Features

 
Reviews

Making struggle sexy

An excerpt on the inequalities and injustices of the American penal system from Poli-Tainment, a resource guide for activists.


The American correctional system of the past 30 years has been characterized by a population increasing exponentially in response to shifts in policy towards mandatory minimum and determinate sentencing. Persons convicted of a crime today are far more likely to be sentenced to incarceration — and will spend a longer period in prison — than their counterparts in past decades. During 2002, the nation’s state and federal prison and local jail population exceeded two million for the first time in history. These trends have contributed to prison overcrowding and state governments being overwhelmed by the burden of funding a rapidly expanding penal system. The results of these decisions are prisons filled with large numbers of non-violent and drug offenders (over 50 percent in both state and federal prisons) at an annual cost of incarceration of $20,000 or more, along with increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety.

It is the logical, inevitable consequence of “tough-on-crime” laws and punitive sentencing polices that elected leaders and public officials embrace to avoid addressing the pressing social problems caused by institutionalized racism and political and economic exclusion. By incarcerating high proportions of low income African American, Latino and American Indian residents and maintaining surveillance over them for even longer periods of time, the criminal justice apparatus perpetuates a social segregation policy that intentionally isolates historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and communities, ensuring a capital divestment policy that builds neither social capital nor economic infrastructure.

According to the U. S. Department of State’s 2000 report to the U.N. Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), “discrimination in the criminal justice system” is a “principal causative factor” hindering progress toward ending racial discrimination in [U.S.] society.

Facts & statistics on criminal justice & black people

Arrests

FBI data compiled from more than 8,500 police agencies show that blacks were the subject of 29 percent of arrests in 1999 (The Herald Sun, 2001), although they make up about 12 percent of the population.

In 1996, black Americans made up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of all convicted federal offenders (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997).

The possibility of incarceration for black Americans is six times (16.2 percent) higher than for the rest of the population (2.5 percent) (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997).

Incarceration

In South Carolina, 68 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 64 were African American. Blacks made up 27 percent of the state’s total population in the same age group (The Herald Sun, 2001).

In 2000, roughly one in 10 black men was in prison (Boston Globe, 1999).

In West Virginia, blacks made up 44 percent of the female inmates ages 18 to 64. Blacks were 3 percent of the total female population in the same age range (The Herald Sun, 2001).

The black prison population has increased eightfold from three decades ago, when there were 133,226 blacks in prison (Boston Globe, 1999).

Black children are nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).

A survey of traffic stops in Volusia County, Florida, showed nearly 70 percent of those stopped were blacks or Hispanics (Boston Globe, 1999).

Because many states bar felons from voting, at least one in seven black men will have lost the right to vote (Boston Globe, 1999).

Thirty to 40 percent of the next generation of black men will permanently lose the right to vote if current trends continue (The Sentencing Project, 1998).

In nine states, one in four black men can never vote again because they were convicted of a felony (The Sentencing Project, 1998).

Juvenile injustice

Ever since juvenile courts were first established in the early 1900s, the laws in most states have permitted judges to approve the transfer of children from the more protective and treatment-oriented juvenile court to criminal court jurisdiction. But first, there had to be a hearing in which the child’s maturity, comprehension, skills, and appropriateness for treatment in the juvenile system are balanced against the nature of the offense and factors such as the length of time before the child becomes a legal adult. In rough numbers, approximately 10,000 children were transferred annually to adult criminal court in this manner.

But in the late 1980s, as violent crimes among juveniles surged, lawmakers following a “tough on crime” ideology enacted laws that authorized transfer to criminal court of juveniles at a much younger age and for less serious crimes than before. These “automatic” or “direct file” transfers were determined by the charge placed against the child by police or at the discretion of a prosecutor, without prior judicial review. Under these laws, upwards of 200,000 children have been prosecuted each year as adults in criminal court.

The Sentencing Project has sought to restrict the practice of “automatically” transferring children to adult court without judicial review. There are many reasons. Children are responsible in different ways than adults for their actions. They are less able to exercise their rights and less able to comprehend court proceedings. They are frequently denied access to education and subjected to abuse when placed in adult jails and prisons. Many court systems fail to provide adequate defense services to children in adult court. Racial disparity characterizes the decisions to prosecute children as adults. Adult sentences, imposed upon children, are unduly harsh — destroying the formative years of a young person’s life, and in the instance of lengthy sentences, the prospect of life outside a prison forever.

Statistics on black youth and the criminal justice system

Black students are punished more severely for the same behaviors as white students. Nationally, black students are fewer than one out of five public school students, but one out of every three students suspended is black (Advancement Project and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, June 2000).

Compared with white youths, black youths are more likely to be held in a detention facility, formally charged in juvenile court, and transferred to adult criminal court, where they receive harsher and longer sentences (Youth Law Center, Justice Policy Institute, Building Blocks for Youth, April 2000).

Compared with youths in juvenile facilities, youths in adult prisons are eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, twice as likely to be beaten by prison staff, and 50 percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).

The latest juvenile-crime report by the Department of Justice shows a 68 percent drop in the juvenile murder rate from 1993 to 1999, reaching its lowest in recorded history (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Juvenile arrests for violence fell 36 percent from its 1994 peak to 1999, the lowest they have been in a decade (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Despite the continuing decline of youth crime, nearly every state has changed its laws to make it easier to prosecute youth as adults (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

A study in California found that compared with white youths, minorities were 2.8 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 6.2 times more likely to be tried in adult court and seven times more likely to be sentenced to prison once they get there. (Justice Policy Institute, 2000).

For youths charged with violent offenses, the average length of incarceration is 193 days for whites, 254 for African Americans, and 305 for Latino youth.

Among those not previously admitted to a secure facility, African Americans are six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and nine times more likely to be jailed if charged with a violent offense.

For drug offenses, African Americans are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison (Building Blocks for Youth, 2001).

In Cook County, Illinois, 99 percent of youths tried as adults are African American or Latino (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Education versus incarceration

In the past decade, many states have cut their budgets for higher education funds to compensate for rapid growth in prison populations and prison construction, fueled in part by increasing numbers of drug offenders in state and federal prisons. In both New York and California, prison expenditures now exceed university financing and more black men are admitted as prisoners than graduate from the state universities. From 1977 to 1995, U.S. prison spending increased by 823 percent while spending on higher education went up by only 374 percent.

Prison industrial complex

What is the prison industrial complex?

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a complicated system situated at the intersection of governmental and private interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems. The PIC depends upon the oppressive systems of racism, classism, and sexism. It includes human rights violations, the death penalty, industry and labor issues, policing, courts, media, community powerlessness, the imprisonment of political prisoners, and the elimination of dissent.

Black women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population and Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita. Approximately five million people — including those on probation and parole — are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. The prison industrial complex profits from racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Black and brown bodies are the human raw material in a vast experiment to conceal the major social problems of our time.

The racially disproportionate demographics of the victims of the war on drugs will not surprise anyone familiar with the symbiotic relationship between poverty and institutionalized racism. Economic inequality and political disenfranchisement have been inextricably intertwined since the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racist enforcement of the drug laws is just the latest example of institutionalized racism. As political economist John Flateau graphically puts it: “Metaphorically, the criminal justice pipeline is like a slave ship, transporting human cargo along interstate triangular trade routes from Black and Brown communities; through the middle passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and courtrooms; to downstate jails or upstate prisons; back to communities as unrehabilitated escapees; and back to prison or jail in a vicious recidivist cycle.”

From plantation to prisons:

Where does the money go?

According to the U.N. International Drug Control Program, the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually. Profits of this magnitude invariably lead to corruption and complicity at the highest levels. Yet the so-called war on this illegal trade targets economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Putting aside the question of legality, there is no evidence of a “trickle-down effect.”

These substantial profits are not enriching the low-level players who constitute the vast majority of drug offenders. To the contrary, the black market drug economy undermines non-drug-related businesses and limits the employability of its participants. Discussing the “legal apartheid” that keeps the developing world poor, Peruvian economist Fernando De Soto observes that “[t]he poor live outside the law . . . because living within the law is impossible: corrupt legal systems and warped rules force those at the bottom of the world economy to spend years leaping absurd hurdles to do things by the book.”  “In a criminalized economy, the risk of imprisonment is almost ‘a form of business license tax.’”

Who is profiting?

In the United States, prison architects and contractors, corrections personnel, policy makers and academics, and the thousands of corporate vendors who peddle their wares at the annual trade-show of the American Corrections Association — hawking everything from toothbrushes and socks to barbed-wire fences and shackles are making money from the PIC.

The sale of tax-exempt bonds to underwrite prison construction is now estimated at $2.3 billion annually. The Wackenhut Corrections Corporation —  which manages 37 prisons in the United States, 18 in the United Kingdom and Australia and has one under contract in South Africa — tried to convert a former slave plantation in North Carolina into a maximum security prison to warehouse mostly black prisoners from the nation’s capital. Promising investors to keep the prison cells filled, these corporations dispatch “bed-brokers” in search of prisoners — evoking images of 19th century bounty-hunters capturing runaway slaves and forcibly returning them to the cotton fields. Corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of punishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners and their families outrageous prices for the precious telephone calls which are often the only contact inmates have with the free world. Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third-world labor power exploited by U.S.-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness, many of whom wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only the high-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor. Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as “Prison Blues,” as well as t-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons.

Racism & poverty: The free market and prison economies

Today there are over two million people incarcerated in the United States. Studies demonstrate that two-thirds of state prisoners had less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of arrest. Over the past decade states have financed prison construction at the expense of investment in higher education. At the same time, access to education in prison has been severely curtailed. Officially, 8.3 percent of working-age blacks in the United States are unemployed but taking into account the “incarceration effect,” the rate is significantly higher. Research confirms the obvious &dashm; the positive relationship between joblessness or low wages and recidivism.

The stigma of prison has been codified in laws and licensing regulations that bar people with criminal records from countless jobs and opportunities, effectively excluding them from the legitimate workforce and forcing them into illegal ventures. As economists Western and Petit point out, “[T]he penal system can be viewed as a type of labor market institution that systematically influences men’s employment … [and has a] pervasive influence … on the life chances of disadvantaged minorities.”

Like slavery, the focused machinery of the war on drugs fractures families, as it destroys individual lives and destabilizes whole communities. It targets American Indians living on or near reservations and urban minority neighborhoods, depressing incomes and repelling investment. “The lost potential earnings, savings, consumer demand, and human and social capital … cost black communities untold millions of dollars in potential economic development, worsening an inner-city political economy already crippled by decades of capital flight and de-industrialization.”

Abolition & prisons as environmental racism

What is abolition?

Abolition is a political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

Abolition means acknowledging the devastating effects prison, policing, and surveillance have on poor communities, communities of color, and other targeted communities, and saying, “No, we won’t live like this. We deserve more.”

Abolitionists recognize that the kinds of wrongdoing we call “crime” do not exist in the same way everywhere and are not “human nature”, but rather determined by the societies we live in. Similarly, abolitionists do not assume that people will never hurt each other or that people won’t cross the boundaries set up by their communities. The society must create alternatives for dealing with the injuries people inflict upon each other in ways that sustain communities and families. Keeping a community whole is impossible by routinely removing people from it.

In the last 20 years the United States has built more prisons than any country during any period in history. The cost of the U.S. criminal justice system now runs to $120 billion per year. But the financial costs are only part of the story. There are other costs not so easily seen; costs passed on to those least able to pay them &dashm; the poor rural towns in which most prisons are built and the poor urban communities from which most prisoners are sent. Therefore, because the costs of the current prison expansion are being passed to the poor, and especially to people of color, prisons are examples of economic injustice and environmental racism.

Women, incarceration & re-entry

Since 1980, the number of women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate for men. Nationally, the 93,000 women in state and federal prison represent a figure more than seven times the number in 1980. The “war on drugs” has been the primary factor in this dramatic growth, with a third of women prisoners incarcerated for a drug offense. These trends raise questions regarding the consequences of incarceration on women offenders. Women prisoners often have significant histories of physical and sexual abuse, high rates of H.I.V. infection, and substance abuse. Traditionally, alternatives to incarceration for women have been limited, as has correctional programming designed to meet their specific needs. In addition, large-scale women’s imprisonment has created an increasing number of children &dashm; estimated at 125,000 &dashm; who suffer from their mother’s incarceration and the loss of family ties.

Women comprise over 6.7 percent of the incarcerated population. One can expect about 9 percent of those women to be released within 60 months of their sentence. Upon release, society expects them to find employment. Of the women who face this challenge, most of them are women of color who will face a greater challenge finding employment upon re-entry than white women. Whether they are expected to work as a condition of a public assistance program or simply as a means of survival, to successfully re-enter, women have to create a foundation for themselves and a job provides the bedrock of this foundation. Unfortunately, the criminal record that follows them out of incarceration serves as a terrific impediment to fulfilling both society’s and their own expectation that they find employment upon release.

Alternative to mass incarcerationRestorative justice

What is restorative justice?

Restorative justice is a systematic response to wrongdoing that emphasizes healing the wounds of victims, offenders and communities caused or revealed by the criminal behavior.

Restorative justice is a new framework for the criminal justice system that is rapidly gaining acceptance and support by criminal justice professionals and community groups. Restorative justice involves looking beyond retribution to find deeper solutions that heal broken relationships.

Indigenous/Native practices, such as Maori justice, and the use of sentencing circles (or peacemaking circles) by North American Indians have been heavy influences.

South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to address injustices under apartheid.

A report from the Department of Justice of Canada analyzed a collection of studies to determine the effectiveness of restorative justice. Encouragingly, it found “restorative justice programs are a more effective method of improving victim/offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with restitution, and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared to more traditional criminal justice responses (i.e. incarceration, probation, court-ordered restitution)” (Latimer, Dowden, & Muise, 2001, p.17).

Practices and programs reflecting restorative purposes will respond to crime by:
a.identifying and taking steps to repair harm,  
b.involving all stakeholders, and
c.transforming the traditional relationship between communities and their governments in responding to crime.

Some of the programs and outcomes typically identified with restorative justice include:

Victim offender mediation
Conferencing
Circles
Victim assistance
Ex-offender assistance
Restitution
Community service

Three principles form the foundation for restorative justice:

1. Justice requires that we work to restore those who have been injured.
2. Those most directly involved and affected by crime should have the opportunity to participate fully in the response if they wish.
3. Government’s role is to preserve a just public order, and the community’s is to build and maintain a just peace.

Restorative programs are characterized by four key values:

1. Encounter:  Create opportunities for victims, offenders and community members who want to do so to meet to discuss the crime and its aftermath.
2. Amends:  Expect offenders to take steps to repair the harm they have caused.
3. Reintegration:  Seek to restore victims and offenders as whole, contributing members of society.
4. Inclusion:  Provide opportunities for parties with a stake in a specific crime to participate in its resolution.

  

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >

Poli-Tainment
URL: http://www.Poli-Tainment.com

RESOURCES >

American Civil Liberties Union
URL: http://www.aclu.org

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
URL: http://www.cjcj.org

Critical Resistance
URL: http://www.criticalresistance.org

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
URL: http://www.famm.org

Justice Policy Institute
URL: http://www.justicepolicy.org

National Black United Fund, Inc.
URL: http://www.nbuf.org

National Lawyers Guild
URL: http://www.nlg.org  

The National Urban League, Inc.
URL: http://www.nul.org

Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC)
URL: http://www.prisonactivist.org

Homies Unidos
URL: http://www.homiesunidos.org  

Active Element Foundation
URL: http://www.activeelement.org  

Prison Moratorium Project — NY
URL: http://www.nomoreprisons.org  

Youth Empowerment Center
URL: http://www.youthec.org  

The No War on Youth Online Resources page
URL: http://www.colorlines.com/waronyouth

  

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Inside the beltway, outside politics

With memories of the closest election in history still fresh on our minds, millions of typically apathetic voters hope to make a difference in this year’s election. The only problem is finding a candidate who will change our lives for the better.


I’m feeling very attractive lately. Two rich guys want me, and I have something they need — an undecided vote.

Most people have a position when it comes to politics. They formulate their political opinions starting with their parents’ party views and then shape their own beliefs as they grow and develop their own identity. But I don’t have a position, and I honestly don’t know why.

My father was a World War II and Korean War veteran. My mother was a Cold War information-gatherer-turn-stay-at-home-mom. Given those two facts, you’d assume the obvious:

Republicans.

But I’m not sure if that’s the case. Politics were never discussed in our house. We lived in Virginia, inside the Beltway. Naval Reserve pay and defense contracting put food on our table, but my parents never discussed the defense budget, rising health care costs, Social Security, or anything remotely political as you would expect growing up in Washington, D.C.

My father loved Archie Bunker, hated hippies, and thought women should stay out of the military service academies. The only time I suspected he might be a Republican was when we saw Richard Nixon get on the Sequoia after we enjoyed a trip to the wharf to get crabs. Dad smiled when the president waved to us.

Mom grew up on a farm in North Carolina and left at 18 to go to Washington to become a civil servant. Her last post with the U.S. Air Attaché in Bonn, Germany in the late 1950s required her to be friendly with the locals and bring information back to her superiors. In the 1970s, she watched the Equal Rights Amendment movement, and she believed in the right to choose. The only political opinion she ever expressed was “I’d vote for Jesse Jackson.” But now she listens to Rush Limbaugh.

I was a sophomore in college when I attained the right to vote. I worked at the Pentagon, writing press releases during college breaks, and volunteered as a reading instructor for the mentally challenged. Throughout the years, I continued to volunteer in my community instead of voting — that way, I could actually see the difference my actions made.

I finally registered to vote when I was 26. I was engaged and almost out of graduate school, and I felt like it was time to care about national politics. My brother was 24 years old, serving on a submarine in Charleston, South Carolina. We decided our votes didn’t matter in the general scheme of how the country was run. We did the unthinkable: We voted for Perot in 1992.

Not much has changed for me in the subsequent 12 years. I’ve been laid off twice and was just days from getting laid off three other times. I’ve cashed out two 401(k)s and one IRA while under- or unemployed. I’ve moved to four states to get a job. Dad’s dead after years of mediocre care from military doctors. Mom’s on a government pensioner’s fixed income living in the same house. My brother is now a civilian dodging downsizings within his company, and he joined the Naval Reserve primarily to ensure he’d have health care and a small pension. We’re all doing OK, but not great.

One thing has changed recently. I registered to vote again. My political apathy turned to action when I checked the “other” political party box on the voter registration form and added “undecided.” I find comfort in the fact that millions of Americans are as undecided as me and fearful of another Florida voting debacle.

The 2004 candidates appear to have distinct opinions about major topics. Kerry supports a woman’s right to choose. Bush opposes abortion and passed legislation banning U.S. funding to any international health care agency providing reproductive services. Kerry is against school vouchers. Bush is ready to hand them out so parents can send their kids to schools that perform well. Kerry believes in gay civil unions. Bush wants to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.

I see truth and fiction in each of their arguments. For example, Bush supported No Child Left Behind, but didn’t fully fund it while in office. The threat of vouchers may force a school, with the right resources, to develop programs to help children. Neither candidate can fully define what terrorism is and how to stop it. This only heightens my indecision. I must select the best man for the job. But given the choices before me, my decision may come down to choosing the most promising of the non-promising.

I believe if I grew up less apolitical, I still wouldn’t know what to do in this election. I’m coming back from a 12-year voting hiatus. Is there a presidential hopeful who will reassure me that I made the right decision to vote in the wake of this current indecision?

Only time will tell.

STORY INDEX

COMMENTARY>

“Election 2004 not likely to be as close as 2000” by Richard Benedetto
URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/benedetto/2004-10-08-benedetto_x.htm

“Scaring voters to the polls” by Helen Thomas
URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1008-32.htm

“Why don’t Americans care?” by Mark Morford
URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1006-31.htm

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

Where the two elections shall meet

Salman Rushdie may be a movie star with rock star friends, but he still offers readers of his 2002 essay collection Step Across This Line valuable insight into the 2004 U.S. presidential election, democracy, and the war on terrorism.


When Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002 was published in 2002, I read it cover-to-cover. His essays became my bedtime stories — and opportunities for politico-cultural ruminations — for several weeks thereafter. Reading it again some two years later, I can’t help but feel a bit giddy at times as I alternate between thinking, “he gets it,” and longing for Rushdie to produce another collection of essays if for no other reason than to flirt with my wit, and offer me insightful new perspectives that remain pertinent this political season.

The essays cover a huge amount of territory: temporally, geographically, and culturally. He reflects on both his first screening of The Wizard of Oz as a young child in India in “Out of Kansas,” and his attendance at a Rolling Stones concert in “In the Voodoo Lounge.” He pays homage to literary greats J.M. Coetzee, Edward Said, and Arundhati Roy, and muses on both the predatory nature of photography in “On Being Photographed,” and the value of the press “in keeping the issues alive” in “Farming Ostriches.”

Now transplanted in, but never wholly of, the United States, Rushdie explores the mundane with a high-caliber literary brilliance. Throughout, Rushdie’s fascination — even boy-like obsession — with contemporary culture is linked to politics. The perfect example of this is his tale of joining U2 onstage during a concert and his admiration of Bono’s success at “reducing Jesse Helms — Jesse Helms! — to tears, winning his support for the campaign against Third World debt.”

For Rushdie, though, it’s not simply such acts of cross-cultural solidarity or unions of the Left that constitute politics. Rather, Rushdie finds politics in the very act of frontier-crossing inherent in both reading and writing: opening one’s eyes, elevating one’s consciousness, allowing oneself to be simultaneously astute and vulnerable to political and moral malleability. As the author explains in “Step Across This Line: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale, 2002”:

To cross a frontier is to be transformed … At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are … At the frontier our liberty is stripped away — we hope temporarily — and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes … what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I’m not anything you need to bother about, really I’m not … I am simple. Let me pass.

Did I step across that line and let myself be challenged the last time I read Rushdie’s essays? Certainly. Many times. And re-reading Step Across This Line some two years later, I get the feeling that I’m being questioned once again. This time, though, I cannot help but read from a slightly different position — that of an American who, since her first reading, has seen this country wage a unilateral war in the name of securing the world from terrorism — under the leadership of a man who scarcely knew the names of foreign leaders when he came into office four years ago and who may again win another tight election, even though he has alienated most of those whose names he has since managed to learn.

“About Islam”

Rushdie’s insight on U.S. domestic and foreign policy demands our attention in this election year — even if the publication date makes his essays appear outdated at first glance. Given the author’s personal experience with terrorism in the form of a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s assassination, the essays offer a unique perspective on the United States’ war on terrorism — likely the deciding factor for many voters. Perhaps predictably, this traumatic experience, which forced Rushdie to go into hiding until the Ayatollah’s 1998 death, has forever changed his life, his politics, and his characterization of Islamic “extremists.”

Born to Muslim parents in India, Rushdie vehemently criticizes what he calls “militant Islam” in several selections in Step Across This Line at a time when demonizing Islam and conflating it with terrorism isn’t exactly politically correct. Somewhere in the process, he contributes to a political reality that may burn as many bridges as many of his other essays seek build.

Consider, for instance, his seemingly trite, yet highly personal and deeply internalized, position concerning the causes of September 11 and the resulting war on terrorism in his November 2001 essay “Not About Islam?”:

Let’s start by calling a spade a spade. Of course this is ‘about Islam.’ The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn’t very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Quaranic analysts. For a vast number of ‘believing’ Muslim men, ‘Islam’ stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions, and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of ‘their’ women; the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness, and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over — ‘Westoxicated’ — by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the last thirty years or so, on growing radical political movements out of this mulch of ‘belief.’ These Islamists …  include the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia.

In this passage and numerous others in Step Across This Line, Rushdie can, at times, seem reminiscent of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” thesis foreboded that the post-Cold War world would be fraught with civilization-changing wars between Eastern and Western religions and cultures, with Islam playing a central role. In progressive academic circles, Huntington has long been heavily criticized for his oversimplified characterization of Islam and of relationships between peoples across cultures.

But when Rushdie makes such statements, they seem to reflect authenticity; one cannot simply dismiss the speaker’s words as racist or essentialist. Not only does Rushdie hail from a part of the world and a history where conflict is often the norm, but the Anglo Indian writer-in-exile has literally had his very existence at stake and been affected by so-called terrorism more intimately than almost any American politician waging the war on terrorism. It also doesn’t hurt that Rushdie, in his usual fashion, tells his own narrative in such a compelling manner in “Messages from the Plague Years” that even opponents and skeptics of the war on terrorism can’t help but empathize with Rushdie’s alienation. He has been shunned not only by Iran, but also by his Indian homeland, which quickly renounced The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim, even though, as the satirist-novelist suggested in a recent interview with St. Petersburg Times writer Margo Hammond, the book was actually intended to depict metropolitan life in Thatcherite London.

At the very least, Rushdie invites those on the Left — many who oppose everything from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration — to reconsider the way in which their position allows them to divorce themselves from genuine political action. It also encourages us to consider how — and if — one can reconcile discriminating against “militant Muslims” while demanding that civil liberties and freedom of speech not be sacrificed in the name of the war on terrorism.

“It Wasn’t Me”

On the other hand, Rushdie’s book, which was published prior to the Bush Administration’s March 2003 declaration of war on Iraq, can seem outdated when read in the context of the 2004 election. That is, his demonization of so-called militant Islam certainly has some relevance today, but it cannot effectively address the question that has dominated much of the 2004 campaign: Why did the Bush Administration invade Iraq unilaterally when the Presiden allegedly knew all along that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction?

While many leftist writers and publications dubbed Rushdie a “Hawk” when, citing the terrible toll taken on the Iraqi people under Saddam, he voiced his support for the dictator’s overthrow, Rushdie has never gone so far as to support Bush’s war. Last month he told C.F. Niles of the People’s Weekly World Newspaper, “President Bush did not tell the truth to the United Nations. Things in Iraq are not getting better, they are getting worse. This is not my opinion — everybody knows that Bush is just electioneering …”

Perhaps Rushdie was borrowing a page from his own book here. Some three years ago, writing about Bush’s claim that there was no proven link between greenhouse gases and global warming in his April 2001 essay “It Wasn’t Me,” Rushdie relayed, “The president has a big microphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.” When I initially read “It Wasn’t Me” — an essay suggesting how fitting Shaggy’s hit single (about a man denying an affair even when his girlfriend witnessed him in the act) is at a time where denial keeps the world spinning ‘round, I didn’t fully appreciate Rushdie’s accuracy. Today, however, the truth that those in high places can right their wrongs with countless doses of denial is more evident.

After reading Step Across This Line in the current election milieu, I was repeatedly reminded of President Bush’s insistence that he had made the right choice in unilaterally invading Iraq, even though he justified that invasion with the false information that Saddam did indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and many others have conceded, to some extent, that Bush misled the American public to invade Iraq, and yet billions of dollars and thousands of lost lives later, he remains poised to win a second term. Perhaps the best support for Rushdie’s argument comes from an October 22 Boston Globe article, which reveals that “A large majority of self-identified Bush voters polled believe Saddam Hussein provided ‘substantial support’ to Al Qaeda, and 47 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion.” All of this despite a flood of stories and high profile reports to the contrary. Bush is apparently at the center of it all — he is, after all, the one with the microphone, as Rushdie says — and everyone else just can’t quite capture the attention of diehard Bush followers. No one else gets as much air time to deny, deny, deny.

Four years none the wiser: Lessons from 2000

Of course, while the free speech — er, free denial — of one American man is helping this election shape up to be as close or closer than the last, the outcome will affect far more than the American people. As Rushdie wrote in his essay entitled Senator Liberman” four years ago, “The citizens of the rest of the world [are] already disconcerted that only about 30 percent of American voters feel it’s worth bothering to vote at all, and the thought that the relative perceived holiness [of the candidates] may be of decisive importance does nothing to reassure us … Today, even the United States’ friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire’s unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too.”

If Rushdie’s argument made sense four year ago, it’s even more fitting in 2004, at a time when a combination of Bush’s pre-emptive doctrine and the United States’ disregard for its allies’ opinions have spurred a drastic decline in the world’s opinion of the United States. Not that long ago, I mulled over the possibility that non-Americans should get to vote for the U.S. president. Often it seems that there are far more people across the globe who criticize — and sometimes praise — the ways in which they’re affected by U.S. policy than there are Americans who concern themselves with the far-reaching consequences of Washington, D.C., decisions. But given the controversy that has arisen in several states over new Americans registering to vote, the possibility that the Republicans or Democrats would so much as entertain the idea of opening the U.S. presidential election up to citizens of the world seems extremely remote, to say the least.

Fortunately, the next best possibility — heeding the advice and insight of those looking in — is well within reach thanks to the wonders of modern media. While Rushdie can’t vote here, he can offer an outsider’s view of how the democracy we practice in the United States can impact billions of people worldwide. He can offer as well an insider’s view into another democratic system — that of his Indian homeland, which, he writes, “is like the United States a large federation of regionalisms, where people define themselves first as Bengalis, Tamils, Kashmiris, and so on, and only after that as Indians. But India, with far fewer resources than the USA, has managed — albeit imperfectly — to run a constituency-based, direct-election democracy for over half a century. It’s hard to grasp why Americans can’t do the same.”

While Rushdie certainly raises useful questions concerning indirect democracy’s necessity and its ability to represent minorities — many whose ballots went uncounted or who were barred from voting on Election Day 2000 — his criticism of American democracy could not, of course, be fully realized when he wrote this first essay after Election Day 2000. Sure, he correctly indicated that the Electoral College foolishly allows for the possibility of a tie. He also pointed out — quite eloquently — that the United States often provides election assistance to developing countries to teach them how to build “fair” and “efficient” democracies while it can’t even count all of its own votes or find a non-partisan way to quell the political bickering that predominates during election season — particularly during election overtime season.

But it was in his December 2000 piece “A Grand Coalition?” that Rushdie raised a question deserving of far more attention then and now. That is, when an election ends in what essentially amounts to a tie, might it make more sense to resolve it through a coalition government — one where, for instance, the Bush/Cheney Administration serves half the term and the Kerry/Edwards Administration serves the other two years, or where the vice presidential candidate on the ticket that garners a few more votes steps aside and allows the other presidential candidate to serve as vice president?

As President Clinton said back in 2000 during the 35-day election standoff, “The people have spoken. It’s just that we don’t yet know what they mean.” Might it be possible that some sort of coalition government — a system that has worked reasonably well in many other democracies — provides the best answer to the problem of the divided nation? Perhaps it would even help unite it, as Bush promised — falsely — to do four years ago.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

Iraq War >

“Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and the Iraq War” by Dr. Sabah Salih
URL: http://home.cogeco.ca/~kurdistan3/11-5-04-opinion-sabah-rushdie-and-irq-war.html

Islam >

”War on Iraq: Where are the Islamic Moderates?” by Mark LeVine and Raymond Baker
URL: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/15050/

Interviews >

A Conversation with Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1177360

Salman Rushdie, Out and About
URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/rushdie.html

Election >

”How the Grinch Stole America” by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,417622,00.html

Marketplace >
(A portion of proceeds from all books purchased through the Powells.com link below help support InTheFray)

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-0679463348-3&partner_id=28164

“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
News

Clout concerns

Word on the street is that 20-somethings, a segment of the population that is traditionally apathetic when it comes to voting, could decide the 2004 election. But in the battleground state of Ohio, the GOP seems to have left much-needed College Republicans behind.


The OSU College Republicans registration tent.

In a 200 seat classroom at The Ohio State University, before an American flag tacked to the chalkboard, the College Republicans overflow into the aisles. Their meeting opens with a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, during which one member yells “under GOD!” emphasizing the controversial phrase on which the Supreme Court avoided passing judgment this past June.

A screen drops down from the ceiling and the room goes dark. A trailer begins for the new anti-Michael Moore documentary “FahrenHYPE 9/11.” There are cheers and laughs. The Republicans plan on filling a 600 seat room for a screening of the film five days before the election.

Most of the meeting, though, is dedicated to plans to counter and ridicule the Democrats’ efforts. For vice-presidential candidate John Edward’s visit, the College Republicans plan on attending the rally with a pair of giant flip-flops in tow. And in response to a question posed by an audience member about the legality of driving people to the polls on Election Day, one officer replies, “I’m sure [driving people to the polls] is [legal]. I’ve heard of Democrats paying homeless people with liquor to vote. I’m pretty sure that’s not legal.”  

No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. While the two candidates’ numerous visits since March of this year, (15 for Bush, 25 for Kerry) show they are paying attention to the battleground state that has lost many manufacturing jobs over the past several years, neither seems to be courting the most passionate and politically impressionable demographic in the electorate: students.

Perhaps this neglect is reasonable. The large numbers and ideological fervor that students bring to the table are weakened by poor voter turnout. 25 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 25 turned out in 2000, compared with 66 percent of voters between the ages of 65 and 74. Yet Democratic-aligned groups like Vote Mob, ACT Now, Hip Hop Teen Vote, MoveOn.org, and Howard Dean’s grassroots group Democracy for America have poured unprecedented time and money into organizing the nation’s students for the 2004 vote, while, on the other side, College Republicans seem to be bearing the largest part of the burden. Visits to The Ohio State University in Columbus, and Miami University, 35 miles north of Cincinnati, reveal campus conservatives feeling underappreciated in the state that, according to conventional wisdom, Bush must win to get re-elected.

Students crowd the Republican Voter registration tent.

Outnumbered by Hollywood

Smack in the middle of Columbus, the large Ohio State University, with an undergraduate population of some 37,000, is anything but picturesque. Located near a litany of tattoo parlors and coffee houses, fast-food restaurants and second-hand music shops, there are large areas of grass where students lounge in the sun studying, reading, and talking politics. Copies of OSU’s student paper The Lantern blow in the wind. The front page reads: “Political Parties, Voter registration groups reach out to voting students.”

Nearby, on the corner of Neil and 17th Avenue, the OSU College Republicans are working a voter registration tent to help take back Franklin County, which narrowly went to Gore in 2000. A quick and unscientific poll of 20 random people on the quad suggests that John Kerry appeals to 55 percent of the voters, Bush only 35 percent, and 10 percent remain undecided. While anyone can register, many of those who sign up to vote at this tent take a Bush/Cheney “04 placard with them and tuck it under an arm or roll it up into a tube on their way to class. Several shift workers comment on the lack of animosity.

Zack Blau, tall, fair-haired, and wearing glasses, explains that his efforts to register voters have been met with some hostility, but not as much as he expected. “One or two people walk by saying ‘fuck Bush, or go Kerry.’ Not too bad. Every once in a while, you get a guy who wants to start an argument, but that’s about it.” The College Democrats’ table, usually set up nearby, has been absent in the last few days.

Eric Little, however, does not share Blau’s optimism. He wears a red-striped Polo shirt and jeans and has a Bush/Cheney sticker secured to his left breast-pocket. He is thin and obviously tired. Having worked for the campaign for almost a year, the labor has taken its toll. He is grateful for the opportunity but expresses confusion over what seems like a lack of involvement from the rest of the campaign. The Franklin County Republicans charged OSU Republicans with the responsibility of registering 2000 new voters before the October 4 deadline, and following up with them in the final days before the election.

“We are given a huge task and not much money to do it,” he says. “If it were more important to get people turning out to vote than just registering them, then you think they would give us a bigger chunk of the budget.”

For Little, the task of competing with the numerous democratic groups is tough. “The Dems have Vote Mob and Hip Hop Summit. We aren’t given much money and we don’t have any celebrities. We are outnumbered and outspent by people and groups that are not students and who aren’t affiliated with the university.”

The huge task is made even bigger, Little says, by the harassment he receives from anti-Bush groups. Chairman of Buckeyes for Bush and a member of the College Republicans, Eric often takes the lion’s share of the labor, working the voter registration tables when others are unable or unwilling. “There’s no greater frustration than working [a voter registration table], doing something we think is a public service and somebody runs by and swears at you.”

His frustration is compounded by a rumor he’s heard from several people that Vote Mob is discarding the registrations of declared Republicans. “These kinds of rumors breed apathy toward the election,“ says Little. “People end up thinking that politics is this corrupt animal and that we’re going to end up throwing away their forms as a result.”

Little’s feeling that the Democrats are outgunning the Republicans on campus by using “Hollywood” influence is supported by the visible presence of celebrities at student-led events. The OSU College Democrats recently held a rally attended by Kerry“s stepson Andre Heinz, actress Claire Danes, and Boston Public star Rashida Jones. That same week John Edwards visited Columbus to attend a debate-watching event, which was also promoted by the OSU College Democrats.

More recently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spoke to a crowd of roughly 300 in OSU’s Campbell Hall. He received applause when he said that the Bush administration’s assault on the Clean Air Act has caused 10 times as many deaths every year as the September 11 attacks attacks, and got laughs when he described the scientists that the administration depends on as “biostitutes.”

And on October 28, just five days before the election, Bruce Springsteen accompanied Kerry on one last swing through the swing state. The Lantern reported that 40,000 people attended the campus concert.

One of many posters for anti-Bush concerts and rallies.

When Buchanan isn’t enough

Over at Miami University, 35 miles north of Cincinnati in Butler County, which went to Bush in 2000, the political atmosphere is more subdued. Some 15,000 undergrads at what is considered a “public Ivy“ don’t see the large public rallies and visible recruiting effort on the part of Democrats and Republicans at places like OSU. Rather, Miami students seem almost closeted about politics. Anyone wanting to join a political discussion or club must actively hunt for one.

Despite the generally reserved and conservative bent of the school, College Republicans don’t feel that their views are always respected.

For example, several students have complained that Dr. Laura Neack, a professor in the political science department, has a pro-Kerry approach that stifles criticism. “Dr. Neack has said in class that if Bush is re-elected, she is almost certain there will be a draft,” says student Matt Nolan.

According to Nolan, there was no mention of the fact that the bill to reinstate the draft, House Resolution 163, was written in 2003 by Democratic Congressman Charles Wrangle of New York, and that the bill was defeated in the house by a vote of 402-2. Nolan also says that when anyone who supports the President attempts to divulge such information in class, they are told to sit down and be quiet.  

When contacted, Dr. Neack refused to comment.

Miami College Republicans Steve Szaranos and Nathan Colvin, (president of the group), say they are frustrated by the way material is presented by liberal professors. “It’s like [professors think] “I’m your elder and I’m going to bestow this knowledge on you. You conservatives don’t know what you’re talking about,”” says Szaranos.

But what really irritates them is the way, in their estimation, they were shut out of the selection of guests for a debate on October 4. Pat Buchanan, who has publicly opposed the Iraq War, was chosen to debate Andrew Cuomo, a decision that Colvin feels was unfair. “With the Iraq war as the hot button of this campaign, to have a ‘conservative’ that is against the war is an injustice to the students,” Colvin says.

Colvin was able to lobby successfully to have the Bush twins visit campus on October 20. But then Howard Dean spoke on campus the following day. To even the score, Colvin and the College Republicans booked Ann Coulter, conservative provocateur for October 28. Although Coulter is a heavyweight in the conservative circles, she’s no match for the Boss in drawing crowds.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTORS >

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS >

College Republican National Committee
URL: http://www.crnc.org/default1.asp

College Democrats of America
URL: http://www.collegedems.com/

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

The double agent

Shifting between Chinese and American identities, a Shanghai observer finds herself both alien and at home. Part three of a three-part series.


When celebrating a research subject’s birthday Shanghai style, rather than eating the cake, it is customary to zha dan gao or plaster each other’s faces with it.

Since coming to China on a research fellowship, I’ve spent very little time with other “foreigners.” I have preferred to “go native,” spending most of my time with my research subjects, rural-to-urban migrant workers who think of me by turns as a confidante, a little sister, an odd spectacle of cultural hybridism, or some combination of the above. As I have assumed the identities they apply to me, the way I identify myself has also evolved.

The notion of “transformation” in a foreign land is a familiar cliché to Americans who venture abroad. But during my time in China, my cynicism has yielded to a grudging resignation that I have transformed — and that whether the change has been “authentic” or imagined does not change its reality. Being foreign teaches you not only how different you are, but also how thoroughly unremarkable you can be among the masses in an unfamiliar territory.

The sensation and science of being foreign

The more I see of Shanghai, the more I discover that everyone here has come in search of liberation. Migrants see this city as a way out of poverty. Westerners see a way out of the ennui of ordinary middle-class existence.

Foreigners are a different kind of migrant, in search not of wealth but of self-affirmation. Talented but aimless individuals flock to Shanghai because they feel like China is a place where “things are happening.” This country also attracts the dregs of educated America: sad middle-aged BA-generalists turned English teachers, meandering middle-class 20-somethings trying to cash in on globalization, earthy backpackers whose lives are tucked between the dog-eared pages of a Lonely Planet.

I’ve developed a taxonomy of the foreigner species, known in China as laowai. There are savvy laowai, with their native girlfriends, their slick use of the local slang, their inside jokes about how ridiculous the Chinese are with their uncivilized habits, their pathetic English, their sexual awkwardness and comical willingness to hit on foreigners of the opposite sex. Then there are the clueless with their pathetic Chinese, their fear of loud traffic and unsanitary restaurant conditions, their naïve fascination with all things “classically” Chinese, like pagoda rooftops, calligraphy scrolls, and chintzy kimonos for which they pay scandalous amounts at seedy street markets.

Many of the foreigners I’ve met have passed the initial culture shock and subsequent euphoria phases of being immersed in a new culture. They are now in the jaded phase. They just can’t get used to some things, they say, like the shoving crowds on the buses, the filth in the streets. Some resign themselves to leading a Western existence in China. Like the Chinese American girl I know who, in her three years here, has never ridden a city bus and admits to having not a single Chinese friend.

For its part, Shanghai prides itself on being more “open” to the rest of the planet than any other city in China and currently aspires to be a dazzlingly modern global capital. The city’s come-hither gaze toward the Western world disturbs and frustrates me, though I owe my own presence here to it, and it makes me more determined to distance myself from the foreign influence in this city that I ironically help constitute.

My negative impressions do have a tangentially scientific basis. Assisting a Chinese sociology professor’s study on the lifestyles of foreigners in Shanghai, I learned that most of the interview subjects shared two major characteristics. Whether they had come in the hope of teaching English for a decent salary or slipping into a white-collar post at a branch office of a foreign company, they were in China mainly because they did not want to be at home. “I just wanted something totally different” was a frequent comment.

The other characteristic these ex-pats had in common was that they professed disdain for other expats, looking down on the stereotypical cloistered lifestyle of expense accounts and social clubs.

At a downtown bar crawling with tipsy Westerners, a young man said to me with a smirk, “Foreigners in China are disgusting.” A fellow foreigner, an English teacher — who said he had left his techno party-monger identity behind in Britain because he was “pissed” —mused, “It’s easier than London. But the beer’s more expensive.”

Newly arrived foreigners don’t share the same irritating complacency but irritate me nonetheless with their naïveté. A young woman I met through American friends, apparently unfamiliar with the one-child policy, asked me one evening if abortion was legal in China. Another interviewee, a Canadian man working for a foreign company in Shanghai, expressed awe at the laborers he saw on the streets struggling to earn a living.  “I see the people go by on bikes. Old, old people peddling, ringing the bell, trying to pick up scraps and stuff like that,” he said. “It’s helped make me a lot more conscious of my money.”

There’s something unsettling about this glorification of hardship. In a Westerner’s eyes, the poor of another country become a muddy moral window, reflecting through grease spots and blood stains a pathetic world that makes the privileged feel passively guilty but above all fortunate. The gain seems, like so many other interactions between developed and undeveloped societies, one-sided.

Blending in and mixing it up

I feel at once disgusted by fellow Americans’ self-confidence and impressed with their survival skills, which even the least culturally competent learn quickly.  I hear them peppering their English with Chinese curse words and haggling with shopkeepers like an “authentic” Chinese. But what could be more typically American than assuming that an American identity can be cast off or disguised as one chooses?

But I dismiss their gratuitous efforts to assimilate mainly because I can pull it off better than they can. Looking Chinese gives me a great advantage over non-Asian Westerners, whose tallness, hairiness, angular features, and plump figures jut out in a Chinese crowd. In my own pursuit of authenticity, I always speak in Chinese, shop at neighborhood markets, and eat at the homes of Chinese friends, borrowing their slang. And it feels good to claim the power of residing in two parallel cultures.

Maybe I’m too Chinese for my own good. I’m coarser in China than I am even in my native New York, grabbing mercilessly for a seat on a crowded bus, speaking at the same loud volume — rude to Western ears — that others use when they address me. My questions here are more intrusive, reflecting a traditional Chinese lack of social caution in asking about your monthly salary, or pointing out, as one friend did recently, that your teeth look unusually yellow this afternoon. Unlike Westerners who politely turn down elderly beggars and children selling flowers (which generally encourages their pursuit), I no longer acknowledge their presence as I walk by, the same way Shanghai natives do. We are all pushed forward by the knowledge that if we stopped to listen to every poor person and everyone who takes advantage of sympathy, we’d never go anywhere.
Yet what separates me from the hordes rushing into a modern lifestyle is that I do stop to listen, often through thin walls. My research topic is the rural migrants who flood into the cities for work, upward-striving but poor and often poorly educated. While the economic and social gulf between us is enormous, despite — or possibly because of — the differences between us, we turn the space between us into a synaptic connection.

My American background has made me instantly popular as it makes me an object of intense curiosity. While I disrupt their notions of a classic laowai, they also see me as a fellow Chinese, with American characteristics. Some migrants have sort of adopted me, viewing me as a distant relative living in the big city by herself who needs looking after. They call me xiao gu niang, or “little girl,” and say I should protect myself because I’m dan cun — the Chinese term for pure and naïve. I do feel vulnerable here, but not in the way they think. I want to tell them that they oversimplify me — perhaps reading simplicity out of me the same way I read out of them complexity that I imagine.  I probably seem simpler in China because my language skills limit my power of expression.  Or perhaps their inability to view me in all my complexity reveals not my “purity” but their innocence.

Migrant stallkeepers play cards to pass the time during a slow day.

A complicated woman

While individual complexity is highly valued in the West, in the mind of a rural migrant who has had to adapt to the assault of rough city life, dan cun is a precious and rare quality. One migrant worker I know recently brought his girlfriend (whom he met through chatting on the Internet) from Guangxi Province to Shanghai. A quiet girl, she whiles away many of her afternoons at an Internet cafe or in front of the television in the back room of the construction storefront where he works. Though her personality seems bland and even a little withdrawn, I see why my friend is drawn to her: She had that purity and consistence that is hard to find among urban youth who get wrapped up in the temptations of Shanghai youth culture — drinking, gambling, even organized crime. My friend didn’t seek a perfect match in looking for a girlfriend; he looked for a transparency, an innocence he could simultaneously protect and escape into.

Individuality is not prioritized here simply because to do so is a luxury. In America, I seek interactions with people who challenge me, but I find that intellectual and emotional challenges are most appealing when everyday living is relatively easy. Personal subjectivity becomes important when the impersonal aspects of our lives are settled, stable, and in a sense, boring. For people who struggle with economic hardship, socializing is utilitarian — a release from the burdens of the workday. Romantically, as my friend’s girlfriend showed me, a good match consists of trust, convenience, and a tacit agreement to face future struggles together. Intellectual or sexual attraction is a secondary consideration.

Though I think it would be a stretch to argue that Chinese culture does not value individuality at all, traditional Chinese do tend to idealize simplicity in a girl’s personality. For migrants who are often in dire economic circumstances, a “pure” girl symbolizes comfort, stability, and solace in a tumultuous society. This doesn’t mean women are looked down upon. Certainly, females are much more respected in Chinese society today than at any other time in history. Still, when I observe workers from a local market in their homes, I see that women, apart from work and raising children, are generally devoid of much of a personal life. Men work hard as well, but they also find the time to drink and gamble with friends, often when their wives are looking after their children or their market stalls. Women are supposed to be tough, working to support their families as men do, but they should never be tougher than their husbands. A complex or fu zha personality would threaten the gender hierarchy that upholds this society and many others.

Complexity can, however, be welcome on occasion, especially if it speaks with a foreign accent.  Most of my research subjects and other Chinese I’ve befriended have expressed respect for me because I am a college graduate, an international traveler, and a woman. I know that my difference intrigues them; my foreignness empowers, and I use it to my advantage. I get a slight thrill from stretching gender boundaries when I hang out with male migrants. Once when I went to dinner with a group of construction workers, the boss was shocked that I was not uncomfortable with the situation, suggesting a respectable local girl would never go out alone at night with a group of rowdy men. During a recent visit to a research subject’s house, I had the slightly awkward realization that I was the only woman willing to discuss politics at dinner.

Having it both ways

I still can’t bring myself to call my research subjects “friends,” although they think of me as such. While they tend to simplify me in their minds, I analyze qualities of theirs to which they themselves are oblivious. My conversations with them never feel quite equal and thus can never be fully open. We’re operating on different levels of awareness — maybe even two different levels of power.

They feel privileged to have a friend like me, who offers them a window into a world they’ll never experience, yet who does not speak a strange language or have a white face.  A migrant worker close to my age told me that his village friends wanted him to take me back home on his next visit, so they could see what his “American friend” was like. I didn’t appreciate the prospect of being paraded around like an exotic pet. Yet I can’t be angry with him, because my “friendship” with him is similarly self-serving. My research subjects are my primary sources, and the fact that I can access them makes me feel special the same way they perhaps feel special for accessing an American.

A foreign student once told me that when people see foreigners here, they see money. I’m reluctantly beginning to believe him. People question me about everything from the price of my tape recorder or the clothing I am wearing to my monthly rent or the amount of my fellowship. I’ve been asked for a loan more than once, for rent money, for investment in a future business, for the purchase of inventory. I guess this is what I would do too if I lived in a world where it was crucial to grab every opportunity that came my way. I restrain my urge to yell that being from a First-World country does not make me a credit union.

But in the end, I have to concede my privilege, and it drags heavily on me. It’s not just having financial resources or an education. My privilege is rooted in my insight, my ability to view these people from my American perspective — to pass judgment, to observe their limitations and aspirations and futile hopes — while remaining detached. To me, they are primarily subjects, and friends only when I want them to be more than foils in my China experience.

It’s odd being able to have it both ways, operating as a two-faced double agent, moving back and forth across the culture gap. The more I become aware of the distance between myself and the migrants, the more I want to close it by spending time in their homes, talking with them, joking with them, trying to build some sort of rapport. But there’s always an element of exploitation, because I am the researcher. My investment in this place is not one of the heart but of the intellect, and though I’ve built warm relationships here, despite my determination to see the best in these people, they are not intellectual connections.

And on the other side, I see myself in the context of other foreigners living in China, and I realize that what I despise about them is what I fear seeing in myself — that cold, careless, clumsy superficiality, that arrogance forged from the latent understanding that this whole country is a temporary experience—a cultural experiment that can end any time one gets tired of it. It’s that arrogance of being able to choose one’s environment.

A debatable identity: two halves, or a whole?

Still, I also willingly enforce my arrogance. Cultural divisions feed my American exceptionalism, manifesting itself in my constant assumption that I must be right in a given debate — on China-Taiwan politics, on how much freedom parents should give children, on when a young person should get married — because I grew up in a comparatively democratic country and have a perspective on the world that the Chinese lack, or because I’ve graduated from college and the person I’m speaking to has a rural junior high school education.

I’ve spent countless evenings with a migrant worker from Shandong, in front of a television flashing images of combat in Iraq and the War on Terror, arguing with him about whether Iraq was better off before the American “liberation.” Though I’m hardly a defender of America, I feel compelled to counter the simplistic idea that Iraq was a content and peaceful nation before America came in and screwed everything up. When the same man said that he supported Osama Bin Laden for attacking America on September 11, 2001, a spontaneous twinge of patriotism urged me to ask: “If my parents had been working in the Twin Towers then, would you still support him?” Inwardly, I know I just desire to counter other people’s self-righteousness with my own, and the fact that both sides are probably misinformed affords us the opportunity to argue pointlessly with abandon.

Even among Chinese peers with educational and class backgrounds similar to mine, with whom I previously looked forward to sharing a common youth culture, a condescending attitude has begun to envelop me. I find myself looking down on Chinese young people’s obedience to a system of laws and rules that I see as oppressive. They stomach a dull and creativity-stifling public education system. Though many don’t respect the social structure that they must negotiate, they comply with it in order to get ahead.

Americans do the same thing, of course, but in China, where education consists basically of tests and regurgitation of lessons, complicity seems even more dangerous to an already silenced civil society. With one Chinese friend, a journalist, I debated whether China would soon face political instability if it did not begin to democratize its government. She asserted that China was more stable than I thought, that you could get along fine as long as you did not get involved in politics or voice your opinion when you weren’t supposed to. She prefers to stay away from sensitive issues like political oppression.

I wanted to tell her that her self-censorship is more of a threat to China’s political future than any outright oppression. But I refrained, because there is no way for me to grasp fully China’s political situation. My Chinese peers, at any rate, may be freer than they appear on the surface. The friend who has vowed to stay out of politics recently went through a political “training course” run by her employer, which she was instructed not to report about. In her bag on the way back from work, however, she carried one of the books that has been banned from press coverage.

People are subtly challenging the system in ways that I can’t understand; coming from a relatively enlightened political culture may actually blind me to the nuances of this political change. Who am I to lecture people on the necessity of political reform in China when I cynically ignore what’s going on in American electoral politics, and when my own country prospers at the expense of the freedom of others?

In our elliptical debates on cultural rifts, people have questioned whether I feel more Chinese or more American.  The simplest answer I can conjure is the loaded one:  I feel both Chinese and American. People admire this access to both cultures, instilling in me a pride that I’m not completely comfortable with. I like to be proud of things that I’ve done, not of a background that I did not choose.

But much of my confidence here is rooted in privilege that I did not earn. Sometimes I walk down the street, see people climbing over each other to board a bus at rush hour, spitting gratuitously on the sidewalk, displaying extremely bad hairstyles, begging on the street, walking around with a mass of scar tissue where one’s cheek should be—from a factory accident? A “struggle session” during the Cultural Revolution ?—and I think, Damn it, America is a great country. My hometown, New York, is a rough place, but at least people line up to buy train tickets there, at least most public toilets display a modicum of sanitary standards, at least the contents of your daily paper are not exactly the propaganda of the ruling party, and if the police harass you unjustly, there is a chance that you can seek legal redress through the justice system. Living in China has made me, an unlikely patriot, feel lucky to be an American — even, dare I say, proud.

The author encountered these young girls during a visit to an impoverished Tibetan settlement in Western Sichuan Province.

Through double-doors

The Chinese have a custom of going from door to door, leisurely visiting neighbors, called chuan men. It seems that my lifestyle now consists of jumping among different doors.

I live half my life now among migrant workers, people who have also chosen their environment. But did they choose it, really? “We were forced here,” one woman told me when I asked if their migration had been empowering to her as a female head of household. It’s not freedom to them — it’s economic captivity.

Entering their lives makes me realize that some doors will always remain closed to me. I know they are joking when they tell me to bring them back to America with them (help my son find a job there, all I need is a visa) again and again, but each time they repeat the request, the seams of their smiles bear threads of desperation. They don’t expect me to help them, but they still ask, out of an instinct to pursue any chance of improving their situation.

And why shouldn’t I help them, if I have more at this moment than they will ever possess? Am I selfish? Do my “American values” dictate that they should earn their way out of poverty on their own? Or am I just afraid that if I help one person, there will be nothing stopping me from helping the dozen or so other people I’ve befriended over the past several months who all need money? I think the main reason is my fear that if I make myself an economic resource for these people, they’ll see me more as an opportunity to get ahead than as another human being, and I will begin to see them as faceless, desperate opportunists and nothing more. That’s not the kind of relationship I was seeking when I came to Shanghai. The hectic, overcrowded anonymity of this sprawling city spurs me to try to preserve the best parts of my humanity, both native and foreign, as much as possible.

But underneath the moral conundrums of living as a foreigner in a –developing-world metropolis, what pains me most is that there is nothing keeping me from abandoning my troubling sense of ethics altogether. A foreigner has so much more license to screw up in China. American dollars go a long way here, and the status of being American can buy you a lifestyle of pleasant apathy unimaginable in the West.

I worry about falling into this laziness of Western privilege. In the past century, my native country has displaced China (the once-great empire named the “center of the earth”) as the axis of modern civilization. But when I try to discipline myself into being as un-foreign and humble as possible, in some ways it only reaffirms my foreignness. Who else would have the time and resources to experiment with a denial of privilege besides those who are most privileged? I have an ample research grant that covers all my living expenses while I am here. I try to fulfill the fellowship’s well-intentioned mission of scholarly and cultural exchange.

But it’s hard to approach the task with humility without being tugged by the inherent self-importance of being a cultural ambassador, especially when I know I represent America to the people with whom I interact. As I negotiate this new territory, I’m discovering that the border between native and foreign is surprisingly porous, the line between experience and exploitation so fine, it is almost irrelevant.

This article was written during a 10-month research fellowship in Shanghai. The author has since returned to the United States, though she has not fully recovered from China — and hopes she never will.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > CULTURAL IDENTITY AND LIVING ABROAD >

World Hum
Enlightened travel writing.
URL: http://www.worldhum.com/

PLACES > CHINA >

China’s Communist Revolution, a Glossary
The BBC’s multimedia project on the history of Communist China.
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/09/99/china_50/default.htm

China Internet Information Center
Official news from China.
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/

Asia Times Online
Unofficial news from China.
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China.html

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
News

Who owns the forest?

A land crisis in a remote region of Nicaragua has brought violence and ethnic strife — and victims on both sides.


Children of Wasa King

In a ramshackle school house deep in the jungle, angry members of the Mayangna community, Nicaragua’s oldest indigenous tribe, plot their next move in the fight to reclaim their land. Lumber prospectors and Mestizo farmers, with or without land deeds, have been cutting into large sections of the once lush forest, and the Mayangnas, long considered the caretakers of Nicaragua’s rain forest, have had enough. “I’m tired of talking,” says Luis Beltran Alfaro, a land trustee in Mayangna’s second capital, Wasa King. “We’ve talked and talked and nothing gets done. We have to take matters into our own hands.”

Thirty-two native inhabitants of Wasa King, all men, stand shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of a largely open classroom, stepping forward one at a time to vent their frustration. “We want to kick them out peacefully,” Emilio Fendley says of the 150 Mestizo families settled nearby. “But we can’t; they won’t go.”

Mestizo farmers have been coming to the region for over 50 years now, but it is the brutality of the latest migration, the ones who have come in the last five years, that has triggered the rage of the Mayangnas. Despite a 2003 law that grants ownership of undeeded land to indigenous groups, trees continue to fall to the new Mestizos’ tactics of slash-and-burn agriculture. The Mayangnas fear that the forest, their traditional hunting ground, will be lost.

“They come and see some forest, and think, ‘nobody is here, we can farm here,’” says Fendley. “But we are here. This is our forest.” He bangs the large wooden stick he holds in his hand on the wood-plank floor. “The only way left to us,” he concludes, “is to spill blood.”

A group of Mayangnas meet in the school house, including Luis Beltran Alfaro,(far left in khakis), Emilio Fendley (in red pants), and Ismal Milado (seated in middle).

Forgotten Peoples

Wasa King is located in the heart of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN). Hennington Tathum Perryman, a high-ranking government official in the RAAN, says that the central government’s interest in the region goes as only as far as the gold, lumber, and fish that the RAAN is rich in.

Perryman says that central government’s indifference to the problems in Wasa King stems from a deep cultural and physical divide between the RAAN and the Pacific side of Nicaragua, home to the country’s capital, Managua.

The RAAN is home not only to a large population of Mayangnas and Miskitus but also to a dwindling number of Black Creoles. None of these three groups is found in any great number on the Pacific side, and they feel that the central government has done nothing to protect their cultures from the continual encroachment of the Spanish-speaking majority represented by the central government.

“No president of Nicaragua will ever care about the Atlantic,” says Perryman in his thick Creole accent. “80 percent of the population of Nicaragua lives in the Pacific, so that’s where they get all of their votes.”

In many ways, Wasa King is to RAAN what RAAN is to Nicaragua: a remote community that feels its unique culture is being threatened while an indifferent government looks on. The nearest town, Rosita, has only one truck that can make the arduous trek over the gutted dirt road leading into Wasa King. The muddy, jostling drive is so hostile to outsiders that the people of Wasa King seldom encounter foreign visitors. When someone does manage to make the trek, throngs of half-naked children surround the truck and guide the visitor past scattered thatch huts, over the narrow suspension bridge, and into the center of town. There, a weathered clapboard church that was once painted white stands prominently, flanked by a long, single-story wooden structure that serves as school, community center, and housing complex.

In January 2003, the government passed a law apparently intended to benefit indigenous people in places like Wasa King. The wording of Law 445, which was supposed to stop the onslaught of destructive migration into the forests, mandates a surprising degree of protection for indigenous land claims, granting the Mayangnas and the Miskitus, the region’s other indigenous group, a right to all forest land that had not already been legally deeded. However, the law is poorly enforced, which means that Mayangnas in Wasa King still have no real means of protecting the forest from the Mestizos.

Children play outside the Wasa King classroom.

A Lumber Mogul and an Easy Target

The Mestizo farmers are not the only ones with a stake in RAAN land. Kamel Ben, a lumber prospector, has laid claim to land near Wasa King. The mere mention of Ben’s name brings a torrent of abuse from Mayangnas. Ismal Milado, a 73-year-old who has come to the classroom to hear how the younger members of his community plan to fight for their land, calls Ben “Osama bin Laden’s brother.” Many in the room nod in agreement.

Ben and the Mayangnas of Wasa King are in the midst of a long legal battle that will determine who is the rightful owner of the 3000 hectares Ben currently harvests. The court has been hearing the case for two years, and it may be at least another year before a verdict is reached.

Pulling up to a coffee shop in Rosita on a new Enduro motorbike, Ben seems more congenial than evil. His sharp Middle Eastern features and graying moustache give him the appearance of a younger Omar Sharif. Puffing on Marlboro Reds, Ben speaks openly about all of his dealings in the region. He dismisses the bin Laden accusation with a laugh. “You see,” he says, “this is the kind of mentality that we are dealing with.”

Ben’s good nature is surprising given the danger he faces in everyday life. Having Middle Eastern features in a region where foreigners are about as common as politicians from Managua makes him an easy target.

“I’ve had two death threats,” says Ben, his signature smile retreating from his face. “I was eating my dinner when the owner of the restaurant rushed up to me going, ‘There’s a whole mob of them coming up the street. They’re going to kill you.’”  His smile begins to resurface as he recalls, “It was not the time to negotiate, so I escaped through the back door.”

Ben says that the Mayangnas’ hatred for him has more to do with their interest in the lumber on his land than with protecting the forest. “There is no economic activity here, so they want money from the wood.” He points out that four Mayangnas have already been arrested for illegally cutting down trees. Government officials in Puerto Cabezas confirm that a “wood mafia” is operating with little restraint in the region, poaching mahogany and other less valuable trees. The mafia is said to pay indigenous people good money to cut trees for them. Ben claims that such activities undercut the image of the Mayangnas as stewards of the rain forests. “It is false,” Ben says of the Mayangnas’ good reputation for environmentalism. “Absolutely false.”

The author (right) with Kamel Ben.

Dwindling Patience and Looming Disaster

The slow speed of the litigation has many in the region worried. As patience with the court proceedings wears thin, the prospect of the Mayangnas following through on their threats increases. No one in the area is taking those threats lightly. In Layasiksa, a Miskitu community 90 kilometers southwest of Wasa King, Misikitus’ anger over a Mestizo settlement on their land exploded on February 7 of this year, when some 100 Miskitus marched on to the settlement. Mestizo homes were burned to the ground, and a gun fight erupted. When it was over, two Mestizo farmers and one Miskitu had been shot dead.

Hurtado Garcia Baker, the governor of RAAN and leader of the largely Miskitu YATAMA party, warns that what happened in Layasiksa could happen again in Wasa King. According to Baker, “The Mayangnas’ defense of their land will be even more fierce that in Layasiksa. There are eighty men there waiting to use their machetes.”

The atmosphere of Garcia Baker’s office lacks the stuffy formality typical of North American politics. Government officials and ordinary citizens mingle in the hallway outside his open door and spill into the office itself. Garcia Baker prefers to talk while standing or sitting on the large sofa in one corner of the room while his desk sits idly against a back wall.

When asked about the President of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanos, Baker’s face contorts as though tasting a bitter lemon. “[Bolanos] has not given one dollar to implement Law 445,” Baker complains. “It is part of the central government’s strategy. They didn’t like the law, so they won’t give the money needed to enforce it.”

Baker believes the solution to the Wasa King situation hinges on the enforcement of the law. But the Bolanos government, he contends, has little incentive to enforce a law that would make it harder for them to herd land-seeking Mestizos into the RAAN. The scarcity of land in the country has created a huge population of landless Mestizo’s roaming the Pacific countryside in desperation, and the government simply does not know what to do with them. The Nicaraguan government would ordinarily never have given the indigenous people of RAAN such powers, says Baker. But the law was passed under political pressure stemming from a corruption scandal involving former president Arnoldo Aleman. “Once Bolanos got into power, he couldn’t believe that such a law had passed, but it did, and he couldn’t do anything about it.”

Garcia Baker seems neither to know nor care where the Mestizos end up. “They’re not from here,” he says. “So they are not our problem.” Rather, Baker has made it his mission to demarcate all of his region’s land in order to grant legal claims to the indigenous people. Once that happens, the protections of Law 445 will begin to take effect. “We’re going map our own land,” Garcia Baker says, “even if Bolanos won’t send us a cent.”

Diplaced Mestizo farmers compete for land and raise the ire of RAAN locals.

The Displaced as Displacers

The massive influx of Mestizos into the RAAN has made them the largest single group in the region — and the least popular. But even though the locals see them as aggressive invaders, the migrants claim to be no less victims of displacement than the indigenous peoples resisting them.

Despite their numbers, Mestizo farmers have little representation in the government. Newly arrived Mestizos are largely uneducated, very poor, and in contrast to the Miskitus, politically unorganized. Many end up razing the forest for cattle fields because the crops of beans and corn that they grew on the Pacific side are not suited to the rainforest’s wet climate.

In Susun, a Mestizo settlement 20 kilometers outside Wasa King, Mayor Noel Palacio Garcia Delgado gathers together a group of Mestizos who have recently arrived in the RAAN. They are thin, their clothes are worn, and their rotting teeth lack the silver caps that more prosperous farmers display. Two women, one with a newborn, and eight men sit before Delgado. They are slow to answer questions, finding it hard to comprehend the level of hatred that the Mayangna in Wasa King feel for them.

“We don’t know where else to go,” says Pedro Antonio Espinoza, a 48-year-old father of nine. “Our lands [on the Pacific side] have all dried up, and we need to feed ourselves. If the don’t want us here, then just tell us where we should go.”

Espinoza bows his head and looks to the floor. When the threat of Mayangna violence is brought up, he speaks while still looking down: “We are worried,” Espinoza says, slowly looking up. “They are the ones that have the guns.”

Miro Brcic provided translation help. The writer would like to thank Tom and Lois McGrail for their contributions, which made this article possible.

STORY INDEX

PLACES >

The Autonomous Regions of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast
URL: http://www.yorku.ca/cerlac/URACCAN/Coast.html

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS ISSUES >

The Nicaragua Network
URL: http://www.nicanet.org/archive.php

Mayanna People’s Statement on Proposed Sustainable Development Project in Nicaragua

URL: http://nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9704/0086.html

”Land Grab In Nicaragua,” commentary by Bill Weinberg, Toward Freedom, 1998
URL: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/229.html

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Interviews

Conversations on The Souls of Black Folk

An interview with Rebecca Carroll concerning her collection of essays, Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls.


Recently InTheFray Contributing Writer Jairus Grove spoke with Rebecca Carroll about Saving the Race, The Souls of Black Folk, and the role that race plays in our world.

The interviewer: Jairus Victor Grove, InTheFray Contributing Writer
The interviewee:Rebecca Carroll, editor/author of Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls.

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s review of Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls, click here.

The diversity of experiences expressed in this book alone calls into question the coherence of ideas like black identity or black community. What political utility do you think these concepts have after your engagement with this project?

I think the idea of a “political utility” in the context of race is counterproductive — and in terms of the coherence of an idea like black identity or black community, neither is an idea so much as a lived experience; an experience that can be defined and internalized individually as one is inclined to do so.

The recent rise to prominence of black conservatives such as Condoleeza Rice, Ward Connelly, and Clarence Thomas seems to reflect a Republican agenda to divide traditionally Democratic and progressive communities, both Black and Hispanic. Do you believe blackness is intrinsically political? If so, how do we keep race political?

If by political you mean involvement with government matters and larger social cause concerns, I don’t believe blackness is any more intrinsically political than human nature.

There is a definitive moment in your own narrative where you say that you decided or felt the conviction that you were a black woman. In our increasingly hybrid times, claims to identity require some history or heritage to be sacrificed or at least underplayed. Do you think the decision to elevate your blackness to the forefront of your own hybrid identity would have been different or more difficult if your other racial heritage was also marginalized, say, Hispanic or Arabic?

No, if anything I think it would have been easier — there isn’t the same stark contrast and opposition between blacks and Hispanics/Arabs as there is between blacks and whites.

Although this book makes a convincing and complex case for the necessity of blackness as at least a way of thinking through an existence marked by skin color and the trauma of survival, what is next? Too often the imagination of a world without race is simply a world of whiteness. Is it time to imagine what is to come after race?  If so, do you have any ideas resulting from this work particularly your conversations with LeAlan Jones and others who make reference to the need to begin imagining what a world without race looks like?

I don’t think LeAlan was suggesting a world without race, but rather a world in which race was more interconnected, more blurred, better understood, and less blatantly segregated which, progress being as it may, is still what it is. So no, I don’t think we need to begin imagining what a world without race looks like; I think we need to start imagining what a world WITH race looks like.

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s review of Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls, click here.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTORS >

The interviewer
Jairus Victor Grove, InTheFray Contributing Writer

The interviewee
Rebecca Carroll, Editor, The Independent Film and Video Monthly.

MARKETPLACE >
(A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the link below is used.)

Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=17-0767916190-0

The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1930097131-0  

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

Lives lived, lessons learned

A century after W.E.B. Du Bois penned The Souls of Black Folks, Rebecca Carroll illuminates just how much the renowned civil rights leader continues to influence modern notions of citizenship and blackness.


To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll, click here.

Following a series of uninspired presidential and vice presidential debates, award-winning narrative nonfiction writer, editor, and interviewer Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls reminds us that hope is not yet lost. The United States is still home to a few brave individuals with vision. Unlike many academic collections on W.E.B. Du Bois, Saving the Race brings together the inheritors of the civil rights movement and a number of artists and writers who represent a diverse array of defiant voices.

The inspiration of this collection was the 100 anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, Du Bois’ most widely read text explicates his philosophical and political aspirations for the black race, situating himself in almost total opposition to the “separate but equal” and industrial education focus of Booker T. Washington.  As Du Bois argued in chapter 3 of The Souls of Black Folk, Washington’s compromise asked black people to give up:

First, political power. Second, insistence on civil rights. Third, higher education of Negro youth — and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

It was this hallmark unwavering disdain for compromise in the area of excellence and achievement for African Americans that alienated many of Washington’s followers and defined Du Bois as a visionary leader and thinker. Equally infamous was the air of elitism that frequently characterized Du Bois’ tone regarding the value of higher education. Most accounts of Du Bois describe a cold and introverted man, who, although well-mannered, was only conversant with those he considered his equals.

Du Bois’ stepson David G. Du Bois described him as “basically a shy person” who did not like to interact with those to whom he was not already close. When David Du Bois’ mother planned dinner parties, David recalls, “My mother did not invite people over with whom Du Bois did not feel relaxed and comfortable.” Cultural critic and author of Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk Stanley Crouch goes so far as to argue that eventually “white people drove Du Bois crazy” after a lifetime of fighting against narrow-mindedness, causing him to break with the mainstream efforts of the NAACP.

Despite his penchant for alienating those he met, Du Bois’ intellect and rigorous scholarship are unquestionable. As a student he pursued and completed a Ph.D. from Harvard University that included study at the prestigious University of Berlin. Despite an impressive academic career for any historical period, his intellectual pursuit was at times a refuge from the intolerable world of racial bias and violent exclusion. As Du Bois once remarked, “I was in Harvard but not of it.”

Today, 101 years later, New York University Law Professor Derrick Bell describes his own tenure at Harvard before he quit in protest over low minority employment, in terms starkly congruent with Du Bois’. As Professor Bell writes in his segment of Saving the Race, “Very few black folk are able to get totally beyond presumption of incompetence. The fact is that those who are even modestly welcome in certain academic circles are the most welcomed they will ever be.” This recognition of African American achievement, tempered by the reality of contemporary more and less subtle forms of post civil rights racism, typify Carroll’s collection.

Comprised of the reflections of African Americans ranging from civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr., to jazz musician and Grammy-nominated composer Terrance Blanchard, Carroll’s collection is tied together by the editor/author’s own compelling autobiography. Lacking the self-indulgence typical of many auto-narratives concerning identity, Carroll unflinchingly describes her intellectual and emotional movement from rural New Hampshire, where she was raised by white adopted parents, to an eyes-wide-open relationship with the complexities and uncertainties of her black history and identity. Carroll’s own struggle to forge an identity that could provide her with a site for empowerment while also ensuring her a sense of authenticity lies at the heart of what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”  

Although hybridity is a popular topic of academic discussion, these dialogues often disregard the traumatic and difficult growth experienced by real people who do not easily fit into the rigid categories of contemporary identity politics. What Du Bois and Carroll share and contribute to this discussion is a profound sense of what it means to be out of place. Like Du Bois, Carroll grew up in a mostly white, Northeastern town. Neither scholar describes overt racism in their childhood, instead describing a sense of loss and alienation that their privileged education provided no vocabulary for discussing. In the most common, yet telling, example, Carroll recalls how it felt to admired but never asked out on dates and how she was often complemented for only being cosmetically black.  

Carroll’s multifaceted story, then, foregrounds the disparate and even opposing accounts of W.E.B. Du Bois and his continuing relevance to a socio-political world that still cannot confront how profoundly the history of the United States of America is the history of “the race problem.” The taboo of discussing race in the United States not only impoverishes our understanding of where we come from; it also erases a rich history of hope and political commitment that has driven that history.

It is this connection between history and politics that demands that we read Saving the Race alongside Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. If we were to develop a cannon of American literature that was truly representative of our collective experience for high schools and universities, the absence of Du Bois’ still eminent work would do a grave injustice to the interests of democratic culture. Former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, for instance, conjures this spirit in her contribution writing:

Right now, we’re at a point of dissent — dissent about globalization, opposition to racism, opposition to forms of neocolonialism, opposition to war … And I have to have hope in that. What’s the alternative? I could say, “Oh, I give up. The pigs have the right way. There is no alternative.” But that’s totally insane. The world that is being presented to us right now is a world based on genocide, ecocide, and homicide; that’s unacceptable. To choose it is to choose your own destruction, and since I’m not self-destructive, I have to maintain hope in an alternative … Let’s clarify that you can rethink and transform how you view the world. Let’s clarify that the world could be entirely different.

A century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Cleaver and the others who join Du Bois’ legacy renew the intellectual and political pursuit of seemingly impossible demands for justice and equality, demonstrating that The Souls of Black Folk still testifies to an outspoken commitment to causes often derided as doomed or unrealistic. By reminding us of the lasting influence — and relevance — of Du Bois on social and racial justice, then, Carroll’s project provides a context for beginning to understand the indispensable role of The Souls of Black Folk in shaping modern America.  

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll concerning Saving the Race, click here.

STORY INDEX

INTERVIEWS >

National Public Radio’s compilation of interviews and responses to the 100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1384569  

HISTORY >

The W.E.B. Du Bois Learning Center
URL: http://www.duboislc.org

MARKETPLACE >
(A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the link below is used.)

Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0767916190

The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1930097131

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

A 20/20 vision

2004 Best of Guest Columns (tie)

All I can do to cope with the fear of another Bush victory is entertain the political fantasies dancing in my head.


An endless capacity for fact-free fantasy allows President Bush to look at the daily disaster that he has created in Iraq and somehow remain optimistic. So, maybe a little fantasy will help me get through the state of angst that has seized me and won’t let go until, at the earliest, the evening of November 2.

Why do I need fantasy? Why am I taking this election so personally? Why is it that the anxiety level ratchets up with every turn in the polls, every debate, and every piece of news? It’s simple: There’s so much at stake.

If Bush wins this election, despite the disastrous mess he has made of the economy and the world, it will mark the death of accountability in America. It will demonstrate for all future candidates that, no matter how badly a president screws up, the incumbent’s remorseless application of fear, fear, and more fear will carry the day.

If we elect a president who talks endlessly of freedom, but works tirelessly to stifle the freedom to oppose his policies, we can expect more and more repression after the next terrorist attack in America. The starkest warning of this danger came from General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq and later said in a magazine interview that another major terrorist attack could “cause our own population to question our own Constitution and begin to militarize our country to avoid a repeat of another mass-casualty-producing event.”

If we choose this sadly inadequate man simply because we are afraid not to, it will prove conclusively that the American electorate simply does not read or pay attention. If we show that we’d prefer a president who seems like a good drinking buddy, over one who witnessed firsthand the evil of war and then spoke out against it, we will give the world a searing insight into our vacant souls. If we choose a leader who refuses to read, over one who can actually think critically, there’s not much hope for our republic.

In the face of these hideous realities, a few fantasies seem like a suitable option for maintaining my sanity.

* * *

It is election night. John Kerry has defeated Bush so convincingly that even the usual Republican dirty tricks at the polling place fail to change the result. This time, no legion of slimy Republican lawyers can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It’s over. The frat-boy presidency is toast. Near tears, Bush thinks briefly about a military coup that overturns the election and restores him to power. But the election results near major American military posts have made it clear that there will be no armies marching to reinstall the AWOL president. In the limousine from the White House to the inauguration next January, he will have to sit, short and sullen and petulant, next to the tall and commanding new president.

Sitting with him in the residence at the White House, his silver-haired mother, Barbara, is not weepy. She is furious. Her useless son, who caused her endless embarrassment in his boozing days, has humiliated her once again. In the bitter recesses of her heart, where compassion chokes and grudges grow, she knows the horrible truth: For only the second time in the history of the republic, the first time since John Quincy Adams suffered a bitter defeat in the election of 1828, a woman enters the annals as both the wife and the mother of a rejected, one-term president. In fact, Abigail Adams had it easier: She saw her husband’s defeat, but a merciful death spared her the humiliation of watching her son lose, too. Unable to stifle her rage, Barbara Bush administers to her wayward child a ferocious tongue-lashing that makes the Leader of the Free World cringe.

* * *

It is 2006. Bush has lived through months of painful seclusion. He watched helplessly as President John F. Kerry led America to capture Osama bin Laden and put him on trial. He cringed sulked as Kerry skillfully ended America’s ill-conceived presence in Iraq — an achievement that cruelly eluded Bush. Now, the former president has decided to take the same route as John Quincy Adams by running for a seat in the House of Representatives. His friends in Crawford will surely not abandon him. In a defiantly folksy speech in May, admitting no errors during his presidency and still expressing confidence that weapons of mass destruction will soon be found in Iraq, Bush says he’s running for Congress.

On election night five months later, as Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress, in a landmark election that will permanently make the Republicans an impotent minority party, Bush loses his second straight election. It isn’t even close. His mother screams at him again.

* * *

It is a cold January day in 2021. America is focusing on the temporary stands outside the Capitol, for the inauguration of the third consecutive Democratic president. After eight solid years of serving under President John Edwards as the first African American vice president, and helping to broker the Amman accords that have finally brought peace to the Middle East, Barack Obama places his left hand on a worn Bible, raises his right hand, and faces Lani Guinier, the first African American Chief Justice of the United States. As Guinier leads him through the oath prescribed in the Constitution, Obama speaks the words loudly and crisply. “Congratulations, Mr. President,” Guinier says. “Thank you, Madame Chief Justice,” he says. Rather than give her the usual formal handshake, the new president draws the chief justice into a bear-like hug, then turns to the podium to deliver his inaugural address.

Obama brings to the presidency breathtaking intellectual and rhetorical gifts, plus a biography of cinematic sweep. In 1961, the year John F. Kennedy became president, Obama was born in Hawaii, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother from Kansas. Obama’s white grandparents had loved him deeply, but he learned, painfully, that his grandmother could still be afraid of a black panhandler. His Kenyan grandfather had been a Muslim and a tribal healer. Obama had struggled to live authentically as a young black man, had grown to maturity in Indonesia, New York, Cambridge and Chicago, had become the first African-American to become president of the Harvard Law Review, and had written about it all in a lyrical literary memoir. In 2004, he easily won a seat in the United States Senate, cruised to a second term in 2010, and joined the Edwards ticket in 2012. Finally, running on his own, Obama scored a landslide victory, carrying even parts of the South where a black president was once merely a nightmare. Left defeated, the aging Florida senator, Jeb Bush, in his last-hurrah run, had failed to salvage the dignity of the Bush family.

In the campaign of 2020, Obama had called for 20/20 vision. He often spoke of his grandfather the medicine man, and called for a national healing of the scars of racial hatred — the nation’s original sin. Choosing not to ignore the solidly Republican South, Obama had campaigned in backwoods bastions of racism where black men had been lynched for little more than lack of deference to their white neighbors. His near-miraculous ease with white southern crowds had won them over.

Now, in an inaugural speech that will be quoted in rhetoric classes for generations to come, President Obama is taking office in a time filled with bright promise, prosperity and peace. At this moment, to those listening to Obama, the long-ago disaster of Bush’s one-term presidency seems little more than an unpleasant dream.“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Fear(less) in Bogotá

BEST OF THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (SO FAR)

A transnational romance with a society shrouded in paranoia.


 

We are walking a rugged dirt trail up a steep forested mountain at 8,500 feet. With my sea-level lungs, I lag behind the group as my girlfriend, Anamaria, her father, and several friends jaunt ahead up the hill. Hoping that months at Bogotá’s altitude have acclimatized me a bit, I muster my energy and try to catch up with the rest.

“Hey!” I say in my best breathless Spanish.

The group pauses as I come up the path, and Anamaria’s father, Luis Alfonso, flashes his mischievous, toothy grin.

“Wait for the Gringo!” I gasp.

Before he can tease me with one of his trademark jokes, we are interrupted by the crack of a rifle shot.

The sound echoes and rumbles as we doubtfully consider the forest around us. The unstated question hangs in the air: Should we abandon our Sunday morning walk and head back down to the city? I’ve heard that there is a group of soldiers nearby, but I’m not reassured. Luis Alfonso scratches his chin. “If the army is shooting at things, that’s a sign of order. Let’s keep on going!” And off he goes, followed happily by Anamaria and our friends.

I can’t help but laugh. Gunshots are no more common in my experience of Bogotá than they were in the United States. But something tells me that interpreting gunshots as a sign of order and security is a distinctly Colombian behavior. It’s hard to decide if it constitutes denial or simply a kind of psychic self-preservation, but for some reason I’m completely happy to continue up the mountain, savoring the anticipation of a majestic view.

 

 

Clear and present paranoia

It can safely be said that Colombia holds a certain horror for people from the United States, if not the whole world. Non-Colombians can hardly be blamed for the negative impression, considering the information they get. One need look no further than Hollywood, which has produced such informative travelogues such as Collateral Damage (Schwarzenegger battles Colombian terrorists), XXX (Vin Diesel spends a scene or two battling Colombian guerillas), and Clear and Present Danger (Harrison Ford battles Colombian narcoterrorists). The world-famous Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, although dead 10 years, also left us a rich legacy of imagery with which to envision Colombia: the corpses of politicians, judges, and journalists gunned down in the streets by $20 assassins, car bombs exploding right and left in Bogotá, half the government on the take and the other half brought to its knees by the power and caprice of a single criminal megalomaniac.

And that’s even without mentioning the 40-year-old civil conflict (or is it 60 years old? One hundred?), in which a tangle of leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and government forces fight among themselves, killing and displacing thousands of civilians every year. Funded in large part by the appetite for cocaine in the United States and Europe, this once-revolutionary struggle has long since been drained of its ideology, and seems doomed to continue pointlessly for all time.

For this reason, Colombia (or “Columbia,” as it is often misspelled in the United States) is irresistible to foreign news media, who can count on the country’s “widespread violence” or “war-torn” nature to excite the audience. (Covering all bases, NPR host Tavis Smiley once even concluded a segment on the country with the phrase “war-, drug-, and assassin-torn Colombia.”) If the media isn’t hair-raising enough, one can read the State Department’s online travel advisory: the deceptively dispassionate tone puts a special shine on terms such as “extremely violent” and “risky.”

So it was difficult for me not to worry a reasonable amount in the weeks leading up to my move south to live with Anamaria. Even the most uninformed acquaintances, upon learning of my plans, would in solemn voices offer counsel along the lines of, “Whoa, man. Be careful down there.” It didn’t help when I emailed a journalist friend in Bogotá to ask for his perspective on safety in Colombia. In his reply, he reflected, “Well, I have been kidnapped, shot at (too many times to count), and nearly blown up by a car bomb, motorcycle bomb, and another smaller bomb. So, take that into consideration.” I was unclear how I could take his advice “into consideration” and still go, so I decided to ignore it. After all, I was moving to South America for love, and a little bit of danger just made buying the ticket more exciting.

Once the plane landed in Bogotá, though, my mind began to fizz with paranoia. I actually laughed out loud at myself but was unable to quell the rising tide of dark fantasies. What were my chances of getting kidnapped? And the friendly passengers around me … surely they were drug mules returning from New York? I found it hard to believe that I had somehow actually ended up in this country, which I surely would never have visited were it not for my unfortunate love for one of its citizens.

 

 

The charms of a Third World kaleidoscope

But after nine months in Bogotá, I am yet unkidnapped. My fears having gone unrealized, I am now a vocal proponent of the city. It’s a wonderful place. The same goes for Cartagena, for Montería and the Caribbean coast, and (from what I hear) even for Medellín, former home of the legendary Pablo Escobar. It turns out that large tracts of this country simply fail to live up to the Colombian rep.

Bogotá, for one thing, is an exciting, diverse, cosmopolitan, challenging city, a metropolis of 8 million, steadily sprawling across its high mountain plateau. It is less a cauldron of Latin American violence than a bewildering mix of contrasts. From the luxurious gated communities in the northern areas of the city, you can drive 40 minutes south to find poor barrios with mud streets and shacks made of corrugated tin.

The very streets reflect the spectrum defined by those two poles. Roads are shared by late-model luxury sedans and sport utility vehicles, tiny two-door economy cars, taxis both shining and crumbling, a swarm of mopeds and motorcycles, the occasional horse cart, and the pushcarts of “recyclers,” piled with cardboard and scrap metal. There is also a multitude of privately owned buses that screech to a stop any time pedestrians hail them. Musicians and street performers continually ply the buses and intersections. On any given bus ride, you may be treated (or subjected) to people playing guitars, pan pipes, drums, even full-size harps, or hawking candies, peanuts, pens and pencils, books, maps, or any other item that can be carried on to a bus. At intersections, jugglers, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, and beggars of all ages perform and plead before cars stopped at traffic lights.

It was only a day or two before the last of my misconceptions evaporated, leaving only delight at this urban kaleidoscope. And the diversity goes beyond the experience of the streets. Colombia is a nation obsessed with its regional styles of music, food, and climate. To turn on the radio or choose a dance club is always to find something different: the accordion-laced laments of Vallenato, the ever-present Salsa, Rock en Español (Spanish rock), the stomping cowboy dance songs from the eastern plains, the African rhythms of the coastal north and west, and every kind of imported pop, hip hop, rock, and reggae.

There is a lot more growing in Colombia than cocaine. The country is, acre for acre, the most biodiverse nation on the planet, heir to a lush collection of distinct ecosystems and their unique flora and fauna. I can’t even visit the supermarket without lingering in the produce section, fascinated by stacks of bizarre fruits with a dizzying array of names and tastes: feijoia (something like a prehistoric kiwi), guanabana (tastes like coconut crossed with pineapple, looks like a spiky, green football), curuba (indescribable), granadilla, tomate de arbol, nispero, zapote … each of which is almost as unexotic here as an apple or a watermelon in the United States. These specimens are accompanied by great quantities of limes, mangoes, passionfruit, cantaloupes, bananas, and so on. You can order four or five of these fruits as fresh juice (made on the spot) in any halfway decent restaurant, confirming Colombia as the world’s most advanced civilization in terms of juice. A lack of fresh feijoa or guanabana juice in a restaurant is almost enough to make diners walk out.

 

The good life

So life is evidently very good here. But at a certain point, I started to wonder at the disconnect between the quality of life I was experiencing and the undeniable problems facing the country. I found that a few minutes skimming the newspaper headlines were enough to keep me more up to date on Colombia’s problems than most of my Colombian friends. For instance, on the night of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas’ 40th anniversary, the police intercepted a one-ton truck bomb intended to destroy a long tunnel beneath the mountains southeast of Bogotá. It was the kind of news that in the United States would have produced days of screaming headlines. But I have Colombian friends who have never heard of the incident, and are happy to leave it that way.

I don’t question their attitude openly. This is partly because it seems impolite for a foreigner to rub a country’s troubles in the face of its people. I also don’t want to be seen as the paranoid gringo. An American who is even minimally preoccupied with safety and security in Colombia may never escape the stereotype of his countrymen: lots of money, lots of fear, and little common sense. It is a stereotype reinforced by the U.S. embassy here, which warns its citizens not to frequent the popular restaurant and club areas of north Bogotá, for fear of the guerilla bombings that are surely to come.

Accordingly, I avoid harping on the subjects of war, drugs, or terror in Colombia. And this is easy to do, since Colombia’s narcoterrorists, guerillas, and cheap assassins are conspicuously absent from my daily life. Thus I participate in a kind of collective denial about violence and injustice here.

The evidence is there for those who want to see it. Families displaced by violence in the countryside beg at car windows in the streets of north Bogotá. And there are obvious and overwhelming differences in wealth and skin color between the powerful and the powerless in Colombia. While it may take a few society dinners to notice that many of the elite here are as white-skinned (if not as fair-haired) as any gringo, a single afternoon’s drive through downtown Bogotá is enough to see that strongly indigenous or African features correspond tightly to economic and social disadvantage. Even discounting racial factors, Colombia is deeply classist: breathtaking economic inequality is a hallmark of the country’s history, politics, and daily life. It almost makes you admit that the guerillas might have had a point when they started their rebellion.

 

Blissful denial

Although Colombia’s reputation in the world is certainly undeserved, there are also plenty of unsavory things most Colombians just don’t want to think about. On the inside walls of buses, which are decorated according to the driver’s idiosyncratic tastes, I have seen decals that read, “Here we don’t talk about the situation. Here we’re good, and getting better!” Perhaps this forced optimism is what happens after 40 years of intractable conflict. Perhaps it’s just pride.

Either way, it’s more than a facile attitude confined to the living rooms of posh Bogotá high-rises. Even taxi drivers complain about Colombia’s unfair reputation, and then rhapsodize about the fruit, the music, and the women. Denial here is not so much a deliberate self-deception as it is an expression of patriotism and a determination to enjoy life. In Colombia, I have learned that even a society fraught with social injustice and protracted civil war can for some be an excellent place to live. And Colombians are a people determined to exploit this fact to its fullest.

In spite of this pervasive positive spirit, however, it would be untrue to say nobody in Bogotá ever worries. Especially among the upper classes, fear expresses itself in the rituals of everyday life: 24-hour doormen who sit behind presumably bulletproof glass. Security personnel who peek into the purses and backpacks of shoppers entering upscale malls. Bomb-sniffing dogs at the entrance of underground parking garages. The mundane sight of military police armed with machine guns standing outside “important” residences. Most of all, fear generates myths and rumors. People in northern Bogotá are afraid of the southern side of their own city. The barrio known as Ciudad Bolívar, for instance, occupies a similar place in the imagination of Bogotá’s citizens as Colombia does in the minds of North Americans: an almost legendary place full of criminals and violence, which only a fool would enter. This might merely be urban folklore, told to frighten Colombian children. But in the case of Ciudad Bolívar, at least, I’m not interested in finding out.

Closer to home, the local variety of fear is usually once-removed. Rumors often circulate about friends-of-friends who have been robbed or attacked. (In the absence of an immediate guerilla threat here in Bogotá, common crime is the main stimulus for worry.) The hillside behind our well-off northern barrio of Rosales in particular draws local concern. A verdant forest crowned with spectacular ridges, its steep paths offer a perfect opportunity to exercise and escape the pollution of the city below. But mention that you enjoy this hill, and you will invariably hear stories about those who have been robbed, raped, or even killed on the mountain. For this reason, everyone agrees, you should only walk there “when it’s safe,” which tends to mean weekend mornings. Presumably that’s when the bad people sleep.

The potential dangers of mountainside walks have been the source of some tension in my pan-American romance, but I’m often reminded that it’s mainly my problem. Anamaria and her father, though deeply good-natured, are that stripe of defiant Bogotanians who consider any change of behavior on the grounds of safety a sign of paranoia and weakness. My repeated suggestions, for instance, that we at least stick together in a group while on the mountain, are often met with rolling eyes and the implication that this is tantamount to staying home and hiding in the closet. And although everyone agrees that we should hike the mountain “only when it’s safe,” this rarely translates into any actual change in behavior. After all, that would be giving in to fear.

To a certain degree, I’ve begun to adopt this attitude myself. If my options are either to be branded a scared gringo or simply to enjoy all that Bogotá and its people have to offer, I choose the latter. This is why, when Anamaria’s father creatively interprets the sound of a gunshot as a sign of safety and security, I’m pretty much content to continue up the mountain.

At the top, the path splits in several directions, and we follow it to the left along a pine-forested ridge that opens onto a lush gully to the right. Scrambling up some rocks, we arrive at our destination, hundreds of feet above the city. The ridge ends in a large knobby outcropping, topped by a small plateau from which we can see almost everything. A giant cross and a statue of the Virgin Mary stand here, gazing out over the unbelievable view: The Andean plateau of Bogotá stretches away to the distance, blanketed everywhere with buildings and roads, humming with the lives of 8 million people. For a moment, I can’t quite remember why everyone is so scared of Colombia.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > COLOMBIA

Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program
URL: http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/index.htm

ReVista (Harvard Review of Latin America) issue on Colombia
URL: http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/publications/revista/colombia/tcontents.html

El Tiempo (Colombian national newspaper — in Spanish)
URL: http://www.eltiempo.com.co

Semana (Colombian national magazine — in Spanish)
URL: http://www.semana.com.co

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Photo Essays

Faces in a rice paddy

Neither the landscape nor the people in North Vietnam appeared to have suffered through ten years of war.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

Neither the landscape nor the people in North Vietnam appeared to have suffered through ten years of war. The following images were taken during a month-long journey following the path of the Red River from Hanoi to Kan Cau, a Chinese border village.

The photographs illustrate a return to an extreme fundamental way of life. From the coal workers on the river bank to the land owners near Ninh Binh to the women selling produce in the Hanoi market to the colorful Hmong tribe in the far north, the Vietnamese have kept their heritage and pride using only what the land has to offer.

Artist Statement

As an artist, I aim to capture emotions portrayed in the human face. Born and raised in Israel, I have witnessed extensive suffering and tragic events since childhood. During my mandatory military service, I vowed to make peace my main objective in life.

I chose Vietnam for the diversity it provides. Fifty-four ethnic groups have maintained traditions, identities and peace after two decades of war. The Vietnamese have created a harmonious culture that has woven its ethnicity into a beautiful, multicolored, multi-cultural quilt.

Traditional customs relating to the essential needs of any individual and community are the strength and security within their quilt and their country. My goal is to produce work that inspires peace as the Vietnamese were an inspiration to me. Although, we are of many different cultures, races, religions and nationalities, there are elements that tie us together.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

The writer and photographer
Uzi Ashkenazi, InTheFray.com Contributor

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Rather troubling

Recent efforts to cover the “news” — even that which isn’t fit to print — have lent credence to, rather than drawn into question, political spin. Just ask CBS news anchor Dan Rather.


September was a bad month to be a liberal journalist. Yeah, I said it. I’m a liberal, and I’m a journalist. But that doesn’t mean I have any less of a beef with Dan Rather.

Who knows what Rather — CBS’s square-headed, monotone Franken-anchor — was thinking when he reported a story about President Bush’s National Guard service that was based on forged documents. He didn’t help matters when he continued to defend his reporting in the face of mounting evidence that the documents were bogus. Was he practicing the newly fashionable “advocate journalism,” or was he just lazy and gullible? I’m guessing it’s some from column A, some from column B. But we’ll never really know if Rather had nefarious intentions. What is clear is that he didn’t do journalism — or journalists — any favors.

Naturally, the Rather retraction got plenty of play on Fox News, where for weeks, everyone took turns scolding and shaming CBS, and speculating that the story had been planted by the Kerry campaign. (As if Fox — the research and publicity arm of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth — is somehow innocent of advocate journalism.)

To Sean Hannity and company, the Rather episode is just further proof of the lengths the liberal media will go to bring down the president. And it’s exactly what they need to justify their existence as a partisan news organization — Fox: the first line of defense against all the liberal wieners making stuff up about our fearless, decisive Commander-in-Chief.

As a corollary to the accidental favor he did for Fox News, Rather did the rest of the journalistic community a colossal disservice. It’s been a bad few weeks for the media, but in truth, it’s been a worse few years. Not only have we had the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass business, but since the 2000 elections and September 11, mainstream news outlets have been all too focused on journalism’s dangerous new goal: balance. And Rather’s mistake is not likely to help reverse the trend.

In the effort to appear non-partisan, the mainstream media has abandoned analysis as an integral part of newsgathering, replacing it with a fragile, postmodern concept of “balance,” which assumes that no one is right and no one is wrong, so everyone should get their say. The result is that the media is no longer a filter, as it should be, but a conduit — a hands-off middleman between politics and the people, parroting each party’s talking points.

I’m not talking about the balance Fox News purports to provide, balancing the supposed liberal media with ultra-conservative rant. I’m talking about the impulse that has taken over the press to give equal time to the loony Left and the ridiculous Right, instead of just shooting straight.

Politicians are generally full of shit — our job as journalists should be to cut through it, not garnish it with a sprig of parsley and serve it to our readers. Sometimes the Left is right (Swift Boat Veterans), and sometimes the Right is right (Kerry changes his mind). The mainstream media needs to focus less on getting it balanced and more on getting it right.

The first step is regaining the public’s trust. And incidents like the Rather retraction aren’t helping.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: