphi, but that I had actually come from India to do the shopping. “You know although I stay in Maryland, I am originally from India,” I reiterated. He was not buying that. “Oh, Indiana! You look so much different”. No, not Indiana. I am from India—India as in a country. In Asia. India—the computers, the elephants.
He was looking at me puzzled. He had never heard of India (luckily, he had heard of Indiana State.) I was accompanied by my office boss. She did not believe this. “Where has he been hiding all these years, for not to know about India?” I nodded.
Often times one encounters ignorance of mass proportions in the country of concentrated wealth. People still believe that Columbus actually discovered America, that Russians were a bunch of murderers out there to kill every American and that Bush did not lie about Iraq and the WMD.
This week, yet another of the great lies have been incorporated by the most read, most cited mainstream media. Another leaf from the American history-telling. In the next blog.
Individualistic Nationalism for the Neocons
By Saswat Pattanayak
What is the equation between individualism and nationalism in the neocolonial period?
With most nations breaking free from foreign dominations (although quite many still remain occupied, viz., Sikkim in India or Hawaii in US—and their status are not likely to be challenged anytime soon), have preached individual progress, what effectively has taken place is an enforced allegiance of the subjects towards the State.
In fulfilling the individual dreams, the State persistently demanded individuals to give for the country, not to assume what the country can do for them. Most of us must have grown up with quoting the Kennedy lines and reciting the national anthems of our respective countries with pride.
This ideology of isolated patriotism has left us a growing distrust for those who differed from us: Isolated patriotisms have few features— national ideologies, national interests, national flags, which have unequivocally been uniquely crafted. This is ironical, since the interests of people of the world are hardly any different (food, clothes, shelter, education and empowerment). Yet political leaderships in each country draft their interests differently!
This love for one’s land as inscribed in national anthems and portrayed in national flags have one major purpose: to leave people feeling that they exist, because they are different from the “others”. The Others in this case have been defined by the degree to which “they” have disagreed with “us”, and by the type of nationalities they have had (completely obliterating the historical similarities in peoples’ struggles to gain independence). This has led to an assumes sense of right vs wrong war where we are always right and they are always wrong, and as united we stand, “we” are defined by our nationalities rather than our intrinsic similarities (for example, the people of Latin America in their struggles, the African Americans in theirs, the colonial peoples of Asia in theirs—were all similar in their approach towards their oppressors, yet they never joined hands together, since they were made to believe that they were of different countries having different “interests”! So when Paul Robeson wrote to Indonesian people, he was actually criticized back home by the Black leaderships. And when Indo-China war was on, civil rights leaders largely turned away from protesting. Interests in home became more crucial than interests outside. After all, that’s what the primary lessons of good socialization process-how to safeguard one’s own interests.
Hence when it’s family members preaching inhuman sermons, our neighbors harassing their children, or even our local politicians ransacking public wealth, we are used not to take much notice. If the government prescribes conscriptions or curfews, we are the gullible law-abiders giving in to the neofascists with glee.
To recognize these efforts, any expressions of intolerance within one’s country are always met with dire consequences by the respective police states. But try enacting the same drama against, let’s say other countries (the famous “enemy” countries--burning effigies of Bush, Musharraf or Saddam) and suddenly that becomes the hallmark of free expressions. One quick mental exercise to assess the “national” leaders (since there are not many “world” leaders—except Mandela and Castro), and we are well aware of the fear psychoses techniques they employ against their people to keep them united. Yet there are vehement expressions of oppositions against some among them, depending on which side folks are on. To be a “true” Indian, one needs to hate Pakistan, to be a “true” Chinese one needs to hate Japanese, to be a “true” American, one needs to show disdain towards Iraq or towards anyone who is not with the Bush administration, notwithstanding that the vice versa are true in all cases too.
In quest to affirm one’s true identity of nationalistic allegiance, one unfortunately has been relegated to hate something. Reverse the question: Who does one need to love, in order to be a true anything? Such questions are not much asked. But of course, the propaganda mill teaches that for unity to prevail, people need to love each other. Then again, the mill teaches that the “each other” need to be part of the same territory.
For its not forming human communities which is the priority here, it’s ruling a country, which is.
And to rule subjects as a unitary, homogenous, one culture whole, a sense of acute distrust towards potential threats (in case of none, threats need to be manufactured) becomes necessary. National flags are symbolic not just of a country’s unique colors of identity from another, but they have historically always been a means of asserting one’s standing on one’s land (remember that all the colonial struggles were led by flag-marching freedom fighters). But the irony is that the flags during colonial times by struggling people were in retaliation to the imposition of a foreign flag, not a novelty by any standard. In the hands of fighters, flags call war. They shout protests. They cry freedom. In the hands of the oppressors, flags become a shame. They become systematic means to declare that no one is above the state, no one is above the rulers, howsoever right the individual might be, howsoever wrong the state machinery might be.
As we grow more individualistic, our social commitments also become an extension of the same trait. Isolationistic patriotism that proves reactionary becomes the end-result. When as freedom fighters, patriotism is displayed, it is epitome of mass consciousness to build a new society of cooperation. When as rulers, they display patriotism, it easily gets converted into the weapon to subjugate the vast majority of people under constant fear of the “others”, those others who do not bow to the same flag. And we too often sadly forget that it was Hitler who as the ruler led the most patriotic bunch of people ever in the world.
What is the equation between individualism and nationalism in the neocolonial period?
With most nations breaking free from foreign dominations (although quite many still remain occupied, viz., Sikkim in India or Hawaii in US—and their status are not likely to be challenged anytime soon), have preached individual progress, what effectively has taken place is an enforced allegiance of the subjects towards the State.
In fulfilling the individual dreams, the State persistently demanded individuals to give for the country, not to assume what the country can do for them. Most of us must have grown up with quoting the Kennedy lines and reciting the national anthems of our respective countries with pride.
This ideology of isolated patriotism has left us a growing distrust for those who differed from us: Isolated patriotisms have few features— national ideologies, national interests, national flags, which have unequivocally been uniquely crafted. This is ironical, since the interests of people of the world are hardly any different (food, clothes, shelter, education and empowerment). Yet political leaderships in each country draft their interests differently!
This love for one’s land as inscribed in national anthems and portrayed in national flags have one major purpose: to leave people feeling that they exist, because they are different from the “others”. The Others in this case have been defined by the degree to which “they” have disagreed with “us”, and by the type of nationalities they have had (completely obliterating the historical similarities in peoples’ struggles to gain independence). This has led to an assumes sense of right vs wrong war where we are always right and they are always wrong, and as united we stand, “we” are defined by our nationalities rather than our intrinsic similarities (for example, the people of Latin America in their struggles, the African Americans in theirs, the colonial peoples of Asia in theirs—were all similar in their approach towards their oppressors, yet they never joined hands together, since they were made to believe that they were of different countries having different “interests”! So when Paul Robeson wrote to Indonesian people, he was actually criticized back home by the Black leaderships. And when Indo-China war was on, civil rights leaders largely turned away from protesting. Interests in home became more crucial than interests outside. After all, that’s what the primary lessons of good socialization process-how to safeguard one’s own interests.
Hence when it’s family members preaching inhuman sermons, our neighbors harassing their children, or even our local politicians ransacking public wealth, we are used not to take much notice. If the government prescribes conscriptions or curfews, we are the gullible law-abiders giving in to the neofascists with glee.
To recognize these efforts, any expressions of intolerance within one’s country are always met with dire consequences by the respective police states. But try enacting the same drama against, let’s say other countries (the famous “enemy” countries--burning effigies of Bush, Musharraf or Saddam) and suddenly that becomes the hallmark of free expressions. One quick mental exercise to assess the “national” leaders (since there are not many “world” leaders—except Mandela and Castro), and we are well aware of the fear psychoses techniques they employ against their people to keep them united. Yet there are vehement expressions of oppositions against some among them, depending on which side folks are on. To be a “true” Indian, one needs to hate Pakistan, to be a “true” Chinese one needs to hate Japanese, to be a “true” American, one needs to show disdain towards Iraq or towards anyone who is not with the Bush administration, notwithstanding that the vice versa are true in all cases too.
In quest to affirm one’s true identity of nationalistic allegiance, one unfortunately has been relegated to hate something. Reverse the question: Who does one need to love, in order to be a true anything? Such questions are not much asked. But of course, the propaganda mill teaches that for unity to prevail, people need to love each other. Then again, the mill teaches that the “each other” need to be part of the same territory.
For its not forming human communities which is the priority here, it’s ruling a country, which is.
And to rule subjects as a unitary, homogenous, one culture whole, a sense of acute distrust towards potential threats (in case of none, threats need to be manufactured) becomes necessary. National flags are symbolic not just of a country’s unique colors of identity from another, but they have historically always been a means of asserting one’s standing on one’s land (remember that all the colonial struggles were led by flag-marching freedom fighters). But the irony is that the flags during colonial times by struggling people were in retaliation to the imposition of a foreign flag, not a novelty by any standard. In the hands of fighters, flags call war. They shout protests. They cry freedom. In the hands of the oppressors, flags become a shame. They become systematic means to declare that no one is above the state, no one is above the rulers, howsoever right the individual might be, howsoever wrong the state machinery might be.
As we grow more individualistic, our social commitments also become an extension of the same trait. Isolationistic patriotism that proves reactionary becomes the end-result. When as freedom fighters, patriotism is displayed, it is epitome of mass consciousness to build a new society of cooperation. When as rulers, they display patriotism, it easily gets converted into the weapon to subjugate the vast majority of people under constant fear of the “others”, those others who do not bow to the same flag. And we too often sadly forget that it was Hitler who as the ruler led the most patriotic bunch of people ever in the world.
We suspect, therefore we are - Part II
By Saswat Pattanayak
Well, do minorities in the US think they have a shared history?
Logically no, if they intend to continue remaining minorities. Else they would be the majority of people (just by the sheer volume of their class structure and solidarity with their White working class counterparts). But the amazing thing is there is a dearth of education regarding a subconscious that there could be anything shared among them.
It grows out of a feeling of selfish endeavor of human being to stay inhumanely competitive. A society such as American (by which I mean an individualistic society where education, healthcare, social security—are all based on individualistic formulae of secret numbers that the State asks folks not to share, than social commitments to welfare where people could organize themselves on basis of their shared knowledge of mutual discontents) teaches people to first take care of their own selves, than anyone else. In some crude form of defining family, the roles are assigned individually among spouses, the children are encouraged to stay separate as different units, and when the parents turn old, they have no constant family support since independent children have not been taking care of much of anyone else anyway (remember they are busy letting their own family become nuclearer).
In such a fragmented society, its ridiculous on my part to assume that people will think beyond their four walls (of course when it gets boring, you have got Oprah and Jerry Springer on the television within the four walls), let alone think of the different races, cultures, nations, languages and you name it, and you don’t have it.
Well, during times when individuals have suffered depending on their race status, they have got united, so that the struggle benefits them individually. And once economically few have benefited for having played the rules of the ruling game, the same members of the oppressed race, show their backs to the other members of the race and hence the wide disparity then becomes apparent between them and the majority members of their race which overwhelmingly remain dispossessed. So the “house slaves” as Malcolm X called these people, who loved playing the rules of the masters and who wept when their master wept saying “oh master, we are sick” when the master alone was sick, then become the torchbearers of the fruits of freedom. A freedom largely unknown to the 35 million homeless and hungry of this country.
In such a self-centered society which does not encourage people to look beyond their own self, in a classically disgusting Ayn Rand fashion, its stupid for me to assume that marginal classes of people will ever think themselves to be belonging to the same rank.
Its not fault of any individual as I see it, but it’s the mistake of the individuality that people flout today. This individuality shows itself on marches, and parades only when it concerns with a result which will eventually benefit the individuals, else not. Hence the anti-imperialist fight is not being fought today. What we have at most is the fights between the Hispanics with the Asians, the Blacks with the Jews. The shared history is denied at every juncture so that we can have many more divisions. At the university level, we can have Latin Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies. At the community level, we can have Latin communities, Black communities, Asian community housings.
People have clearly forgotten the systematic murders of the Native Americans, the Japanese, the Africans, the Philipinos, the Chinese, the Latinos, the homosexuals, the Muslims, the Jews, the atheists, the communists, the Black and White panthers. By degree they have all varied. The worst sufferers have been the Native Americans, and the least could be the homosexuals. But that’s just a numeric difference. In other words the numbers are so fluid that no one knows in near future whose turns will it be to be counted as the most unfortunate. Between the extremes, one remembers the most tragic and systematically orchestrated lynchings of the Blacks in the South.
What is important to remember in this context is the not just degree and the fact that the degree will vary in future times to include most of us, but also the type of exploitation. This has consistently been the case, not just in America whose natives were attacked most brutally, but also in other countries which were invaded by the European colonialists. The difference being, in the other countries like India and South Africa, the numbers of oppressed people far outweighed the number of the Europeans colonialists (ruling business and royal classes of Spain, France, Britain).
Going by the shared history of enslavement and tortures, I do not see for a moment, why any minority group must feel more privileged or less privileged than another. But the irony is, that this is how it works.
In a recent discussion, my African American friends commented that whereas Tsunami song evoked protests, where were the Asians when blacks were being called Niggers. My Asian American friends wonder why the racism should only address issues of the Blacks on prime time television resulting in a change to “their” favor whereas there is no black protest against discrimination of Asian who are missing from popular culture. The Ghettopoly protest vis-à-vis the naming of the “chinks” on hip hop are all opening the door to further divide the “their” and “our” issues.
The conflicts between the Blacks and the Jews is well recorded. The media, proverbially owned by the Jewish capitalists, tilting against the church going Black nationalists has been a debate historically waged. The conflicts between the Arabs and the Jews, even as one watched Fahrenheit 911 with wonder would vouch for. “Those Arabs.”
In a classic post colonial discourse, it would be miserably aping the behaviors called for by the colonialists so that one group will be more favorably looked upon than the others. These “others”, though logically would be belonging to the one and the same force, would need to fight against one another for them to be easily overwhelmed and left without a choice in the matters of their lives.
The stock of history always have been produced in manners that are in consonance with state interests. When the right-wing party in India decided to take off the chapter on Gandhi’s assassination (since the dastardly act was committed by a right-wing fanatic) it was no surprise. Or when the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC took off the main chapter of Niemöller’s warning on “First They Came” since it talked about 6 million Communist victims, it came as no surprise. Talking of Niemöller, its very apt to mention his original work here:
The legendary stanza has been largely rewritten by people who influence history, for obvious reasons. Time magazine, that primary source for historical researches used the quotation, moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats!
American Vice-President Al Gore who claimed to have coined words even for the cyberspace, quotes the lines, but drops the trade unionists!
Gore and Time also have added Roman Catholics, who were never on the list of Niemöller's at all. In fact on the Holocaust memorial at the Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed.
The US Holocaust Museum at the Washington DC, another place for historians have dropped the Communists but retained the Social Democrats!
As far as I can see the mutual resentment to delete certain sections could have to do more with the issues of class-based differences that were sought for to be resolved by this group of fabled people. Because its easy to attack someone as a Communist, as Stallman says, for having said the most uninteresting things. Things which interest people in individualistic societies have to do with individual progress/competitive clashes/power plays/merit games even in terms of narrating and positioning their “own” histories and not look at the shared history of exploitations in fear of not having a separate studies/housing/museum (which anyway gets founded on manipulated ideas).
If only we knew we stand to lose nothing if we got to tell our stories of common histories than of our discreet glories?
Well, do minorities in the US think they have a shared history?
Logically no, if they intend to continue remaining minorities. Else they would be the majority of people (just by the sheer volume of their class structure and solidarity with their White working class counterparts). But the amazing thing is there is a dearth of education regarding a subconscious that there could be anything shared among them.
It grows out of a feeling of selfish endeavor of human being to stay inhumanely competitive. A society such as American (by which I mean an individualistic society where education, healthcare, social security—are all based on individualistic formulae of secret numbers that the State asks folks not to share, than social commitments to welfare where people could organize themselves on basis of their shared knowledge of mutual discontents) teaches people to first take care of their own selves, than anyone else. In some crude form of defining family, the roles are assigned individually among spouses, the children are encouraged to stay separate as different units, and when the parents turn old, they have no constant family support since independent children have not been taking care of much of anyone else anyway (remember they are busy letting their own family become nuclearer).
In such a fragmented society, its ridiculous on my part to assume that people will think beyond their four walls (of course when it gets boring, you have got Oprah and Jerry Springer on the television within the four walls), let alone think of the different races, cultures, nations, languages and you name it, and you don’t have it.
Well, during times when individuals have suffered depending on their race status, they have got united, so that the struggle benefits them individually. And once economically few have benefited for having played the rules of the ruling game, the same members of the oppressed race, show their backs to the other members of the race and hence the wide disparity then becomes apparent between them and the majority members of their race which overwhelmingly remain dispossessed. So the “house slaves” as Malcolm X called these people, who loved playing the rules of the masters and who wept when their master wept saying “oh master, we are sick” when the master alone was sick, then become the torchbearers of the fruits of freedom. A freedom largely unknown to the 35 million homeless and hungry of this country.
In such a self-centered society which does not encourage people to look beyond their own self, in a classically disgusting Ayn Rand fashion, its stupid for me to assume that marginal classes of people will ever think themselves to be belonging to the same rank.
Its not fault of any individual as I see it, but it’s the mistake of the individuality that people flout today. This individuality shows itself on marches, and parades only when it concerns with a result which will eventually benefit the individuals, else not. Hence the anti-imperialist fight is not being fought today. What we have at most is the fights between the Hispanics with the Asians, the Blacks with the Jews. The shared history is denied at every juncture so that we can have many more divisions. At the university level, we can have Latin Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies. At the community level, we can have Latin communities, Black communities, Asian community housings.
People have clearly forgotten the systematic murders of the Native Americans, the Japanese, the Africans, the Philipinos, the Chinese, the Latinos, the homosexuals, the Muslims, the Jews, the atheists, the communists, the Black and White panthers. By degree they have all varied. The worst sufferers have been the Native Americans, and the least could be the homosexuals. But that’s just a numeric difference. In other words the numbers are so fluid that no one knows in near future whose turns will it be to be counted as the most unfortunate. Between the extremes, one remembers the most tragic and systematically orchestrated lynchings of the Blacks in the South.
What is important to remember in this context is the not just degree and the fact that the degree will vary in future times to include most of us, but also the type of exploitation. This has consistently been the case, not just in America whose natives were attacked most brutally, but also in other countries which were invaded by the European colonialists. The difference being, in the other countries like India and South Africa, the numbers of oppressed people far outweighed the number of the Europeans colonialists (ruling business and royal classes of Spain, France, Britain).
Going by the shared history of enslavement and tortures, I do not see for a moment, why any minority group must feel more privileged or less privileged than another. But the irony is, that this is how it works.
In a recent discussion, my African American friends commented that whereas Tsunami song evoked protests, where were the Asians when blacks were being called Niggers. My Asian American friends wonder why the racism should only address issues of the Blacks on prime time television resulting in a change to “their” favor whereas there is no black protest against discrimination of Asian who are missing from popular culture. The Ghettopoly protest vis-à-vis the naming of the “chinks” on hip hop are all opening the door to further divide the “their” and “our” issues.
The conflicts between the Blacks and the Jews is well recorded. The media, proverbially owned by the Jewish capitalists, tilting against the church going Black nationalists has been a debate historically waged. The conflicts between the Arabs and the Jews, even as one watched Fahrenheit 911 with wonder would vouch for. “Those Arabs.”
In a classic post colonial discourse, it would be miserably aping the behaviors called for by the colonialists so that one group will be more favorably looked upon than the others. These “others”, though logically would be belonging to the one and the same force, would need to fight against one another for them to be easily overwhelmed and left without a choice in the matters of their lives.
The stock of history always have been produced in manners that are in consonance with state interests. When the right-wing party in India decided to take off the chapter on Gandhi’s assassination (since the dastardly act was committed by a right-wing fanatic) it was no surprise. Or when the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC took off the main chapter of Niemöller’s warning on “First They Came” since it talked about 6 million Communist victims, it came as no surprise. Talking of Niemöller, its very apt to mention his original work here:
"First they came for the Communists
but I was not a Communist - so I said nothing.
Then they came for the Social Democrats,
but I was not a Social Democrat - so I did nothing.
Then came the trade unionists,
but I was not a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews,
but I was not a Jew - so I did little.
Then when they came for me,
there was no one left who could stand up for me."
The legendary stanza has been largely rewritten by people who influence history, for obvious reasons. Time magazine, that primary source for historical researches used the quotation, moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats!
American Vice-President Al Gore who claimed to have coined words even for the cyberspace, quotes the lines, but drops the trade unionists!
Gore and Time also have added Roman Catholics, who were never on the list of Niemöller's at all. In fact on the Holocaust memorial at the Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed.
The US Holocaust Museum at the Washington DC, another place for historians have dropped the Communists but retained the Social Democrats!
As far as I can see the mutual resentment to delete certain sections could have to do more with the issues of class-based differences that were sought for to be resolved by this group of fabled people. Because its easy to attack someone as a Communist, as Stallman says, for having said the most uninteresting things. Things which interest people in individualistic societies have to do with individual progress/competitive clashes/power plays/merit games even in terms of narrating and positioning their “own” histories and not look at the shared history of exploitations in fear of not having a separate studies/housing/museum (which anyway gets founded on manipulated ideas).
If only we knew we stand to lose nothing if we got to tell our stories of common histories than of our discreet glories?
We suspect, therefore we are - Part I
By Saswat Pattanayak
The long history of conflicts between the marginal groups to vie for each others’ blood is a well known one.
One of the major reasons behind the conquerors’ successes in sustained oppression has been not just to divide and rule, but also to create a sense of suspicion among the ruled groups.
Let’s go one step at a time. When Amrita and I came to live by the Kreeger Drive in Adelphi, Maryland since two years now, I was advised by my fellow Indian relatives and friends that it was not a good place to go to. And if we had no other choice, at least we had to be very careful so as not to venture out in evenings. Not to walk around in the market, rather to drive only (and even while driving, looking out for those people who cross the roads insanely).
Without paying any heed of course, we never drove here. Always walked, even in the evenings, asked the people drinking in front of our apartment to at least reduce the noise so that we could study. We knew that they were working class wage earners toiling hard in the days (even standing by the 7/11s in line to be picked up for work by any generous White man for the day) and relaxing a bit on Friday evenings with one of two best offering of capitalistic societies—Miller’s booze (the other, Church remains closed in the evenings). After few weeks they not only stopped the noises, they also changed the venue.
We even knocked the door of my immediate neighbor in the first week, just to know them, you know. The man in the family did not open the door, instead looked out of the window and asked “hmm?” I said, “Hi there, we are your new neighbors. Just wanted to get to know you.” The neighbor, an African-American man in his 40’s, immediately closed the window itself. After a couple of months he was gone. A Latino family now is our adjacent neighbor. They of course don’t converse in English.
The neighbor on the second floor, another Black man in this case, happened to be a taxi driver. He exchanged his number and asked me to contact him directly instead of the cab service since most of the time he is looking for people to give rides to. After few months, he told me when I called, that his cab was stolen. He said, “These Mexicans, they steal man. Brother you have to be careful. Don’t go out on the street in the evening.”
After a month, he knocked my door. I was about to open it, when he shouted, “I am your neighbor, the cab guy. I came here to….” I opened the door quick enough to listen to him directly rather than encouraging that suspicion trip. “Hello, how u doin? Hey man I have a favor to ask. Can you please keep my TV for a week at your place for me to pick it up later? I am moving from here since my room mate is leaving for Nigeria. If that’s not a lot of problem, I know I can trust you with it.” For sure, no problem in that, I said. I even went up to lend a hand in lifting that huge machine. Both of us could not manage it. “Don’t worry. I will get some of those Mexicans to do it. Thanks man, for agreeing to keep it at your place.” Next morning, he got four of “those Mexicans” to do the needful, probably paying a couple of dollars to them. Instead of 7 days, he came back after three weeks to take the TV back.
While he was taking it back, he was noticeably grateful that I had taken care of his 30 inch tv in my one bedroom apartment for so many days. “What do you do in the university?” Looking at my little library, he was in doubts. “I am a graduate student,” I said. He had obviously thought I was a part time worker at the university (which I was by the way, apart from being a student). But being a graduate student at an elite university like that, “Wow! I never knew that.” He said, before showering me with some compliments.
And after three months I suddenly noticed an Indian man in our community. He would park his car in front of the nearby building and open the doors and play Hindi music at full blast. Maybe to say, “hey you people out there. The Indian civilized smartass has arrived now! Listen to my music” Not just Jay-Z and Shakira, but also a punch of Bhangra. Well, not much to add about it except that he once stopped Amrita on her way back, to self-introduce as, “Hey I am from Indian.” (Read: since we are Indians and neighbors, we should logically trust each other, than trust those blacks and latinos there, you know)
Our Cab guy’s advice was in essence: “Be aware of the Mexicans, my man.” My Indian relatives advice: “Be aware of the Blacks.” So its time for some to say beware of both the Mexicans and the Blacks. Half the time I take cabs to the campus and every time I end up discussing race related issues with the drivers, all of them invariably Africans (not African-Americans) in this area and almost all of them Indians (recent Punjabi immigrants, not Asian Americans) little ahead in Greenbelt area.
If you are wondering if anyone (Blacks, Latinos, Indians) in these working class neighborhoods have ever asked me to be aware of the Whites, you bet, no one has. Not that I need to be cautioned about them. But what’s so very predictive in a shocking manner is the way the minorities are very eager to call each other names and create a sense of insecurity and/or fear among themselves basing on assumptions about each of the other groups.
Well, where does this lack of faith among them stem from?
I see it as a drastic failure emanating from an inability to unify. This is what my observation is towards the whole issue of Crash in the American multicultural salad bowl.
And the second precept is that they are intentionally being kept away from being unified so that they shall continue to nurture inter-group suspicions. Once they be united owing to their larger shared history….
The long history of conflicts between the marginal groups to vie for each others’ blood is a well known one.
One of the major reasons behind the conquerors’ successes in sustained oppression has been not just to divide and rule, but also to create a sense of suspicion among the ruled groups.
Let’s go one step at a time. When Amrita and I came to live by the Kreeger Drive in Adelphi, Maryland since two years now, I was advised by my fellow Indian relatives and friends that it was not a good place to go to. And if we had no other choice, at least we had to be very careful so as not to venture out in evenings. Not to walk around in the market, rather to drive only (and even while driving, looking out for those people who cross the roads insanely).
Without paying any heed of course, we never drove here. Always walked, even in the evenings, asked the people drinking in front of our apartment to at least reduce the noise so that we could study. We knew that they were working class wage earners toiling hard in the days (even standing by the 7/11s in line to be picked up for work by any generous White man for the day) and relaxing a bit on Friday evenings with one of two best offering of capitalistic societies—Miller’s booze (the other, Church remains closed in the evenings). After few weeks they not only stopped the noises, they also changed the venue.
We even knocked the door of my immediate neighbor in the first week, just to know them, you know. The man in the family did not open the door, instead looked out of the window and asked “hmm?” I said, “Hi there, we are your new neighbors. Just wanted to get to know you.” The neighbor, an African-American man in his 40’s, immediately closed the window itself. After a couple of months he was gone. A Latino family now is our adjacent neighbor. They of course don’t converse in English.
The neighbor on the second floor, another Black man in this case, happened to be a taxi driver. He exchanged his number and asked me to contact him directly instead of the cab service since most of the time he is looking for people to give rides to. After few months, he told me when I called, that his cab was stolen. He said, “These Mexicans, they steal man. Brother you have to be careful. Don’t go out on the street in the evening.”
After a month, he knocked my door. I was about to open it, when he shouted, “I am your neighbor, the cab guy. I came here to….” I opened the door quick enough to listen to him directly rather than encouraging that suspicion trip. “Hello, how u doin? Hey man I have a favor to ask. Can you please keep my TV for a week at your place for me to pick it up later? I am moving from here since my room mate is leaving for Nigeria. If that’s not a lot of problem, I know I can trust you with it.” For sure, no problem in that, I said. I even went up to lend a hand in lifting that huge machine. Both of us could not manage it. “Don’t worry. I will get some of those Mexicans to do it. Thanks man, for agreeing to keep it at your place.” Next morning, he got four of “those Mexicans” to do the needful, probably paying a couple of dollars to them. Instead of 7 days, he came back after three weeks to take the TV back.
While he was taking it back, he was noticeably grateful that I had taken care of his 30 inch tv in my one bedroom apartment for so many days. “What do you do in the university?” Looking at my little library, he was in doubts. “I am a graduate student,” I said. He had obviously thought I was a part time worker at the university (which I was by the way, apart from being a student). But being a graduate student at an elite university like that, “Wow! I never knew that.” He said, before showering me with some compliments.
And after three months I suddenly noticed an Indian man in our community. He would park his car in front of the nearby building and open the doors and play Hindi music at full blast. Maybe to say, “hey you people out there. The Indian civilized smartass has arrived now! Listen to my music” Not just Jay-Z and Shakira, but also a punch of Bhangra. Well, not much to add about it except that he once stopped Amrita on her way back, to self-introduce as, “Hey I am from Indian.” (Read: since we are Indians and neighbors, we should logically trust each other, than trust those blacks and latinos there, you know)
Our Cab guy’s advice was in essence: “Be aware of the Mexicans, my man.” My Indian relatives advice: “Be aware of the Blacks.” So its time for some to say beware of both the Mexicans and the Blacks. Half the time I take cabs to the campus and every time I end up discussing race related issues with the drivers, all of them invariably Africans (not African-Americans) in this area and almost all of them Indians (recent Punjabi immigrants, not Asian Americans) little ahead in Greenbelt area.
If you are wondering if anyone (Blacks, Latinos, Indians) in these working class neighborhoods have ever asked me to be aware of the Whites, you bet, no one has. Not that I need to be cautioned about them. But what’s so very predictive in a shocking manner is the way the minorities are very eager to call each other names and create a sense of insecurity and/or fear among themselves basing on assumptions about each of the other groups.
Well, where does this lack of faith among them stem from?
I see it as a drastic failure emanating from an inability to unify. This is what my observation is towards the whole issue of Crash in the American multicultural salad bowl.
And the second precept is that they are intentionally being kept away from being unified so that they shall continue to nurture inter-group suspicions. Once they be united owing to their larger shared history….
An Ode to Multicultural-ism
By Saswat Pattanayak
My recent poem did not need to sound lyrical:
My recent poem did not need to sound lyrical:
I won’t be a victim of their myopic definition
Not a subject of their divided and ruled abstraction
Don’t dare call me a lovechild of illegal immigration
Will never give in to their verdicts for societal seclusion
Don’t just divide this world up into several borderlines
And compel me to produce a passport to prove my alliance
I don’t hold torches or flags; I wont fight with no “enemy” beings
And I ain’t no reserved pig, won’t dance to their muddy signs
They’ve been asking long for me to sign the checkbox of my ethnicity
African-American, Asian-American, Latin-American and any other entity
The terms that they block us by, and those divisions subject to atrophy
They devise multiculturalism and play favorites, so we fight for each legacy
The whites of the World are surely united for their common histories
It’s the people of color who are grouped differently by some taxonomies
I wonder why there are no enlisted Europeans-American categories
Even as the Native Indians are made to suffer from some identity crisis
The Third world and our diasporic folks in First World have some in common
We have always fought the rulers bravely, to repel the ghastly intrusions
We’re the strongest force to reckon with, as the victims of oppressions
Divide us, calm us, comedy us, and we are soon our own frustrations
I know they secretly love to call us Niggers, call us Zappies, call us Chinkies
But they wont call me Asian yet, for where will go the yellow lot Chinese?
Now they call me South Asian and I wonder what need is for that tease
But of course we are items stratified on their flawed geographical drawings
They can call me at will, a different race and a different ethnicity
But can hardly ever separate me from my shared similar history
With the peoples who suffered being part of one same colony
Ruled and ravaged as uncivilized colored, yet laundered as valued money
Spanish, French, Dutch, Germans, English and the Americans
Their ruling elites believing in imperialistic expansions
To sustain the rule, have broken people into rival sections
And now preachers of the G-7 and the self-proclaimed well-wishers
Nay, peoples of the world reject the rules of the ruling classes
No more nationalistic agendas, no racial superiority clashes
Won’t take that bullet from them anymore, nor shall we shoot their gun
Working peoples of the world this time, will fight for their own revolution
As the Asian Heritage Month passes away
On campus at UMD, we had few events, of course. We
even had Vijay Prasad over to give one of the most
interesting talks I have heard of. He would agree too
that the observation of the Asian Heritage Month was
also one of the ways to normalize the potential
dissent.
Well, one of the pitfalls of the multiculturalism is of course that it makes things appear so subtle that it would then look like cultures were made to live by side of each other by default. Subsequently any war and peace are byproducts of a complicated web of interactions.
In essence, the ways of living is clearly left for the people to determine. Culture never belonged to the government anyway. And millions of democracy lovers would want the Government to stay away from controlling culture. So, easy game, baby. Dominant will prevail.
For the rest, we shall observe a month for them. Rest 11 months, the tech-slave Asians live within free American society.
Read More...
Well, one of the pitfalls of the multiculturalism is of course that it makes things appear so subtle that it would then look like cultures were made to live by side of each other by default. Subsequently any war and peace are byproducts of a complicated web of interactions.
In essence, the ways of living is clearly left for the people to determine. Culture never belonged to the government anyway. And millions of democracy lovers would want the Government to stay away from controlling culture. So, easy game, baby. Dominant will prevail.
For the rest, we shall observe a month for them. Rest 11 months, the tech-slave Asians live within free American society.
Read More...