What changed between 1991 and 2003 Iraq invasions? (Apr. 3, 2010)
The Morocco author Fatema Mernissi wrote in 1991 “Islam and democracy” after the first invasion of Iraq by President Bush the father or senior. In 2002, she wrote an introduction to the English edition. In 2010, the French editor Albin Michel asked Mernissi a fresh introduction to the updated French edition. Mernissi suggested that the English introduction should be fine and Michel replied: “Do you think that nothing happened between 2002 and 2010 that young Europeans might be interested in knowing?”
After a good night sleep Mernissi realized that among the many changes, apart that Islamic/Arabic youth are double the Western rate, one change stands out grandly: In 1991, the Arabs were terrified of Western supremacy in technology (smart bombs for example that CNN kept showing their devastating effects in collateral damages on civilians); in 2003 invasion it was clear that the American and British soldiers were the most scared of Islam virulence. Mainly, Islamic/Arab States had acquired the numeric information technology for disseminating instant news in sound, pictures, and videos and had begun rational communication discussions (jadal) on points and counter points to the benefit of every Arab/Moslems living in European States and the USA.
The unilateral monopoly in the diffusion and dissemination of information and “intelligence” was eroded: Moslems and Arabs could now enjoy 36 satellite channels broadcasting everywhere, including the most popular Al Jazeera channel that even the Western Medias watched for current and impartial news. Moslems in China were able to keep up with the rest of Islamic World events.
This information victory scared the Western civilization after it realized that the new Islamic/Arabic generations are no longer attuned to their local monopoly Medias run by dictators and monarchs: it is internet age and youth want changes and to discourse rationally. In 1991, Arabs had practically the CNN to cover the war in Iraq as direct source of information and it was biased toward showing the effects of “smart bombs” and Iraqi soldiers being shoveled alive under in the dune bunkers. Arab people got familiar with the term “collateral damages” and CNN failed to inform on the casualties. In 2003, Arab/Moslem masses had Al Jazeera channel to cover the war among 32 other satellite channels viewed for free. It is estimated that by 2012, Islamic/Arab States will have over 1,200 free channels as option for the world to watch information and discussion sessions.
For example, since 1948, Israel has devoured all Palestine and waged countless major pre-emptive wars and the Arab masses had to rely on American Medias for totally biased information; the pickiest watchers occasionally selected the BBC. Things have changed in this numeric information age. In 2003, Al Jazeera was offering as bonuses well targeted discussion panels with many foreign figures. For example, in 2001 and before the September attack on the Twin Towers, Al Jazeera ridiculed Taliban for bombing the ancient giant Buddhist idols in Bamyan (Afghanistan) while Richard Keller of the giant oil multinational UNOCAL was proclaiming “Taliban is good thing for us”
Western humanists grabbed the successes of the Islamic/Arabic satellite channels to become regular guest stars. For example, Dany Schechter of “Plunder: Investigating our economic calamity and the subprime scandal”; Adam Hochschild of “Burry the chains: Prophets and rebels in the fight to liberal”; and Chris Hedges of “War is a force that gives us meaning” are regular guests on Arab satellite channels.
Most ironic, it is the USA and a few European States that have been pressuring the obscurantist Arabic State dictators and monarchies to suppressing freedom of opinions and to shut down “controversial” Arabic channels. In France a few city mayors ordered Arabic channels banned for dissemination because the Arabs and Moslems living in these cities were hooked to Arabic channels and their mind being “poisoned” away from France patriotic indoctrination and inclusion programs.
Today a friend of mine […] suddenly told me that she had been [avoiding subway and taking buses and other means of land public transportation] to work this whole past week. She works at [Kolomenskaya[6] subway station], and lives at [Rechnoy Vokzal[7]]. It takes her only 40 minutes to get from home to work. But since Tuesday, she's been leaving home two hours earlier - at 6 AM, that is - to be at the office by 9 AM.
I didn't get what she meant right away. That is, I could guess she was stressed out, like many other Muscovites, as a result of [last Monday's subway blasts]. But I didn't know her condition was that serious. And when I asked her why she was so sure something similar couldn't happen on [a bus], she started crying. And I suddenly realized that I had just told her a very cruel thing. The imaginary safety of land transportation was keeping her afloat, allowed her to continue going to work, to somehow plan her life. And now she was sobbing, saying this: “I can't live! I can't live! I can't descend into the subway! I can't look at the people!” And now I could understand her. I was in a similar state in 2004, in and after Beslan. Everything that used to give my life a sense of some universal justice had collapsed then. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat or go out into the street. In front of my eyes stood black plastic bags, and the black women screaming above them. It's impossible to express this, the words that I'm writing now seem absurd. Even now I have a lump in my throat. I don't even remember how I got out of that. Many hours, weeks, I'd been talking to all kinds of people, friends, a priest, my husband, colleagues. It was then that I decided I wouldn't be seeing psychologists - they aren't of much help. They are just doing their job, staying outside - outside your pain.
Then a year passed, and I went to Beslan again. And again, there was this terrible hurt, and these symbols - white balloons over the school, white birds over the cemetery, an old woman saying tender words to a dove that chose to sit on her granddaughter's grave, children's faces on the cold gravestones, their teddy bears, their chocolates and cola. I'm a strong person, I know that. I've seen a lot in my 33 years. War, dirt, terrorist acts, corpses that no longer looked like people. I know that I've survived all that. But I know that deep inside I still haven't recovered from Beslan. I don't like to talk about it. I try not to think about it. Because when I do, I sob from despair, from fear. I sob because I still haven't understood why it happened. I sob the way my friend did today. She's just scared. There are many people like her now. People are scared to go inside subway. They are scared of women in headscarves, even though many of these women are Moscow natives. They are scared of their own fear. Fear is an enemy that destroys a person from within. If you are scared and you give up, the fear will take full hold of you. When I'm scared to go to the Caucasus, I realize that if I give in to fear and don't go once, I'll stop going there altogether - and I'll end up stuck at home, behind the closed doors, and I'll be scared even to pick up a phone. I know people to whom this happened.
I don't understand why they aren't discussing this problem on TV. Why there are no psychologists who would talk in prime time to people about the problems that are bothering them a lot. Not every person would agree to see a psychologist. Not everyone understands that it's a disease that requires treatment.
They'd tell me - what TV discussions do you expect when on the day of the attacks they didn't even air special newscasts on TV. I live in this country, so I'm not surprised. A year after Beslan, exactly on the anniversary, Moscow was celebrating its birthday. And when I wrote a text about it, outraged readers responded to me: “What, do you want us to forget our own birthdays, anniversaries, weddings?” My friend, by the way, was also celebrating her birthday on that day. And now she is sobbing from fear. It's just that at that time it all seemed too distant. And now it's very close. […] And I'm not surprised by how the federal channels were covering the subway attacks. If you remember Nord-Ost [theater hostage crisis of 2002[8]] and the live broadcasts on [NTV[9]] - and what they did to NTV afterwards - it becomes clear that no live broadcasts are possible in this country under this regime. I'm not gonna get hysterical and scream about why the officials aren't showing me the truth - the way Beslan mothers did at one point. I simply despise this regime. I don't see them as authorities. For me, they are a cowardly bunch of people who couldn't even get out of the Beslan airport, but were sitting there, in the hastily set up headquarters (just in case, so that they could get out if the terrorists suddenly besiege the whole city) - at the time when the children were being shot at by tanks and grenade launchers. These same cowardly people were trying to convince the citizens whose relatives were taken hostage in the besieged Nord-Ost [theater]: “Colleagues! Calm down! All the terrorists are waiting for is for you to hold a rally on Red Square! We won't allow this!” A quote from [Valentina Matvienko[10]]. They, of course, couldn't allow such a blow to their image. A rally against the war in Chechnya, and right on Red Square. Against the sacred and on the sacred.
I don't expect anything from these people. I even understand why they disliked the publications in the media claiming that the Moscow attacks were acts of revenge for the Caucasus. [Boris Gryzlov] is very displeased with hearing all the time about the regime's cowardliness. And about the mistakes they had committed but wouldn't admit to. […]
But - again - this isn't what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that people need help. Professional psychological help as well as simple moral support from [family and friends]. If you have a friend who is scare to take subway, talk to him about it. Help him. Maybe you'll save him from trouble. We can only rely on ourselves, on our dear ones, on fellow citizens. Because there's no one else in this country that we can rely on.
Article printed from Global Voices Online: http://globalvoicesonline.org
URL to article: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/04/06/russia-war-reporter-blogs-on-trauma-and-politics-of-the-subway-attacks/
So says President Obama, who is working with Chinese officials to ensure that the US sends 100,000 students to China over the next four years. The number of Americans studying in China has been rising steadily on its own, but what is the point of this? That’s a vast generalization, of course, but take it from someone who spends all day every day with American kids — they know nothing about the world outside the US.
When I say “nothing” I want you to understand exactly what I mean, so here are some examples. I asked my students what language they speak in Australia. Less than half of them knew for sure, several thought “Australian”, and one of them said French. I asked them what continent China was on, and only around half of them got it right. Several of them wrote “China”. I could go on, but you’ve heard these statistics before. That’s because they are true. American students are woefully, woefully ignorant of the world outside their iPods.
As some of you know, I teach Chinese and History at a boarding school in New England, so my students tend to be privileged. They have grown up with more and better access to education than the average American. Many of them have traveled abroad with their parents before. By all accounts, they ought to be performing better than the average American on simple questions like the ones I asked them, which makes their abject failure even more worrisome. Obviously, my “study” was not at all scientific and my sample size far too small, but this is a blog, so I’m going to make the point anyway: Americans don’t know anything about other countries.
More worrisome than that, though (after all, as a teacher, isn’t that kind of my fault) is that at least among my students, I believe there is a complete lack of empathy for those outside the US’s borders, especially those in faraway places like Asia. Students act as though historical events were plot points in a movie, and their writing further betrays that conceptually speaking, they do not perceive the places we are talking about as real.
I probably don’t have to explain why that’s a problem in the long term. Now, maybe kids are all like this, or have always been like this. I wouldn’t know. But I do think I understand why Obama wants to send 100,000 Americans to China. They aren’t all going to come back speaking Chinese fluently, ready to join the CIA’s China analysts pushing desks in Virginia. But they are all going to come back with a real sense that there is a world outside the US. They’re going to come back with friends, business contacts, and experiences — real life experiences, not classroom knowledge — that turn the Sino-American policy debate into something that seems real and important. Say what you will about Obama, but at least when it comes to China, it seems like he’s not planning to throw the whole “mutual understanding” thing under the bus.
But I am extremely tired, and it’s possible this line of reasoning makes no sense, so, what do you think?
Bastardi’s position is ridiculous (which is no doubt why he’s often asked to air it on Fox News). Yet there it was on the front page of the Times last week. Among weathermen, it turns out, views like Bastardi’s are typical. A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused “mostly by natural changes.” (The survey also found that more than eighty per cent of weathercasters don’t trust “mainstream news media sources,” though they are presumably included in this category.)
Why, with global warming, is it always one step forward, two, maybe three steps back? A year ago, it looked as if the so-called climate debate might finally be over, and the business of actually addressing the problem about to begin. In April, the Obama Administration designated CO2 a dangerous pollutant, thus taking the first critical step toward regulating carbon emissions. The following month, the Administration announced new fuel-efficiency standards for cars. (These rules were finalized last week.) In June, the House of Representatives passed a bill, named for its co-sponsors, Edward Markey and Henry Waxman, that called for reducing emissions seventeen per cent by 2020. Speaking in September at the United Nations, the President said that a “new era” had dawned. “We understand the gravity of the climate threat,” he declared. “We are determined to act.”
Then, much like the Arctic ice cap, that “new era” started to fall to pieces. The U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in December broke up without agreement even on a possible outline for a future treaty. A Senate version of the Markey-Waxman bill failed to materialize and, it’s now clear, won’t be materializing anytime this year. (Indeed, the one thing that seems certain not to be in a Senate energy bill is the economy-wide emissions reduction required by the House bill.) Last week, despite the Senate’s inaction, President Obama announced that he was opening huge swaths of the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts to oil drilling. The White House billed the move as part of a “comprehensive energy strategy,” a characterization that, as many commentators pointed out, made no sense, since comprehensiveness is precisely what the President’s strategy lacks. As Josh Nelson put it on the blog EnviroKnow, “Obama is either an exceptionally bad negotiator, or he actually believes in some truly awful policy ideas. Neither of these possibilities bodes well.”
As lawmakers dither, public support for action melts away. In a Gallup poll taken last month, forty-eight per cent of respondents said that they believe the threat of global warming to be “generally exaggerated.” This figure was up from thirty-five per cent just two years ago. According to the same poll, only fifty-two per cent of Americans believe that “most scientists believe that global warming is occurring,” down from sixty-five per cent in 2008.
The most immediate explanation for this disturbing trend is the mess that’s come to be known as Climategate. Here the situation is the reverse of what’s going on in the troposphere: Climategate really is a hyped-up media phenomenon. Late last year, hackers broke into the computer system at the Climatic Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia and posted online hundreds of private e-mails from scientists. In the e-mails, C.R.U. researchers often express irritation with their critics—the death of one detractor is described as “cheering news”—and discuss ways to dodge a slew of what they consider to be nuisance Freedom of Information requests. The e-mails were widely portrayed in the press and in the blogosphere as evidence of a conspiracy to misrepresent the data. But, as a parliamentary committee appointed to investigate the matter concluded last week, this charge is so off base that it is difficult even to respond to: “Insofar as the committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the committee considers that there is no case to answer.”
The e-mail brouhaha was followed by—and immediately confused with—another overblown controversy, about a mistake in the second volume of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, from 2007. On page 493 of the nine-hundred-and-seventy-six-page document, it is asserted, incorrectly, that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. (The report cites as a source for this erroneous information a report by the World Wildlife Fund.) The screw-up, which was soon acknowledged by the I.P.C.C. and the W.W.F., was somehow transformed by commentators into a reason to doubt everything in the three-volume assessment, including, by implication, the basic laws of thermodynamics. The “new scandal (already awarded the unimaginative name of ‘Glaciergate’) raises further challenges for a scientific theory that is steadily losing credibility,” James Heiser wrote on the Web site of the right-wing magazine New American.
No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax. Nor has anyone been able to explain why Mother Nature would keep playing along; despite what it might have felt like in the Northeast these past few months, globally it was one of the warmest winters on record.
The message from scientists at this point couldn’t be clearer: the world’s emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories—these are all a distraction from what’s really happening. Which, apparently, is what we’re looking for.
Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”
Often, the most appropriate answer to that question is a joke, or a series of jokes. In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (This magazine made the list, too, at No. 114.) Lander’s tone is faux-anthropological but wide-eyed: “Bike shops are almost entirely staffed and patronized by white people!”; “After learning that a white person is pregnant, it is a good idea to provide a list of recipes for placenta.” His “white people” are wealthy, urban, youngish, and thoroughly blue—they “hate” Republicans, and although Obama hadn’t yet won the Democratic nomination, he placed eighth on the list. (Coffee was No. 1.)
Benjamin did most of his research toward the end of the Bush era, and perhaps he now wishes he had waited a few years. Obama’s election was a transformative moment for blacks in America, but it has also proved to be a transformative moment for whites. As a whole, white people voted for Senator McCain, and, with the growth of the anti-Obama backlash, especially in the form of Tea Party protests, the whiteness of the Obama opposition has become a political issue. Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC, called the Tea Party movement “a white people’s party,” and asked, in reference to the various marches and rallies, “Where are the black faces?” (The most adroit response came in the form of a YouTube video highlighting the all-white lineup pictured on the MSNBC Web site.) When Jon Stewart introduced a “Daily Show” segment on the Conservative Political Action Conference, he got a laugh from his studio audience by calling it a “festival of whites.” (Stewart’s show ranked thirty-fifth on Lander’s list.)
The organizers of the Tea Party rallies have made a point of inviting African-American conservatives to address the crowds. But there’s no denying that the Tea Party protesters tend to be white. Should we pretend to be surprised? Judging from exit polls, black voters made up about 1.1 per cent of the McCain electorate, which is lower than the historical average, but not by much. (In 1984, when President Reagan was reëlected in a landslide, black voters accounted for only about 1.5 per cent of his total.) American politics has been segregated for decades; the election of a black President only made that segregation more obvious.
In a wide-ranging new book titled “The History of White People” (Norton; $27.95), Nell Irvin Painter, a black historian of America, starts at the beginning, or near it. Her narrative opens in ancient Greece, with Hippocrates, who published his ethnography of the known world around 400 B.C. In assaying the tribes of Europe, he praised the “ferocity” of the mountain-dwellers, but he was less impressed by tribes who live where there is “a larger proportion of hot than of cold winds”—the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule. “They are rather of a dark than of a light complexion,” he wrote, adding that “courage and laborious enterprise are not naturally in them.” In time, “ancients” like Hippocrates were seen as archetypes of racial purity and excellence. Painter quotes the eighteenth-century Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater, who delivered a plaintive verdict: “The Grecian race then was more beautiful than we are; they were better than us—and the present generation is vilely degraded!”
Like many of his contemporaries, Lavater was a devout craniologist, and it was through craniology that whiteness was given scientific validation. In 1793, a German anthropologist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach received a skull from a colleague which he considered particularly pleasing; it had belonged to a woman from Georgia, in the Caucasus region, and Blumenbach declared that it was typical of the “Caucasian” race, a super-category that came to include most of the peoples of Europe. As Painter explains, Blumenbach was making an argument from beauty, and his belief in Caucasian beauty had a notable pedigree: decades earlier, Kant had noted that “Circassian and Georgian maidens have always been considered extremely pretty by all Europeans who travel through their lands”; the fact that these “maidens” were enslaved by the Ottomans was part of the appeal. The Caucasian race begins with an evocation of bondage, and the skull of a young Georgian woman helped seal the connection between whiteness and weakness. It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked. The supposed perfection of whiteness makes it vulnerable: every flaw and quirk, every tangled bloodline and degraded specimen, is seen as an existential threat, poised to undermine the whole project.
In eighteenth-century America, whiteness came to connote the opposite of slavery. Whiteness in America was primarily Anglo-Saxon—Thomas Jefferson argued for American independence by adducing the example of “our Saxon ancestors”—but not exclusively so, and the presence of immigrants from elsewhere in Europe eventually nudged American race theorists toward a more miscellaneous idea of whiteness. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson published “English Traits,” which includes a strange and suggestive chapter called “Race.” In it, he portrays the essence of whiteness as an elusive spirit. For a time, Norway had it, and Painter notes Emerson’s “affection” for the bloodthirsty old Norse sagas: “A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other’s body, as did Yngve and Alf.” But even these brutes were, in their own way, as delicate as Circassian waifs. Somehow, the glorious moment passed—a few too many “piratical expeditions,” he suspects—and “the power of the race migrated and left Norway permanently exhausted.” Around the same time, in his journal, Emerson was experimenting with a more ambitious theory. “The Atlantic is a sieve through which only or chiefly the liberal adventurous sensitive America-loving part of each city, clan, family, are brought,” he wrote. “It is the light complexion, the blue eyes of Europe that come: the black eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe is left.” This is a powerful notion: America as a magical siphon, extracting whiteness from Europe.
Emerson is a high point in “The History of White People.” As the theorists and theories pile up, Painter starts to seem, like nineteenth-century Norway, a bit exhausted. She isn’t helped by the format she has chosen, which divides a long and circuitous story into a textbook-like series of three-page biographical sketches, and she often sounds bored by the now obscure race men she profiles: William Z. Ripley’s 1899 magnum opus, “The Races of Europe,” is “nonsense” that “could not survive a careful reading”; early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonist theories are “blather.” One needn’t disagree with her judgments to wonder about her strategy: the tone and the format conspire to make these architects of whiteness hard to distinguish, and harder still to care about.
An odd thing about “The History of White People” is that there’s not more history in it: Painter underplays the social and political developments that were far more influential than the grand theories of whiteness. She mentions America’s one-drop rule only in passing. (The rule held—and, for the most part, still holds—that any person of mixed black and white ancestry is black, no matter the mixture.) And readers will have to search the footnotes to learn about the 1790 Naturalization Act, which made citizenship possible for any “free white person” of “good character” who had lived in America for at least two years. Long before it had any sort of coherent cultural or historical identity, whiteness in America was a broad, loosely defined political category, which is precisely why so many scholars knocked themselves out trying to fill in the details.
Painter aims for the conceptual heart of the race, but Roediger, the eminent abolitionist of whiteness, has always been more interested in its margins and boundaries. In 2008, just in time for the dawning Obama age, he compressed his decades of scholarship into a pithy little book, “How Race Survived U.S. History,” which has just been published in paperback (Verso; $19.95). He is alert to the shifting legal status of whiteness, and he underscores the 1691 Virginia law that banned “negroes, mulattos, and Indians” from “intermarrying with English, or other white women.” (Again, one of the defining qualities of whiteness is that it needs protection.) He also tells the story of Charles W. Janson, a British businessman who came to America in 1793 and, sometime during his thirteen-year visit, offended a white domestic worker by asking to speak with her master. “I have no master,” she said, adding, “I’d have you to know, man, that I am no sarvant; none but negers are sarvants.” Janson was shocked by “the arrogance of domestics in this land of republican liberty and equality”—shocked, that is, by a country where even the maids had something to be proud of, and someone to be prouder than.
The end of the Civil War was a perilous moment for whiteness. Roediger writes that, in America, “scientific racism”—the sort of grand theorizing that Painter chronicles—emerged “in the context of the pro-slavery argument and as a response to abolitionism.” Whiteness survived emancipation by becoming more muscular and more self-referential: where once whiteness offered a specific legal benefit—it meant that you were unenslavable, a non-“sarvant”—now whiteness had to be its own reward. Roediger writes that some poor white laborers in the South started wearing brimless wool hats, to distinguish themselves from ex-slaves, who customarily wore straw hats. (According to one contested etymology, the sunburn such laborers suffered gave rise to the term “redneck,” which conflates race and class.) And he tracks the insurgent whiteness of the Ku Klux Klan, founded after the end of the war and revived in 1915, the year of D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster “The Birth of a Nation,” which portrayed Klansmen as heroic defenders of white virtue. (The pivotal scene involves a white woman on a cliff, who tells her black pursuer, “Stay away or I’ll jump!” He doesn’t; she does.) “The Birth of a Nation” included intertitles with brief history lessons from President Woodrow Wilson, and Roediger quotes the most famous card, which marks the transition from war to Reconstruction: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
That astonishing sentence comes from Wilson’s “History of the American People,” but it’s not really a sentence at all: the ellipsis marks the removal of nearly seven hundred words. In Wilson’s original, the apologia for the Klan is meant to echo the eighteenth-century argument for American independence:
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors.
The film depicts a clash between whites and blacks (one of the main villains is an ambitious mulatto politician), but, in this passage, “ignorant negroes” are a secondary concern, a mere symptom of a greater problem. In Wilson’s telling, Klan violence serves to defend white rights against “adventurers” from the North—that is, against other white people.
In the twentieth century, the struggle to define and defend whiteness was often presented this way, as an intra-racial struggle—white people against “the wrong kind of white people.” The race theorist Lothrop Stoddard warned against “racial impoverishment,” and enumerated the “alien stocks” that were taking over Rhode Island: “Poles, Polish and Russian Jews, South Italians, and French-Canadians.” Because of the legal tradition begun by the 1790 Naturalization Act, courts were often asked to judge the whiteness of immigrants from all over the world— Afghans and Armenians, Persians and Portuguese—and judges appealed to common sense, or to the anthropological entity known as the Caucasian race. But who counts as Caucasian? Madison Grant, in “The Passing of the Great Race,” a supremely pessimistic work of race theory first published in 1916, admitted defeat: “The term ‘Caucasian race’ has ceased to have any meaning, except where it is used, in the United States, to contrast white populations with Negroes or Indians or in the Old World with Mongols.” Grant was right that the putatively scientific term “Caucasian” was becoming interchangeable with its colloquial counterpart, “white”; both referred to a category that was growing simultaneously more inclusive (of Europeans) and more exclusive (of “Negroes” and “Mongols” and others).
But the borders of whiteness were never quite defined, let alone sealed. In an immigration report from 1911, a government commission declared that an “Arabian” was by definition Caucasian, a judgment that some of today’s politicians might want to appeal. The boundaries of whiteness have often reflected the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy. And there remains something particularly fraught about the whiteness of Italian-Americans, which has been contested for centuries. Roediger notes that “ ‘Guineas,’ an old marker for African Americans originally signaling their origins on the West African slaving coast, came to be applied widely and pejoratively to Italian Americans.” Now, of course, “guinea” has given way to “guido,” an anti-Italian-American slur that has been co-opted by its targets. The instructive MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” followed a group of self-described “guidos” and “guidettes” living in a beach house in New Jersey. In this tribe, the bond between skin color and identity had been decisively severed (with help from a nearby tanning salon), and it was discovered that not all the stars were of pure Italian heritage. One of them, known as Jwoww, posted a clarification on her Twitter page: “I’ve said a billion times I’m a spanish/irish!! Its a life style not an ethnicity or race the term ‘guidette’!!”
In current debates about whiteness, no identity is more destabilizing than “Hispanic.” The 2010 census explains that “Hispanic origins are not races,” and yet in America the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” indicate a population that is often viewed as a racial minority. (When Anglos in America think of the Latino “race,” they are often thinking of the identity known in much of Central and South America as mestizo, which refers to mixed-race descendants of Europeans and various indigenous groups.) In “Searching for Whitopia,” Rich Benjamin is surprised to find himself drawn into conversations with white residents about illegal immigration, especially from Mexico. “For the first time in my life, I am treated like an innocent bystander to the ‘scourge’ of race and poverty,” he writes. “Latinos now take the heat.”
In 1963, when George Wallace was inaugurated as the governor of Alabama, he told the crowd that he was standing in the “heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” and he issued his famous rallying cry: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But when Wallace campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he stated his case more circumspectly, saying, “This civil-rights bill will wind up putting a homeowner in jail, because he doesn’t sell his home to someone that some bureaucrat thinks he ought to sell it to.” Wallace professed to be defending the common “homeowner,” presumably white, against the faceless “bureaucrat,” also presumably white. It was possible for Wallace to portray himself as a defender of the white race without mentioning race at all.
This was not a new strategy. Throughout history, the power of whiteness has often been linked to its invisibility: white supremacy lurked in seemingly race-neutral language, unmentioned and therefore incontestable. (Think of the Constitution, which tacitly condoned slavery—“importation” of “persons”—without mentioning race.) The success of the civil-rights movement had the paradoxical effect of strengthening this pernicious tradition by making white pride taboo; white politicians had to rely on increasingly subtle forms of coded speech. Roediger is impressed and disturbed by President Reagan’s appeal to working-class white voters, which stemmed, he says, from a “sure command of divisive code words such as ‘state’s rights,’ ‘welfare moms,’ ‘quotas,’ and ‘reverse racism.’ ”
The problem with a fixation on “code words” is that you can start to see them everywhere. At one point, Roediger analyzes the politics of America in the nineteen-seventies through the prism of “such racial ‘code words’ as crime, busing, welfare, and taxes.” Taxes! Is there any hotly debated political topic that couldn’t be considered, in some context, a code word? (Glenn Beck recently argued that “social justice” and “economic justice” are “Marxist code words”; it would be hard to prove that they aren’t or never have been.) And is there any way for a white politician to criticize a black President in front of a disproportionately white audience and be certain that he or she isn’t, however inadvertently, appealing to a sense of racial solidarity?
These are the questions that liberals have been asking of the Tea Party movement, a decentralized libertarian-influenced conservative movement that has cast its opposition to President Obama as an opposition to runaway government spending, runaway public debt, runaway taxation. (The movement’s unofficial motto turns “tea” into an acronym: Taxed Enough Already.) There have been race-related controversies. A white activist in Houston was photographed holding a sign that said, “Congress = Slave Owner. Taxpayer = Niggar”; he was swiftly disavowed by the Houston Tea Party Society (even though, strictly, he was calling himself a “niggar”). At the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the former congressman Tom Tancredo voiced his regret that “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country,” which reminded some commentators of the schemes that disenfranchised black voters during Reconstruction. (Tancredo declined to apologize, saying that he wanted only to combat “civic ignorance.”) And two African-American congressmen say that they heard someone shout a racial slur during the recent Capitol Hill rally against the health-care bill.
More often, though, the Tea Party movement has been relatively disciplined in its focus on spending and taxing. Conceivably, arguments about health-care reform have been advanced in bad faith, in the hope of stoking white racial resentment. But the other possibility is more unsettling: maybe health-care reform is merely one more topic on which Americans’ opinions correlate, however loosely, with race. Certainly it’s hard to assess the protests without also assessing the politics. Those aggrieved (mainly) white folks look a lot different if you think they’re speaking out against fiscal malpractice.
Because explicit formulations of white-identity politics are taboo, we have no non-pejorative way to talk about the disproportionate whiteness of the Tea Parties. (We don’t even have a good way to measure it. Keith Olbermann included “Hispanics” on the list of people he didn’t see represented in Tea Party crowds, but, really, how could he tell?) Supporters of the Tea Parties can’t decide whether they should refuse this identity, by highlighting black speakers and attendees, or defend it, by suggesting, as Beck did, that anti-white racism is a serious worry. In fact, Beck’s slippery concern with racism—outrage over false charges of anti-black racism, combined with outrage over anti-white racism—seems central to a certain kind of white-identity politics. This professedly anti-racist argument is about as close as anyone comes to articulating a mainstream political agenda that is explicitly pro-white.
In the Warner Bros. movie “The Blind Side,” Quinton Aaron plays Michael Oher, a black football prodigy who is adopted by Leigh Anne Tuohy, a white materfamilias, played by Sandra Bullock. Early on, Michael explains why his new surroundings feel so strange. “I look, and I see white everywhere,” he says. “White walls, white floors, and lots of white people.” They—the white people—are the film’s true subject; Michael remains a sweet but silent cipher. (The real Michael Oher is now a lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, and before the movie’s release he told the Baltimore Sun that he was “not in a hurry to see it.”) The Tuohys’ whiteness is expressed as a series of red-state signifiers: they are Republican and Christian and they live in Tennessee; Leigh Anne’s husband is played by the country star Tim McGraw. There is even a reference to anti-white racism: when the cute young son, known as S.J., complains that a “Chinese” kid was picked, instead of him, to play the Indian chief in the school play, he wonders whether “multicultural bias” might have been at work.
At times, the movie seems to be building toward the familiar moment when the whites atone for the past by confronting their unexamined racism, but that moment never arrives. Instead, a climactic scene has Leigh Anne facing off against a black thug from Michael’s old neighborhood. He insults her with a racial slur (the “s” word—“snowflake”), and threatens her family; she responds by threatening him right back. “You so much as cross into downtown, you will be sorry,” she says, adding that she knows the district attorney and belongs to the National Rifle Association. This kind of threat, a Southern white woman telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, has a long and dismal history, but Bullock delivers it with verve, and without a trace of self-consciousness. (No doubt the scene helped her win her Academy Award.) Leigh Anne is refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity—for her, it’s neither something to live down nor something to live up to.
Roediger and Painter are right to remind us that whiteness was built over centuries on a foundation of deceit and confusion and disguised political imperatives. But neither seems fully to grasp the ways in which this artificial category has, over the years, come haltingly to life. Yes, whiteness is a social construct, and not (as race scientists used to think) a biological essence—but then so, too, is every collective identity. It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be.
Demographers predict that, sometime before the middle of this century, non-Hispanic white people will cease to be a majority in America. This doesn’t mean that there will be a white “minority”—whites will continue to be the country’s most populous racial group for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t mean that white is the new black—the two races have never been symmetrical, and never will be. And it doesn’t mean that whiteness is innocent of history—you can’t tell the story of whiteness (or, for that matter, blackness) without talking about racism. But, if the old race theory was brutally reductive, there is something reductive, too, about the idea that whiteness, for all its paradoxes, isn’t real. The history of human culture is the history of forgeries that become genuine, categories that people make and cannot simply unmake. So we should probably stop thinking of whiteness as an error, and start thinking of it, instead, as a work in progress. Historians have sometimes framed the treacherous history of whiteness as the slow death of an idea. Perhaps it’s time we start viewing it, instead, as the slow birth of a people.
Moscow's Muslim community is concerned about an increase in racist attacks.
April 01, 2010
By Brian Whitmore
In the aftermath of this week's twin suicide bombings in Moscow, Uzlipat Gebekova is very careful about what she wears in public.
A resident of Makhachkala, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Daghestan, Gebekova is living in Moscow temporarily while she studies jewelry-making. And she doesn't want anybody associating her with the two female suicide bombers who wore long black skirts to cover the explosive belts they detonated on the Moscow Metro, killing 39 Monday-morning commuters.
"The situation is very dangerous for us," Gebekova says. "Wearing a head scarf is a risk. I think even wearing a skirt would be dangerous. It's best just to wear trousers. To come here [to Moscow] now -- whether for business, education, or medical treatment -- is dangerous."
Life in Moscow is never easy for ethnic minorities, particularly people from the Caucasus. They are routinely subjected to discrimination, harassment, attacks, and humiliating document checks by police. But their situation gets even worse when terrorism strikes, returning the public focus to Russia's long-simmering conflict in the North Caucasus, and heightening resentment between ethnic Slavs and other city residents.
The Moscow-based Sova Center, which monitors racially motivated attacks, has recorded assaults on five members of ethnic minorities in three separate incidents since the March 29 attacks. Among those attacked were three females, including a 17-year-old Armenian girl and two Muslim women who were wearing head scarves.
For them, it doesn't matter where in the Caucasus somebody is from.
The Sova Center's deputy director, Galina Kozhevnikova, says the number of actual attacks is undoubtedly much higher, since minorities are often afraid to report such attacks and police are reluctant to investigate them.
"We know that many people who don't have a Slavic appearance have consciously avoided going out in public in the days following the attack. They are afraid of attacks," Kozhevnikova says.
Stress, Fear, And Grief
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has claimed responsibility for the March 29 suicide bombings in a video posted on the Internet and said attacks on Russia would continue.
And with Moscow bracing for possible follow-up attacks, some politicians are making pointed statements that it is time for the government to take the gloves off and deal harshly with those responsible for plotting and carrying out terrorist attacks.
In remarks reported by the website gzt.ru, State Duma Deputy Aleksandr Gurov claimed that concerns over political correctness were preventing the authorities from dealing with terrorism effectively. "How much can we play with this so-called tolerance?" he said.
But tolerance is the last thing ethnic minorities are experiencing, according to Abdullah Duduyev, editor of the Chechen-language magazine "Dosh."
Duduyev says he and other Chechens in Moscow are "saddened by what happened," adding that those who perished in the blasts were "innocent people." He adds that "now it is the Chechens who will suffer, as they always do" in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
"Attitudes toward us have gotten worse," Duduyev says. "When two Muslim women were beaten in the metro, not a single person in the crowded wagon stuck up for them. This shows the mood of society. Stress, fear, and grief are visible on people's faces. It is impossible to hide the aggression people feel toward outsiders."
The twin suicide bombings killed 39 people
Central Asians living in the Russian capital are also fearful. "The atmosphere for our compatriots in Moscow is depressing. People are afraid and are going out less. We canceled a meeting two days ago due to security concerns," says Abdullo Davlatov, a leading member of Moscow's Tajik migrant community. "Police are checking documents more, but we have not yet had any complaints about attacks by nationalists or skinheads." Outhouses And Sewers
Aleksandr Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, says the rhetoric used by the authorities has contributed to the climate of fear among minorities. This includes recent remarks by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who pledged on March 30 to "drag" terrorists "from the depths of the sewer." The comments were an echo of his notorious pledge in 1999 to "wipe out" terrorists while they were sitting "in the outhouse."
Verkhovsky says that instead of such provocative phrases, Putin should be using language that unites society.
"So this time the prime minister isn't going to wipe out terrorists in the outhouse. Instead he is going to get them in the sewer," Verkhovsky says. "Of course you need to go after the terrorists, but this over-the-top rhetoric is destructive. It encourages negative emotions. This is the prime minister speaking, not some common citizen talking in the kitchen."
Initially, Russian officials said they were focusing on the North Caucasus, where Moscow has been battling separatists for nearly two decades, to find those involved with the recent attacks. But Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the National Security Council, suggested that Georgian involvement in the attacks "could not be excluded."
Russia and Georgia fought a bitter five-day war in August 2008 and relations between the two neighbors remain tense. The Georgian government -- which immediately condemned the attacks, offered condolences to the victims, and said it was prepared to assist in any investigation -- denied Patrushev's claim.
Johny Karatskhelia, president of Lazare, a Moscow-based Georgian community organization, says Patrushev's remark shows that all people from the Caucasus living in Moscow are under suspicion -- and therefore in danger.
"For them, it doesn't matter where in the Caucasus somebody is from. They don't make a distinction between a Chechen, an Ingush, a Georgian, or an Abkhaz," Karatskhelia says. "All Georgians and all people from the Caucasus are afraid of what will happen next." RFE/RL's North Caucasus, Russian, Tajik, Georgian, and Echo of the Caucasus services contributed to this report
New America Media, News Report, Paul Kleyman, Apr 05, 2010
Asian Americans as a group are half as likely as non-Hispanic whites to die from heart disease. But Native Hawaiians are 40 percent more apt to suffer from heart disease than whites. That’s just one example of a health threat that gets lost when all Asians are statistically blended into the category “Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AA/NHPI).”
The May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health is entirely devoted to health concerns for AA/NHPI populations and is being hailed as a milestone for showing that bundling statistics for all Asians projects, according to a University of Toronto study, an “inaccurate and misleading” picture, which “fails to identify particularly vulnerable groups.”
“We’re constantly being lumped together as the ‘model minority’ that has fewer health problems than other groups,” explained Marguerite J. Ro, deputy director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF) in San Francisco.
Although many group differences seem obvious, the common practice of statistical blending in health studies tends to wash out critical differences that would give public health experts information they need to target research and community programs effectively.
For example, Ro said, aggregating so many groups masks Pacific Islander health disparities. “That makes them a minority within an already invisible minority,” she stated.
Among other sharp differences examined in the journal between “Asian” groups are that older Filipinos in the United States stand a far greater chance of being disabled than Japanese Americans, Vietnamese seniors are far more likely than Koreans and “Asians” in general to incur Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive problems, and Hmong in California experience rates of liver and cervical cancer triple or quadruple those of other AA/NHPI groups.
One study by Scarlett Lin Gomez and colleagues at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California (CPIC) notes that past breast cancer research failed to consider differences in Asian ethnicity or immigrant status. Because group-specific data within Asian groups is unavailable, they wrote, “health disparities experienced within Asian communities in the U.S. have been largely overlooked.”
According to Gomez and her coauthors, Asian American women are the only ethnic group for which cancer is the leading cause of death, outweighing heart disease. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in these women. Yet the lack of group-specific data has obscured especially vulnerable populations that health care professionals should target for screening and treatment. For instance, while Japanese-American women born in the United States have a lower incidence of breast cancer than non-Hispanic white women, Filipinas had poorer five-year survival rates and greater development of late stages of the cancer that were comparable to African American women. The study notes that "explanations for the ethnic differences in breast cancer survival in Asians have not been carefully studied."
Gomez’s study determined that Asian-born women in the United States, especially those from Vietnam, China and the Philippines, are at higher risk of dying of developing breast cancer than U.S.-born Asian Americans, with Vietnamese women being the most vulnerable. These findings contradict the popular perception that the burden of breast cancer is universally low among Asian women, Gomez said.
In fact, a University of Toronto study found that there was more variation in disability rates among elderly AA/NHPI groups than between the white and the aggregated Asian group.
For example, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive problems was very slight between whites and all Asians. But Vietnamese people 55 and older had significantly higher levels of cognitive difficulties and more than twice the prevalence rate of Koreans.
Unpacking the statistics pertaining to different groups subsumed into the Asian label could also mean more ethnic specific outreach. A report from CPIC revealed the public-health power of ethnic-specific media outreach. Better community education through targeted brochures and use of ethnic media dramatically increased life-saving tests for colorectal cancer (CRC) among Vietnamese Americans ages 50-74.
CPIC’s Bang H. Nguyen and his team focused on older Vietnamese Americans and worked with Vietnamese print, radio and television media in Santa Clara County to develop articles and place ads featuring Vietnamese media personalities, cancer survivors, health community members and health providers. They produced a professional bilingual booklet titled Kham Ruot Gia De Song Tho (For Long Life, Test Colon). They also staffed a bilingual telephone hotline and held programs to educate health providers.
During the two-year project and follow-up survey, the Institute’s researchers found that the California effort boosted CRC screenings by 40 percent more than in the large Vietnamese community of the Houston, Texas area, where there was no cancer-screening effort.
Nguyen concluded that outreach to Vietnamese Americans and other racial and ethnic, poor or immigrant communities “could be applied to other forms of cancer, cardiovascular disease, tobacco, diabetes and obesity control.”
One of the Toronto researchers, Sarah Brennenstuhl, advised in an interview that when AA/NHPI seniors and their family members see a doctor or other health care professional, they should make sure “the person is not making silly assumptions. They shouldn’t assume there’s no need to screen for certain conditions. People should discuss this variability among Asians with their health care professionals.”
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For them, it doesn't matter where in the Caucasus somebody is from.
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