Starting Points: Ethnicity

Showing posts with label Ethnicity. Show all posts

Jul 23, 2010

A place for race on Obama's agenda

Screenshot of Obama's speech on race, A More P...

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A03

Two years ago, in a powerful speech in Philadelphia, presidential candidate Barack Obama warned that Americans will not be able to overcome their divisions if they continue to "tackle race only as a spectacle."

This week, however, the subject of race returned to the forefront as just that: A spectacle over a selectively edited Internet video that led to the hasty firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod for seemingly making racist comments. Then came a rush of recrimination and vindication when a fuller version revealed that she had actually been giving a speech about overcoming prejudice.

On Thursday, Obama called Sherrod from a private study off the Oval Office to apologize for his administration's missteps, but Sherrod insisted that there was much more that he should do.

"The president, if he could actually look at this in the way that he should, he could help bring this front and center and do a lot to help at least start the process," she told Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart in an interview a few hours before she talked to Obama. "I don't think he can solve it by himself. But being in the position he's in, he could do a lot to help this nation get to the point where we can deal with it."

"What happened to me," she added, "was an attempt to run away from it."

Whether that is true or not, the subject of race has had a way of catching up with Obama.

His apology to Sherrod came on the one-year anniversary of a news conference in which Obama kicked up the first racially charged controversy of his presidency by declaring that the Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" by arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African American professor at Harvard and one of the nation's preeminent scholars. The ensuing storm of criticism led to the "beer summit" at which Gates and the officer who arrested him shared brews in the Rose Garden with Obama and Vice President Biden.

Officials conceded privately that one of the reasons the White House kept its distance from the Sherrod controversy when it first erupted, with the posting of the misleading video by blogger Andrew Breitbart, was that it didn't want to ignite yet another round of racism accusations against the administration by conservative media.

As Obama himself has pointed out many times, it would have been naive to think that the election of the nation's first African American president would be enough to make the country a paradise of racial harmony.

"If there's a lesson to be drawn from this episode," Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview taped Thursday, "it's that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what's in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress."

Though he rarely addresses the subject of race explicitly, Obama's advisers insist that he has not failed to honor the promises he made in that Philadelphia speech two years ago.

But it can require something of a bank shot to make that case. "Look at an issue like education," where the administration has launched an initiative to reward states that lift their standards, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Many civil rights leaders talk about education as a civil rights issue."

His allies say that Obama has so much else on his plate, with a recession at home and two wars overseas, that there is no room left for much else right now. And they contend that it would be difficult for him to lead a dialogue on race when he is the subject of some of its more corrosive story lines.

"You can't have this conversation when the political environment is so polluted," said Donna Brazile, an African American and a Democratic political strategist. "A healthy part of this conversation has to start with the fact that, since his election, those who oppose him have redoubled their efforts to somehow prove that he is not an American, to question his legitimacy."

Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are the ones who have had their legitimacy unfairly questioned. Since Obama became president, they say, accusations of racism have too often been hurled at his opponents when they have a difference with him over policy or philosophy.

"The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time," Erick Ericson wrote Tuesday on his RedState.com blog. "They have devalued what racism means -- which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means."

Although civil rights leaders say they do not expect -- or necessarily even want -- Obama to use the Sherrod episode to launch a dialogue on race, they say that it showed he still has work to do in one area: making sure that his own government reflects the country at large.

"I really believe there is an experience gap in this administration," a lack of diversity in its upper echelons, said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the highest-ranking African American in Congress. "I really believe those kinds of experiences need to be shared at the highest levels of government."

Jul 9, 2010

First Tweets from My New Burma Blog

Image by FriskoDude via Flickr

JohnAMacDougall

#Burma #Monitor: #Water #shortage returns to crisis-hit regions: http://bit.ly/cNRNyJ via @addthis #DVB 25 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Burma #Monitor: #Rangoon #bombing #suspect put in solitary confinement: http://bit.ly/aK4KmF via @addthis #dvb 37 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Burma #Monitor: How Do You Spell Hope?: The Story of #Rochester's #Burmese #Refugees (Part Three): http://bit.ly/bTj7By via @addthis about 4 hours ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Burma #Monitor: How Do You Spell Hope?: The Story of #Rochester's #Burmese #Refugees (Part Two): http://bit.ly/blsLp3 via @addthis about 5 hours ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Burma #Monitor: How Do You Spell Hope?: The Story of #Rochester's #Burmese #Refugees (Part One): http://bit.ly/bcpUfh via @addthis about 5 hours ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

WXXI: How Do You Spell Hope?: The Story of Rochester's #Burmese #Refugees (Part One) (2010-07-07): http://bit.ly/bo7XQV via @addthis about 7 hours ago via web

Apr 17, 2010

On Religion - Call and Response on the State of the Black Church - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”

Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.

Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.

In the conventional wisdom that accompanied the popular imagery, the Black Church was regarded by insider and outsider, by ally and opponent, as a fount of progressive politics expressed through the prophetic tradition of Moses, Amos, Isaiah and Jesus.

Now a young scholar has taken a rhetorical wrecking ball to the monolith, and the reverberations are rippling through religious and academic circles of African-Americans. To mix the metaphor, the broader public has been allowed to eavesdrop on the theological equivalent of a black barbershop, a place of glorious disputation that is usually kept out of white earshot.

The debate took off in February when The Huffington Post published an essay by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. , a professor of religion at Princeton, under the deliberately provocative headline “The Black Church Is Dead.”

“When I came up with the title, I said, ‘Lord, what am I doing?’ ” Professor Glaude, 41, recalled in a telephone interview this week. “And as I was thinking that, I hit the send key. With the understanding that I would be in the firestorm.”

Early in the obituary, Professor Glaude declared, “The idea of this venerable institution as central to black life and as a repository for the social and moral conscience of the nation has all but disappeared.” He added later, “The idea of a black church standing at the center of all that takes place in a community has long since passed away.”

Professor Glaude argued that many black churches espouse conservative politics, especially on social issues, and have failed to address current liberal causes like health care reform. Ministries devoted to self-help or the so-called health and wealth gospel, some led by whites, draw black followers.

In large measure, Professor Glaude explained in the interview, he wrote the essay in response to two recent developments. The election of Barack Obama, a black Christian, as president has complicated if not blunted the black church’s traditional role of confronting the establishment, “speaking truth to power.” The social conservatism of some black churches meanwhile figured prominently in the ballot measure against same-sex marriage in California and an anti-abortion billboard campaign in the Atlanta area.

There have been internal criticisms of the black church almost as long as there has been a black church. A 19th-century bishop of the A.M.E. denomination scorned call-and-response praise songs as “cornfield ditties.” E. Franklin Frazier, the eminent black sociologist, depicted the church as an obstacle to assimilation. Malcolm X ridiculed Christianity as “the white man’s religion.”

All those precedents notwithstanding, Professor Glaude’s jeremiad brought on the predicted firestorm. A panel of leading scholars of African-American religion published responses on the Religion Dispatches Web site. Professor Glaude debated another one of his peers, Prof. Josef Sorett of Columbia University, on bloggingheads.tv. Private e-mail accounts sizzled with contention.

And only some of the criticism dealt with Professor Glaude’s thesis. A fair amount assailed his very right to criticize. As a born Roman Catholic without a church membership presently, and as a faculty member in a privileged university, Professor Glaude was vulnerable to attack from the mainstream of working-class, African-American Protestants.

“I am sick and tired,” went an e-mail message from the Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Sr., pastor emeritus of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif., “of black academics who are paid by rich, powerful ivy league schools, who have access to the microphone and the ear of the press pontificating about the health of black churches.” The e-mail message continued, “None of these second- or third-generation black academics talk to us in the trenches. They are too elitist to talk to us.”

Lawrence H. Mamiya, a professor of religion at Vassar and co-author of the seminal history “The Black Church in the African American Experience,” levied similar complaints, albeit in less strident language. “Theologians and philosophers like Eddie Glaude don’t go to black churches,” Professor Mamiya said in a telephone interview. “They haven’t been out in the field. And unless you’re in the field, you can’t see what’s happening.” (Professor Glaude’s scholarly specialty is the philosophy of religion; he is not a social scientist regularly engaged in field work.)

Among his own generation of scholars, though, Professor Glaude has received plenty of credit for stirring discussion. “It causes us to complicate how we think about African-American Protestantism,” said Jonathan L. Walton, 36, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside. “The term ‘black church’ is in so many ways unsubstantiated. So this debate is very healthy.”

One of Professor Glaude’s forebears in criticism, Prof. James H. Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York, appreciated a certain paradox.

“Eddie Glaude is doing the black church a service,” said Professor Cone, 71, the author of several books of black liberation theology. “By saying it’s dead, he’s challenging the black church to show it’s alive. But the black church, like any institution, does not like criticism from outside the family. It wants to be prophetic against society, but it does not want intellectuals to be prophetic against it.”

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com

Jan 22, 2010

Census Figures Challenge Views of Race and Ethnicity

Image by nathangibbs via Flickr

By SAM ROBERTS

New census figures that provide a snapshot of America’s foreign-born population are challenging conventional views of immigration, race and ethnicity.

What it means to be African-American, for example, may be redefined by the record number of blacks — now nearly 1 in 10 — born abroad, according to the report from American Community Survey data, which was released Wednesday. It found that Africa now accounts for one in three foreign-born blacks in this country, another modern record.

More than 1 in 50 Americans now identify themselves as “multiracial.” But the pattern of race reporting for foreign-born Americans, is markedly different than for native-born Americans. The foreign born are more likely to list their nation of origin when identifying race or ethnicity.

For example, while 87 percent of Americans born in Cuba and 53 percent born in Mexico identified themselves as white, a majority born in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, who are newer immigrants, described themselves as neither black nor white.

“The concept of race and how we view it culturally has changed,” said Elizabeth M. Grieco, chief of the Census Bureau’s immigration statistics staff, which analyzed 2007 data. “It’s a part of not knowing where they fit into how we define race in the United States.”

Image by Birdie Holsclaw via Flickr

Recent arrivals “might not be sure how to classify themselves,” Dr. Grieco said. (The census treats race and Hispanic origin as separate categories.)

The changing perception of race is being driven largely by immigration and higher birthrates among the foreign born. While immigrants account for 13 percent of the population, the share of recent births to foreign-born mothers rose to 20 percent. As a result of intermarriage with native-born Americans, a growing number of American children — now more than one in four under the age of 6 — are being raised by at least one foreign-born parent.

“It’s fair to say that we are approaching the shares seen at the peak of the last great immigration wave” at the beginning of the 20th century, said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, noted that more that two-thirds of the growth of the Hispanic population last year came from births, not immigration.

“You could shut off immigration tomorrow and the impact of the foreign born on U.S. demographic trends would still be a powerful force,” he said.

Among the nation’s 37.3 million blacks, more than 8 percent are now foreign born, compared with 1 percent in 1960. Of those, more than half came from the Caribbean. Some 34 percent emigrated from Africa, compared with 1 percent in 1960.

The census recorded 10,500 American blacks born in Africa in 1970; in 2008, the number of African-born Americans topped one million for the first time.

Seventy-eight percent of native-born Americans reported their race as white, followed by 13 percent who said they were black. Among the foreign born, 46 percent identified themselves as white and 23 percent as Asian.

Since 2000, the Hispanic foreign-born population has increased 45 percent, to 18.5 million from 12.8 million. Latin Americans represent more than half of the foreign-born population.

Among all who identified themselves as Asian-Americans, which is often understood to mean born here, 67 percent were, in fact, foreign born.

How immigrants translate their own backgrounds and report their adopted identities “have important implications for the nation’s racial and ethnic composition,” the Census Bureau said in the report.

Nicholas A. Jones, chief of the bureau’s racial statistics branch, said that given the likelihood that foreign-born people would identify themselves as German or Irish or Nigerian instead of black or white, the bureau might eventually encourage people to provide more detailed write-in answers to how they define themselves.

Jan 8, 2010

The Real Reason Profiling Fails

Image by goosmurf via Flickr

by Matthew Yglesias

Conservatives looking to engage in their favorite sport of national-security hysteria got their wish Christmas Day, when a young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with incendiary chemicals stashed in his underpants. The would-be bomber failed to destroy the plane and certainly did no fundamental damage to the United States of America. He did, however, get Fox News personalities Brit Hume and Bill Kristol to proclaim the attack a success. Under ordinary circumstances, you would expect the conservative press to avoid acting as al-Qaeda’s hype-men. But with partisan hay to be made, an attack in which only the attacker was injured becomes a victory for America’s enemies.

Coupled with the failure-as-success narrative, new calls have come for stepped-up racial or ethnic profiling. Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, offered an extreme version, proposing that we "be very serious and harsh about the profiling" to the extent that "if you are an 18- to 28-year-old Muslim male you should be strip searched." Andy McCarthy at National Review Online and Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal expressed only slightly more restrained versions of profiling enthusiasm.

These proposals to entrench systematic, formal discrimination against the world’s Muslim population raise troubling ethical issues. More fundamentally, they completely fail to grapple with the logic of anti-American terrorist violence or the responsibilities of a global power.

Image by Bearman2007 via Flickr

Al-Qaeda's capacity to damage the United States is actually very limited. Even the devastating mass murder of September 11 left the country’s economic strength, infrastructure, and military might entirely intact. Al-Qaeda has since hit some soft targets abroad and attempted -- but failed -- to blow up airliners. Obviously, it would be a bad thing if someone like Abdulmutallab or "shoe bomber" Richard Reid killed a plane full of people, and the government rightly seeks to avoid this sort of attack. But a clear distinction should be drawn between a threat on that order and genuinely big-time dangers to national security like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and nuclear proliferation.

Instead, what al-Qaeda can do to America is scare its citizens and try to prompt us into counterproductive actions. Systematic anti-Muslim discrimination, for example, really might be an effective way of making air travel slightly more secure in the short term. But air travel is already extremely safe, and the United States of America needs to consider the broader implications of such a policy. Right now, a promising Bangladeshi scientist considering competing job offers in the United States and Europe could be honestly told that he would likely find America a more welcoming place. That’s an important source of national strength. Conversely, if we start routinely strip-searching the younger employees of the Indonesian embassy as they fly to their new posts in Washington, we can expect to adversely affect our relations with that country. Right now, over 10,000 Muslims serve in the American military. Their service is valuable on its own terms, and all the more so because they may have cultural or language skills that most Americans lack. Should they really be singled out for special maltreatment because a co-religionist set his pants on fire?

Beyond that, is it better to live in a country where a teenage American Muslim reads on a message board that the United States is a racist country hell-bent on persecuting Islam and reacts, "No, it isn’t"? Or would we really prefer he think, "That’s why I got singled out for strip searches when we went on vacation last winter"?

At the end of the day, our greatest defense against terrorism is the simple fact that few people actually seem to want to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans. The exact number of al-Qaeda operatives isn’t known, but the total is thought to be only in the thousands -- more Muslims are employed by America's own government. And most al-Qaeda operatives are apparently not volunteering for martyrdom.

One of the most under-noted aspects of the Abdulmutallab case is that his own father tried to drop the dime on him. That kind of cooperation is invaluable, as are our commercial, cultural, diplomatic, military, and law enforcement ties with majority-Muslim countries. As are the contributions of America’s Muslim citizens. To throw this all out the window in response to -- of all things -- a failed terrorist attack would be a huge mistake.

Indeed, the steps the Obama administration has already taken in this direction, most notably compiling a list of 14 "countries of interest" whose citizens and residents will be singled out for enhanced security, already go too far. This is profiling by another name, and throwing Cuba into this list -- on the theory that it’s a state sponsor of terrorism -- is childish and fools no one. Less than a month ago, Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and said, "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend." He was right. Too bad he’s lost sight of that.

Aug 27, 2009

UN Representative Criticizes Australia's Aboriginal Policies as Racist - VOA

Image via Wikipedia

By Phil Mercer
Sydney
27 August 2009

Mercer report - Download (MP3)

Mercer report - Listen (MP3)

A U.N. representative says Australia's intervention in dozens of troubled Aboriginal communities is discriminatory and breaches the country's international human-rights obligations.

The U.N. special investigator on indigenous people, James Anaya, says that Aborigines in Australia face entrenched racism. He says the government's controversial intervention in dysfunctional communities in the Northern Territory continued to discriminate against Aborigines.

Two years ago troops, medical staff and social workers were deployed in an attempt to combat violence and rampant abuse of children in some aboriginal communities. Racial discrimination laws were suspended to allow the controversial policy to be implemented.

Alcohol and pornography were banned in the communities and indigenous residents were forced to spend a portion of their welfare payments on essentials such as food.

Some activists say the measures violate human rights because they only target Aborigines.

James Anaya, special Rapporteur for the UN Human Rights commission (2008 File)

Anaya, an American professor of human rights law, says he agrees with that assessment.

"These measures overtly discriminate against aboriginal peoples, infringe their right of self-determination and stigmatize already stigmatized communities," he said.

Anaya just completed a 12-day tour to learn more about Australia's most disadvantaged community. Indigenous groups, church leaders and social justice organizations requested his visit.

Anaya is the first U.N. investigator on indigenous people to visit Australia's aboriginal communities. He congratulated Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for the historic apology he made last year to the country's original inhabitants for past injustices.

Anaya also welcomed calls for a new national body to represent Australia's Aborigines, which will need government approval.

Tom Calma, from the Australian Human Rights Commission, proposed the body, saying it will give the disadvantaged a powerful voice.

"It is a historic day. It is a day when as aboriginal and Torres Strait people we begin a new journey when we express our determination to put our futures in our hands," he said.

A recent study has found the gap between non-indigenous Australians and their aboriginal neighbors was growing in areas such as child abuse and domestic violence. Aborigines also are more likely than other Australians to suffer from a variety of health problems, including chemical addiction, and their average life span is 17 years less.

Prime Minister Rudd said it was "a devastating report" on an unacceptable situation.