During my cab ride home from the airport yesterday, the cab driver asked if I preferred to listen to music or the news. When I chose the middle ground, telling him that either one was fine with me, he selected something about as far from the center as possible: Rush Limbaugh.
After a while, I think I probably just tuned Rush out since I don’t remember much of what he said after a certain point. But for the first three minutes of so that I was graced with his radio show, I was reminded that everything coming out of the mouths of political commentators is just that: political.
During this particular episode of bashing-of-all-who-lean-further-left-than-the-talk-show-host, Limbaugh was ranting about the hoopla over the photos of Iraqis being tortured by Western solidiers. According to Limbaugh, everyone is overreacting and the Iraqis are “getting what they deserve.” That is, American soldiers have had to die and suffer in Iraq, so it’s only fitting that Iraqis have to pay their dues for this suffering.
Am I the only one that finds this logic perplexing? Yes, American soldiers have died and suffered in Iraq. Not all — or even most — of those deaths are the result of being tortured by the Iraqi people. Much of the blame could arguably be attributed to the U.S. and British governments that sent them to Iraq in the first place to wage a war and find those elusive weapons of mass destruction.
This isn’t to say that no Western soldiers have died at the hands of Iraqi militants, but Limbaugh’s “they got what they deserved” ignores a crucial difference. U.S. and British soldiers have been torturing Iraqis indiscriminately, stripping them of their humanity, when in fact these soldiers went over to Iraq in the name of “securing freedom” — for the Iraqi people. But by Limbaugh’s double-standard, freedom need only be secured for American soldiers to do whatever is necessary to to ensure Western dominance over the Arab world — even if that means torturing (rather than killing them with one shot) them in the most grotesque and inhumane of ways. It’s a bit frightening to say the least.
But I digress … Limbaugh continued on to say that this is clearly an isolated incident (though he never cites any evidence to support that claim) that has been concocted by so-called liberals to defeat Bush at the polls. That is, Limbaugh says that the circulation of these images and accounts of torture in Iraq is nothing more than a political ploy, that images of Iraqis are being used by Bush’s political opponents for their own ends. One can’t deny that there may be some political fallout from this scandal. But to dismiss these accounts of torture as nothing more than an election year scheme enables Limbaugh to dismiss his own culpability in fueling the politicization of this human rights scandal. (He does after all reduce the scandal to politics by dismissing the scandal as a means to villify so-called liberals).
Such politicization also ignores a crucial component of this debate: the Iraqis who have allegedly been tortured. Whether this is actually an isolated incident is unclear — despite Limbaugh’s claims to the contrary. Even if these incidents are isolated, that doesn’t make them any less distressing.
Contrary to Limbaugh’s assertion that we should stop overreacting to this “isolated” incident, we should use this as an opportunity to raise questions — not just as to whether this incident is in fact isolated, but also about how we position ourselves in relation to both the tortured and torturers.
It’s easy to dismiss the images of torture and to say that these people “got what they deserved” when you live comfortably, thousands of miles away. Limbaugh and many other conservative demagogues would likely dismiss this criticism of their privilege and objectification of Iraqi suffering as par for the course — or what Madeline Albright once termed “collateral damage.” But with the exception of Joseph Stalin, who ordered the death of his own son in the gulags, I can’t imagine that Limbaugh or anyone else who considered him- or herself human would say that the Iraqis “got what they deserved,” that this was mere “collateral damage” and chalk it all up to election year politics if they lived in Iraq, or if they or someone they loved or knew was subjected to such torture.
This doesn’t mean that the circulation of these images isn’t political or that politics don’t have any relevance to international relations and conflicts. But the reduction of this scandal to wins and losses for individual candidates and parties dismisses the possibility that the political can and should be something much larger and much more universal than the “personal” politics of Washington’s politicians implies. It dismisses a politics of compassion, which is something much more fundamental than the polling booth and congressional action.
With this in mind, perhaps it is time for political commentators of all political persuasions to refuse to understand humanity, suffering, and the events that deeply impact people’s lives to political capital, elections, win, lose, or draw. After all, winning and losing isn’t just a matter of who resides in the White House; it’s also a matter of life and death. Just ask the people of Iraq.
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Whites-only money in a whites-only town
In of the most insultingly timed events in recent memory, the whites-only town of Orania, in South Africa, has leased its own whites-only currency two days after the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid.
The new currency, dubbed the “ora,” can only be spent in the small town of Orania, where its 600 or so white residents have an agriculturally based economy.
While the ostensible reason that the residents of Orania flocked to the small town was to escape the violence and the crime that plagues South Africa, it is doubtful that security was the motivating factor for their migration to Orania, and the legacy of apartheid is alive and well in the town; the grandson of Henrik Vorwoerd, who designed the program of apartheid, currently lives in Orania.
In a baffling defense of the notion of white supremacy, Eleanor Lombard, a town spokesman, declared: “South African society is like a fruit salad – if I am allowed to be whatever I am – a banana, an apple or whatever – I can add to the flavour … If I am all squashed up, I cannot contribute.” In Lombard’s explanation, the purpose of establishing this currency is to make the community increasingly self-sufficient.
The notion of a racially exclusive community is shameful, demeaning, and repellent. That these individuals took the jubilant and hopeful anniversary of the end of apartheid to further reinforce racial divisions is a disgraceful insult to the potential of inter-racial harmony.
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See Asians. See Asians go.
Asians, as a minority group in America, sit pretty squarely in a sort of purgatory when it comes to the antagonistic politics of the comfortable vs. the afflicted. This comes with its advantages; a definitive identity is not one of them. Burdened as they are, with an unspecific name and accompanying mish-mash identity, Asian Americans have interestingly emerged in several recent stories — from The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek — in a somewhat victorious light.
A brief, chronological compendium follows.
February 25, 2004: The Wall Street Journal runs “Affluence rises for Asian Americans.” The main point here is that Asians are the fastest growing group of affluent investors in this country. They accounted for less than one percent of affluent households in 2002. That number grew to five percent today.
March 22, 2004: Newsweek publishes “American Masala.” This story profiles accomplished South Asians, including, among others, a movie director, novelist, and doctor. More importantly, the story lays out the rising cultural influence of immigrants and their descendants.
April 19, 2004: This time, Newsweek runs a story about Asians abroad in “Asians get going.” Here, a writer for the magazine says that Asians in Asia have more money and have started to travel abroad, boosting tourism and offering huge potential for future growth. This, the story says, is the beginning of a larger wave of travelers from China and India.
April 28, 2004: Another reporter at the WSJ writes about the proliferation of mini-Chinatowns in surburban America. The opening anecdote charmingly tells of one entrepreneur who got started building these mini-Chinatowns after he frustratingly could not find a decent Chinese-vegetarian meal for his mother while they were visiting Las Vegas. The consumption of real estate and the demand for ethnic food are the clearest signs of a culture’s growth, if you ask me.
This latest coverage makes you wonder: Will the image of Asians as financially successful and culturally influential further deconstruct the outmoded stereotypes of Asians as clever and closed-off? Eric Liu wrote in his book of essays, The Accidental Asian, that the collective identity of Asian Americans, “fragile invention that it is, will simply dissipate through intermarriage, as so many Jews fear is happening to their community.” He continued, “On the other hand, it’s possible the Asian identity will intensify in the next generation … The old borders are shifting.” They certainly still shift, but today, some six years after Liu published that, we still have little idea which way they move.
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Mixing black, white, and a dab of Brown
Whose side are you on? East or West? North or South? Haiti or the Dominican Republic? Black or white? Rich or poor? Pro-life or pro-choice? Are you with us or against us? Pro-Arab or pro-America? Are you in or out? The categories can seem arbitrary, even childish, but the world we live in isn’t a game of red rover: Distinctions like these often mean the difference between life and death, love and hate, peace and war.
Or, for that matter, segregation and integration. The word “segregation” is used far less frequently than it was 50 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate is not equal. But the fading away of that term doesn’t mean that the practice of segregation — intentional or not — has vanished. Today people throughout the world continue to grapple with differences and division — along the lines of class, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, and a host of other categories.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, this special issue of InTheFray Magazine asks whether we should settle for a world of difference or continue struggling to step across the dividing lines. We begin with some historical context: Segregation’s last hurrah, a collection of Will Counts’ award-winning 1957 photographs of nine black students who defied the Arkansas National Guard to attend an all-white high school in Little Rock. In Making a nation of difference, we speak with Berkeley law professor Rachel F. Moran about how effective Brown has been in transforming racial attitudes in this country.
How do we balance our need to bond with people like ourselves, and our desire to bridge the divides separating us from others? Journalist and activist Robert Jensen examines the contradictions of being an antiracist advocate while also maintaining Illusions of superiority about his own whiteness. And guest columnist Carol Lee explores the struggles faced by modern women who are confronted with both family and work responsibilities in We can do it … right?
Rounding out this week’s articles, we step onto a not-so-distant shore to examine the legacy of a centuries-old segregation linked tragically to North America’s own: the Caribbean island shared by two nations, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, separated near birth along lines of blood and bloodshed. In The handshake man, Justin Clark examines the struggles to fit in faced by Haitians on both sides of an island cleaved in two, while Sierra Prasada Millman, in Far from heaven, far from home, questions the possibilities of redemption for characters — and countries — trying to crawl out from the shadows of their violent histories in Haitian American writer Edwige Danticat’s novel The Dew Breaker.
On Monday, May 17, 2004 — the anniversary of the Brown decision — we will publish part two of this special issue, including:
If you haven’t already, please register on our site (it’s free) and get your copy of Juneteenth now! And don’t forget to pick up Benjamin Weissman’s novel, Headless, Off the Shelf’s featured book for June.
Laura Nathan
Managing Editor
Austin, Texas
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The handshake man
Can a Belgian priest help quell the ethnic, class, and political schisms that divide Haitians in the Dominican Republic?
Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent … If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask? —Graham Greene, The Comedians
A couple of hours across the border from Haiti, in the hot sprawling sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic, lives a man everyone in the area knows. When the locals see his truck dragging a bridal train of dust along the unpaved plantation roads, they stop what they are doing and come forward. Yes, they all know him, the Haitian migrants, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and Dominicans who live on this plantation near the seaside mining town of Baraona. They have all have exchanged a genial word with him and shaken his hand.
His real name is Pierre Ruquoy, though few of the locals use it. It has been almost three decades since the Belgian priest arrived during the corrupt Balauger regime, when there was little electricity outside the capital, and the roads were so terrible it took eight hours to make a trip that now requires only two.
Back in 1975, Pedro rode his mule up into the mountains to do battle with the windmills of poverty and suffering, or as he puts it, to learn with “the people.” Since then, little has changed. The electricity still fails regularly, most of the roads remain unpaved, and corruption persists.
But one can say this, at least: for many years now, the people have had a hand to shake.
Now 52, Pedro lives in a modest house paid for by the Church on the edge of Batey 5. His parish is the batey itself, the warren of shacks that lodges los braceros, the cane cutters. With its dry earth and utilitarian name, its checkpoints and barbed wire, Batey 5 looks and sounds like nothing so much as an army base. The checkpoints ensure that workers stay put and prevent rival plantations from stealing each other’s workers. The barbed wire on the shacks is less explicable, because there is almost nothing for a thief to steal, except the occasional rooster tethered to a heavy stone.
While the rest of the Dominican Republic modernizes, little changes on the bateyes. The last few presidential administrations have replaced many of the stick-and-mud shacks with more modern cinderblock lodgings, plastering them with campaign posters afterwards. With the election coming in May, the candidates want visitors to know who has built the cane cutters’ houses.
But for the Haitian cane cutters, the election is a less urgent issue at the moment than the political events happening across the border in their homeland, where in the past few months there has been unrest, a coup, and still more unrest.
When Pedro comes around, he gives the workers news, trying to dispel the rumors that spread like wildfire through the isolated community. As programming director of Radio Enriquillo, a local Catholic radio station, he helps provide news, religious programming, and political advocacy for the braceros. Though Pedro is uncertain how much political power the station actually has, he insists on the value of the listening ear, the proffered hand. To voice the batey’s problems is itself a kind of relief, he says, even if few outside the plantation hear his protest.
All week long, Pedro listens to the confessions of “the people”: a man whose wife has been stolen by a plantation security guard, a young man who wants to avoid marrying the girl he has impregnated, a man whose shoulder is infected and needs antibiotics. But the braceros’ present trouble, says Pedro, is boredom. Now, mid-March, is el tiempo muerto, the dead time between harvests, and they sit around in the shade of their barracks like bored soldiers. Many lie around sick with malaria or rougeole, the measles. The women sit in plastic chairs and watch the laundry dry, and the men take turns trimming each other’s hair. Their children wander around sucking on bits of cane or plastic bags of yellow homemade ice cream. One clever boy ties a rope to another’s bicycle, and they take turns towing each other around through the gray dust that surrounds the gray-green sea of cane stalks.
Many of the workers here are Haitian economic refugees with families to support back home. But the labor that provides the sugar that rots American teeth barely sustains the workers themselves. They usually plan to go to the Dominican Republic and return after the harvest with their wages, but many never leave. To get to the Dominican plantations, they must pay their traffickers 600 Haitian dollars (around $70 U.S.) to take them across the border, a huge sum considering that they earn only $3 a day for cutting cane from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. And because of interest owed to the traffickers, the immigrants often do not earn enough to make the return trip, and thus remain stuck in the limbo between sustenance and profit.
The Dominican-born braceros with Haitian roots have a related problem, Pedro says. The majority are second-generation Haitians or Dominican-Haitians, fully half of whom do not speak the Haitian language, Kreyol. But according to the Batey Relief Alliance, a group that fights to improve the conditions of the braceros, a third of the workers lack documentation and suffer systematic deportations. In 1997, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that 25,000 Haitians were sent home in the months of January and February alone, or one out of every eight of the 200,000 workers on the bateyes.
That another stream of Haitians continuously replaces the deported testifies to Haiti’s dire economic conditions. Critics of the deportation policy say the Dominican government’s real agenda is to keep the community in a state of political disorganization. If so, the policy is a success. Often newly-arrived sugar braceros knock at the door of Pedro’s house on the edge of Batey 5, showing up naked, in the middle of the night, after selling their clothes to the traffickers. They have malaria, they have the mumps, they are often heartbroken and tired. Pedro gives them something to wear, something to eat, a place to stay, medicine. But their biggest problem, the lack of respect many Dominicans have for the braceros, is something he, as a foreigner, cannot solve.
“To work here you have to know you are a stranger,” Pedro says, as he drives to the shanties where the braceros live. With a fencer’s lean frame, a gray European moustache, wire-rim glasses, and pants hitched high over his waist, he holds his Nacional cigarette with an intellectual delicacy. “You will never be Dominican,” he says.
By ‘you’ he means himself, but he says it is also the problem of the Haitian immigrants themselves. “It’s important to have confidence in your own identity – then you can bring something and receive something,” Pedro says. “It’s the people who will save the people. There is no people in the world that believes another people will save it.”
These seem odd words coming from a missionary, when one considers the steady flow of aid that comes from the Church. They make more sense when considers that far more aid is needed to close the plantations’ open sewers, to put running water in each house, than the Church can provide.
Pedro can only afford to shelter a dozen or so refugees at his house. Even if the plight of the refugees themselves were eased, he says, refugees would still spill across the border, probably in greater numbers.
Learning about Haiti through sound bites
The economic problems of Haitians in the Dominican Republic are inseparable from the economic problems of Haiti, which are at least partly political in nature, and which never seem to cease. For a few weeks this spring, the world gained an intermittent awareness of those problems, the tides of misery that send Haitians into the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic.
One thing is for certain: even if the people could save the people, history has not given them much of a chance. Though the former French colony achieved its independence early – Haiti’s 1804 rebellion was the first successful slave revolt in the history of the Americas – it has endured foreign intervention ever since. In 1915, recognizing Haiti’s strategic proximity to the Windward Passage after the assassination of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, U.S. Marines occupied the country for nearly two decades. After their departure in 1934, the constitution was rewritten, and the infrastructure was improved, but the country remained in a state of economic hardship that undermined the American attempt to create political stability.
“The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” we were told in sound bites on the nightly news, as we watched a rebel force creep down from the northern city of Gonaives toward Port-au-Prince. “Forty-five percent of Haitians are illiterate. 70% are unemployed. 30% are malnourished. 80% live in poverty,” the newspapers told us.
These numbers, tragic as they are, were not the story. They were merely the context for the coup that deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29. It is only natural to wonder, given the nation’s current efforts to bring democracy to Iraq, why the same system was failing yet again just 150 miles from Miami, why there were more dark faces overturning cars and lighting tire barricades afire.
Just as quickly, the rebels reached Port-au-Prince, and the why no longer mattered. Aristide was besieged again, as he had been during a 1991 coup, when he was forced from power by the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress (FRAPH), a group allied with former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. In 1994, out of a sense of moral obligation and a desire to stave off the exodus of Haitian refugees, 20,000 U.S. marines forcibly restored Aristide to power. In February, this cycle repeated itself when our nation heaved a collective sigh of resignation, and dispatched a few thousand Marines, to avoid “a bloodbath”, in U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s formulation.
The question for most of the international community was not whether to intervene – most observers accepted Powell’s analysis – but who to blame for the failure. Aristide’s critics say he strayed too far from his promises. To some he was a tyrant; to others, merely ineffectual. His supporters have another view. They criticize the United Nations and the State Department for pressuring Aristide to accept an economic structural adjustment program in exchange for expediting his return to power – a deal that allegedly made it difficult for Aristide to carry out the reforms he had promised. Some in the Congressional Black Caucus even claim that Washington and Paris engineered his failure as retribution for criticizing their economic policies.
Haitian-American activist Serge Lilavois, 57, is one of those who argues that the reform efforts Aristide proposed never had a chance.
“If you don’t have enough money, you’re going to find people in disagreement with you,” said Lilavois, organizer of the Coalition to Resist the February 29 Coup in Haiti, a New York-based group convinced that Aristide was “coup-d’napped”, when Marines escorted him onto a military plane bound for the Central African Republic. The Coalition says the press exaggerated the human rights abuses of Aristide’s partisans, which they allege numbered only a fraction of those committed by the rebels who deposed him. Lè yo vle touye chen yo di’l fou, goes the Kreyol saying – when they want to kill a dog they say it’s crazy.
Locating divisions
The Coalition has attempted to spread this message, but so far it has not moved beyond the Haitian community, which is itself very divided over the issue. Haitian braceros right across the Dominican border have even less political influence and information than their countrymen in New York City. Indeed, many of the workers of Haitian descent are too poorly educated to recognize pictures of their country’s ousted president when Pedro shows it to them.
In fact, the batey’s ethnic divisions are a more pressing issue for most of the braceros. The plantations are segregated by antihaitianismo, a word that means exactly as it sounds. Haitians suffer tremendous discrimination, even within the economic ghetto of the bateyes. They live apart from the Dominicans and Dominican-Haitians, who are anxious to distinguish themselves from those of even marginally lower social standing, says Pedro.
“Trujillo made the division between Haitians and Dominicans in the batey,” says Pedro, referring to the assassinated former Dominican dictator who, in 1937, attempted to “whiten” the country by slaughtering 30,000 Haitians in a tragedy known as the River Massacre. “Dominican people feel they are Spanish people and it’s a lie. They don’t acknowledge African culture. You have to break the idea that white people are superior.”
The policies of Trujillo, who incidentally was a sugar cane plantation guard as a young man, merely exacerbated an existing hatred, according to Pedro. In fact, the River Massacre took its name from a Spanish slaughter of French pirates on the island during the colonial era; this gives one a sense of the roots of racial hatred that persist on the island of Hispaniola today. It is not surprising that a people whose national identity was defined on these pretenses has suffered from discord ever since, according to Pedro.
An example: for the past couple of months, Pedro has given refuge to a half-dozen young Haitian anti-Aristide student demonstrators, all of them from the upper classes. In January of 2004, they were stopped and detained by Aristide’s militiamen in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince. They feared for their lives. The government press had taken their picture at the demonstrations they’d helped organize, and read their names on the radio – the primary means of communicating in the mostly illiterate country. The brother of one, Johame, had been a long-time enemy of Aristide’s Lavalas government. Four days earlier, the chimeres had beaten the radio journalist brother of another, Samuel, to the brink of a coma. They worried they would suffer the fate of their friend Brignol Brignol Lindor, a radio station journalist who had been stoned and hacked to death for opposing Aristide’s partisans, the chimeres.
Fortunately, the chimeres did not discover the students’ identities. The students were merely beaten and released, and with the help of Haiti’s Committee of Lawyers for Individual Respect and Liberties (CARLI) (CARLI) they escaped to the Dominican Republic, where they are staying with Pedro. In exchange for shelter, they have agreed to teach a class to the plantation workers, most of whom have had little formal education. Pedro says much of the political instability in Haiti owes to a lack of education among the rural population. It is easy for demagogues to persuade them to unseat governments, he argues.
“There are two countries in Haiti, people who come from Port-au-Prince, and people from the mountains. We try to help them understand what happened in Haiti but it’s not easy. Last week I went to the mountains, and talked to 25 people who had almost made a decision to help [rebel leader] Guy Philippe,” Pedro explains, to demonstrate how poor the flow of information was to the people in the mountains. An interim government had already taken the reigns from Philippe weeks before Pedro’s trip.
Pedro says he wants the class to be an opportunity for the students to learn from the workers. Asked if that was the students’ motive for teaching it, his reply is frustrated.
“They are teaching the class for solidarity with me, he says. “It’s not for the people. They [the workers and the students] speak two different languages.”
Building the New Movement
I am eager to meet the students, nevertheless, wondering if the meeting will provide an example of the people helping the people. I sit with them in the early afternoon at a table under a pavilion in Pedro’s backyard. A refreshing breeze has picked up, and the relaxing click of dominoes fills the hours while Pedro is doing his duty at Radio Enriquillo.
When I ask them how they intend to foster political unity here in the Dominican Republic and across the border, the students evade my questions. Instead, they carry on an intense discussion in French about my presence. Several times I hear the acronym “CIA.” An American’s sudden appearance in the middle of nowhere, the students’ recent experiences, and the long history of clandestine U.S. intervention in Haitian politics make this a reasonable possibility. When I ask the name of their political group, they say they can’t decide, because they are changing it.
“We’re calling it the New Movement,” says Gethro, their unofficial spokesman.
Gethro has the best English, good enough to have qualified him to translate for the U.S. Marines in 1994, the last time they occupied the country. Johame, still in his early 20s, is already graying, and the unspoken leader of the group. Michelle, with short red hair, maintains a petulant silence. Smith is tall and lanky, Samuel a champion cyclist. I cannot resist imagining that I am meeting, in its gawky youth, the future leadership of Haiti, and so I empty out the disorderly contents of my wallet onto the table to calm them.
“Our fathers could be killed,” says Gethro who asks me not to use his and the other students’ surnames. He shows me a local Dominican newspaper printed a few weeks earlier, with a cover story on the political crisis. The photograph shows the students and several of Pedro’s other refugee guests walking together across the batey. The students toss it around angrily.
“It’s the picture,” Gethro explains, stabbing the page with his finger. “It puts us with the other refugees.”
Johame points across the half-finished domino game at Samy (not to be confused with Samuel), a young man who caught malaria while cutting cane, and is now recuperating at Pedro’s house. He speaks no English and looks at us with concern, unsure of what we are saying.
Earlier, Samy said that he came here to look for life but that he hasn’t been able to find it. I wonder if the phrase is as poetic before translation.
“He,” says Johame, referring to his countryman, “is an economic refugee. We are political refugees.”
At first I think the students are upset because the article might endanger their case for political asylum, but Pedro later tells me this is not the case, that indeed, the article, which clearly identifies the students as political refugees, has boosted their chances of qualifying for it.
Their anger, Pedro says, has a much simpler cause: snobbery. This student elite, these brave organizers of the demonstrations against Aristide, have been thrust together by history into the squalor of the batey. Even though their immediate cause, Aristide’s departure, has been achieved, their country remains politically unstable, their university closed. Among the very people they seek to help, and despite their bravery and ideals, they cannot help feeling superior.
Who are the People?
Pedro’s dictum: the people must save the people. If the aid workers and the 2500 foreign peacekeepers sent to Haiti after Aristide’s ouster can only lend a hand, who, then, are the people? Students, braceros, rich mulattoes, political or economic refugees, Haitians or Dominican-Haitians? Who, when the international community returns its attention to more pressing matters, will be left in charge? And whose interest will they have in mind?
Perhaps it is too difficult to predict how things will change for the braceros following the May election in the Dominican Republic. It is harder still to say what will become of Haiti after the election scheduled in 2005. In the meantime, the tiempo muerto continues, and the struggle for survival trumps the political one. Pedro insists that the strength needed for both fights will come from the same source: the people. He takes me to the house of his friend, Noel, one of more than a hundred voodoo priests on the batey. Noel, 76, diabetic and blind, lies naked on a wooden mat in his boxers as we enter. The father of 54 children, he looks younger than he feels.
“He says it is time to die, but I say I don’t agree,” Pedro smiles, after conferring with the other man in Kreyol. Pedro explains he has promised to speak with Baron Cimetiere, the god of the dead, on Noel’s behalf. “I said I have to go to the Pantheon to speak with the spirit of the dead and give rum. Now is not the moment to go to the land of the dead.”
“Can I take a picture of him?” I ask.
Pedro gets the old man’s permission and nods. His son steps inside to close the fly of Noel’s boxers. I take another picture of the priest’s altar, a collection of bottles and dusty picture frames that looks to me like a pile of recycling. Later, as we drive back to Pedro’s house, I ask Pedro what the Church thinks about his close relationship with a heathen religion, and his attendance at voodoo ceremonies.
“It was a problem for them when they saw I visited a voodoo priest,” he says. “The Catholic Church doesn’t accept voodoo as a religion, but the most progressive people in the church call it religiosity. I don’t like to call it religiosity. They tend to say, ‘We have religion, they have religiosity.’ For two centuries voodoo allowed people to maintain their identity – we need to respect it.”
This sounds reasonable, but his tone suggests something greater than respect. I ask him if he believes in voodoo himself.
“Once I was sick and visited the priest. He said, ‘I will see what the spirit can do, but I don’t know what I will say because you are a Catholic priest – anyway, I will say you are a friend.’ He gave me a bottle of water and something else in it, some herbs.”
“Did it work?” I ask, not interested so much in the efficacy of the herbs as in Pedro’s faith in the people, which seems at times greater than his allegiance to the Church.
“Yes,” says Pedro, happily.
I ask him later where he gets his own energy, and he says it has come from the example set by the people he has lived with for more than half his life. “The thing is to live every day,” he answers. “In Europe and in the U.S., we live next month, next week. These people live every day.”
“But,” he adds, after a moment, “that’s a problem too.”
Pedro is strange: a missionary who does not believe he can save people, who accepts the magic of another religion, who has spent his life among a foreign people and yet still considers himself a stranger. If someone so close to the people cannot save it, what does that mean for my country’s efforts, well-intentioned or not, to remake the world in its own image?
We spend the rest of the day driving through the bateyes, Pedro and I. The people come forward to tell him their problems, to share a joke, to shake his hand. I stand beside them quietly, trying to figure out what it is, in that mysterious gesture, that they are really exchanging.
STORY INDEX
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The Comedians by Graham Greene
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A Creole Language Guide
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The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
URL: http://www.cidh.oas.org/The Congressional Black Caucus
URL: http://www.house.gov/cummings/cbc/cbchome.htmFormer President Aristide
URL: http://www.afiwi.com/people2.asp?id=21The Coalition to Resist the February 29 Coup in Haiti
URL: http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng04-21.html
"
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We can do it … right?
Women of Generation “You can do anything” start to ask how.
Thirty years ago, the women’s movement was relishing a cultural shift that began with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and culminated with the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. A generation of women that grew up preparing for adult lives inside of the home gave birth to the first generation of girls groomed for self-sufficient futures in the workforce.
Hard-won legislation like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from gender and racial discrimination, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which gives equal opportunity to girls in schools receiving federal aid effectively created generation “You can do anything.” The expectations were high. The polarization of work and family had exploded. These girls could choose to have either or both. It was up to them to prove true the heart of every boycott, sit-in, and rally held by their feminist predecessors: that if given the chance to thrive without gender and racial discrimination, women could, in fact, do anything.
We didn’t disappoint. Women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. We still earn fewer doctorate and professional degrees than men, but are catching up fast. We’ve got Annika Sorenstam, Venus and Serena Williams, the WNBA and the LPGA. Working women over the age of 25 have narrowed the gender gap in the male-to-female earnings ratio to 85 percent in 2002 from 67 percent in 1979, giving us unprecedented purchasing power. Millions of young women are climbing executive ranks, saving their marriage vows for soul mates and ignoring their biological clocks.
Yet amid a lifelong sprint to the next promotion, many young women are realizing what working class, poor, and minority women have always been aware of: the implausibility of doing everything and the unhappiness that coincides with trying.
Reports of overstressed working moms trading in long hours at the office for quality time at home abound. Presidential Adviser Karen Hughes and Brenda Barnes, former president and CEO of PepsiCola North America, made headlines when they left their prestigious positions to spend more time with her family. And those are just the women who found the time to nurture meaningful relationships while building their resumes — or who are able to afford scaling back their hours or quitting their jobs. Many working class and minority women, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, do not have the privilege of gorging on the array of choices fed to the middle and upper classes. There’s a large part of generation “You can do anything” for whom a working mother was not a novelty.
That women who have access to quality education should pursue — and perfect — a career path before taking on any other role — namely wife and mother — was made clear from the start. This implicit message was infused into my generation’s television shows, magazines, and toys from the day we were born. Even our food said, “Get a job.” Lunchables debuted in 1988, sending a clear message that moms work — and so will you.
As aspiring career women, we responded by dedicating the fervor of our childhood heroine, She-ra, to securing our financial futures. A job is our “Sword of Protection.”
We’ve been less adamant about securing our emotional futures. We plan to pursue them more fully after years of slogging through grunt-work propel us to the top. But as we move up the ladder, there’s no guarantee that personal fulfillment is waiting patiently for when we have more time.
The work/family dichotomy that inspired Betty Friedan to identify “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is spawning parallel testimonials. The young women who have feasted on a lifelong diet of “girl power” are wrestling with their own unnamed problem. Friedan articulated the unhappiness some women felt about their role as wives and mothers defining their identities. Many of today’s young women are beginning to express frustration that our role as successful professionals is eclipsing our domestic aspirations. We feel like we never really had a choice.
A March Time magazine cover story featured the headline, “The Case for Staying Home: Caught between the pressure of the workplace and the demands of being a mom, more women are sticking with the kids.” The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article last fall about Ivy League professionals forsaking coveted jobs to be stay at home moms. Authors Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin make the case that young women have been fooled by the myth of “having it all.” Their book, Midlife Crisis at 30, explores the fantasy of “long careers, egalitarian marriages and children” versus the reality: “While old-school rules of corporate hierarchy have loosened up, they haven’t gone away.”
The work of earlier feminists has percolated. Many of the first girls to benefit are now women for whom raising a family and maintaining a challenging career are important, and who are learning that it is not feasible to do both within the pace of the modern workforce. Additionally, they fear that downsizing their careers in order to nurture a family will spur backlash from their peers and superiors and eventually will be spun as a thundering “I told you so” from a culture that a mere 30 years ago didn’t think women belonged in the office.
Women’s careers are hindered by the demands of family largely because women still do most of the work at home, and because many employers don’t have policies in place that help women to balance their dedication to work and family. Even the school-nurse reflex still speed-dials mom when a child is sick at school — though nowadays both parents typically work.
The problem has been named. It obviously resonates. Organizations and mom groups have formed in response. But it has yet to galvanize a revolution like The Feminine Mystique did. The recent March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. might instill the passion exhibited by Ms. Friedan and her cohorts into a new generation of women. If so, let’s hope we can learn from their successes, as well as their mistakes.
It’s disheartening that the first murmurings of our “problem” are coming from the same privileged perspective and demonstrating the same exclusion of working class, poor and minority women that the The Feminine Mystique did.
Fortunately, it’s still early enough to articulate that the stress of trying to nurture a family while working fulltime is every woman’s problem — if not even more so for working class and minority women. Squeezing in, let alone paying for, a doctor’s appointment for their children or themselves is tricky for women clocking 12-hour shifts at the supermarket. Having struggled without sufficient childcare, job flexibility, livable wages, health insurance, and education, these women know better than anyone what it’s like to feel caught in the work/family dichotomy. This time they belong in the forefront of any effort to change those things. It would be a disservice to all women to proceed otherwise.
A first front in demonstrating that it’s no longer radical for a woman to work like a man, but to change the way work gets done could be the persistence of the woman’s double-shift. Flexible hours would keep more talented women in the workforce and allow them to continue contributing to a benefits plan that they can rely on in old age. Stop-and-start careers, as well as divorce and longer life spans, put women at risk for impoverished retirement.
Women could encourage businesses to devise ways for their employees to slow down, stop and start their climb up the career ladder. They could demand that companies institute part-time workweeks, while still providing health benefits, and give women the option of working at home or provide on-site company daycare. We need better wages and universal healthcare for all working women, particularly those doing manual labor whose bodies physically give out earlier than office employees. Perhaps by revisiting some of that landmark legislation our predecessors won and tidying up the fine print, generation “You can do anything” might eventually be a realistic tagline.
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Is Japan really pacifist?
If we can read a nation’s constitution as indicative of its cultural and political identity, it may be the case that Japan is beginning to rearticulate its identity. There is a great amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in the debate, but the Japanese are now asking the question: Do we revise our pacifist Constitution?
Particularly since the first Gulf War, the Japanese have been accused of bankroll diplomacy; Japan shelled out 1.3 trillion yen, or approximately 11.8 billion U.S. dollars, to support the U.S.-led war against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but did not contribute any troops. This approach of funding, coupled with withholding all personnel, caused some members of the international community to accuse the Japanese of a nasty, cowardly, let’s-not-get-our-hands-dirty approach to international conflict.
The Japanese, however, were legally unable to contribute any forces. The Japanese Constitution — implemented in 1947, essentially written by the United States, and unaltered since its introduction — includes Article 9, which strictly prohibits Japan from having a military force. The Self Defense Forces, or SDF, exist, but they are not deployed overseas. It is only due to a recent law, enacted in the summer of 2003, that Japanese troops are legally able to enter non-combat zones Iraq, although arguably no such areas currently exist in the war-torn nation.
The Asahi Shimbun reported on May 1 that in a survey of 1,945 people conducted in April of 2004, 53 percent of respondents favored a revised Constitution. This year is the first time, since The Asahi Shimbun began taking a survey on the subject in 1995, that a majority of respondents have supported a revised Constitution.
A survey in the Yomiuri Shimbun, the most widely circulated Japanese daily newspaper, indicated that 65 percent of the 1,823 individuals surveyed supported a revised Constitution. But one important caveat, however, is that only 44 percent of the respondents wanted to change Article 9 — the portion of the Constitution that bars Japan from possessing a military force.
The Japanese citizens will ultimately decide whether this fluctuating national sentiment translates into legislative change; a revision of the Constitution must first be supported by a majority of the public, and it must then be endorsed by a two-third majority of the Upper and Lower houses. Among the relevant questions to be answered is whether the increasing support of a Constitutional revision reflects a truly Japanese and truly radical reconsideration of its national character and its role in the international arena, or whether this is a temporary blip in the national consciousness caused by American bullying.
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Far from heaven, far from home
Haitian expatriates seek a reason for hope in Edwidge Danticat’s latest stories.
(Courtesy of Knopf website)
Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje.
He who strikes the blow, forgets; he who bears the bruises, remembers.
In her highly anticipated new collection of short stories, The Dew Breaker, author and Haitian immigrant Edwidge Danticat responds to this proverb. The protagonist of the title story (and a principal figure in several of the collection’s related tales) has emerged from the prisons of Haiti to forge a new life in Brooklyn. Still, he cannot escape the dark prologue to his New World story, nor can his American-born daughter Ka, who, in “The Book of the Dead,” struggles to capture his suffering in rough wooden sculptures.
The protagonist refuses her requests to photograph him, holding a hand up to his face to cover the thick scar that slides down his right cheek to his lips. He haunts the Ancient Egyptian room at the Brooklyn museum, awed by the Egyptian capacity to mourn, their intense probing of the nature of death. One of Ka’s statues, a kneeling, contorted nude of her father in prison, forces him to confront the truth of his past. Drawing upon another Haitian proverb, he confesses the long-kept secret to his daughter: “Your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.”
This man, whose nightmares once drove him from his bed onto the floor, shattering his teeth and forcing him to wear dentures, dreams not of his own pain, but of that he caused his victims, men and women he tortured and killed. The blows he has rained down on others continue to fall on his own head, and he can neither forget nor escape them.
Author Edwidge Danticat (Photo by Jill Krementz, courtesy of Knopf website)
The ‘dew breaker’
In her other books, this man, this father and husband, is only a dark shadow, an angel of death, a “dew breaker.” He gyrates in the black root of candle flames and sways beneath the shifting waves of the river of blood that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. He is one of the dictator Francois (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier’s notorious tonton macoutes, a rural militia-cum-secret-police established in 1959 to terrorize the Haitian population into submission.
He is the man who has raped, imprisoned, and murdered the women of Danticat’s five books, has stolen her lovers from each other and children from their parents, has forced her varied protagonists into what may be a permanent exile. In a story from Danticat’s debut collection, Krik? Krak!, a young Haitian man writes to his lover from a boat en route to the United States, imploring, “Whatever you do, please don’t marry a soldier. They’re almost not human.” But in this book, in these stories, the soldier is as human as his victims. His humanity is the heaviest of burdens — one no confession will ever lighten.
The never-ending wait
The majority of Haitians today — most of them poor subsistence farmers living in the mountains — remain unable to read or write. Another proverb appropriately captures the difficulties of Haitian life and the stubborn endurance of the Haitian people: “Beyond the mountain is another mountain.”
Despite, or perhaps because of their ongoing struggles, Haitians have maintained the rich oral tradition of their ancestors, gathering in the ghost light of the setting sun to cheer each other with stories, jokes, and riddles. One person says “Krik?” The others respond “Krak!” And a story begins.
Danticat’s affection for the Haiti of her childhood is palpable, but her stories often plunge into the very darkness from which Haitians struggle to escape. The visceral prose that arrested readers in her debut collection has fallen away and the style of her new collection is sparer, direct, almost dry, yet no less evocative. Moments of humor illuminate the dense terrain that her narrators have tread in Haiti and that they must continue to navigate as strangers in a foreign land.
In the story “Seven,” a wife travels from Haiti to New York to rejoin her husband after seven years apart. After they make love, she leaves the room to find the bathroom, only to quickly return, having been confronted by the sight of two men playing dominoes, who, in deference to her presence, have clothed themselves in identical pink satin robes.
The reunited lovers rely upon their memories of Carnival (the riotous Haitian festival that falls just before Ash Wednesday each year and reaches a zenith on Mardi Gras night) to cope with feelings of disintegration that threaten to overwhelm them. The traditions into which Eric has settled over the last seven years will be irrevocably altered by the arrival of his wife: “Gone were the early-evening domino games. Gone was the phone number he’d had for the last five years, ever since he’d had a telephone. (He didn’t need other women calling him now.)”
His wife must endure a similar disruption — on arriving at the airport, she stands and watches as a customs man pushes through her luggage, confiscating almost everything she’s brought from Haiti. The seeming lightness of lives reduced only to essentials belies the immense weight of expectations born of the near decade spent waiting to see one another. Even the ritual of making love seven times, once for every year apart, fails to restore the couple’s sense of gravity. They venture out onto the streets of New York, walking hand-in-hand, but the unfamiliar surroundings can only conjure more memories of Carnival theater. Utterly lost, they have become actors, “performing their own carnival,” their only connection with one another a conspiratorial agreement to pretend that everything will normalize eventually.
Reaching the promised land
Immigrants must wait. They wait to receive a visa (or to board the boat that promises to transport them to a better world, on earth or in heaven). They wait to pass through customs. They wait for the day when lover, parent, child will cross the waters to join them. They wait for the day of return. They wait for the day when they will wake, each morning, without tasting fresh coconut milk on the tips of their tongues or feeling the smoothness of a conch shell against the soft skin of their cheeks. They wait to become U.S. citizens. They wait for a time when they won’t feel the need to wait for anything anymore.
Danticat’s personal history (of waiting, hoping, fearing, dreaming) informs her ongoing chronicle of the immigrant experience. Her father immigrated to the United States in 1971, only two years after her birth, and her mother followed him two years after that, leaving Danticat to be raised by an aunt and uncle. At 12 years old, she, too, left Haiti to join her parents in New York.
The Danticats were one family among many who chose to immigrate to the United States during the peak years of the Haitian exodus. Shallow waves of immigration slapping American shores in the 1950s gave way to a virtual flood over the next twenty years as the cresting of the Duvalier dictatorship drove first middle class and then poor Haitians to seek refuge elsewhere. Some Haitians chose Europe or Africa as their destination, but the largest group of the diaspora settled in the United States, many (like the Danticats) in largely Haitian ethnic enclaves.
In his book, Haiti: In Focus, Charles Arthur, the coordinator of the London-based Haiti Support Group, writes: “In the last few years, many Haitian-Americans have abandoned their dreams of going home. Many have begun the process of seeking U.S. citizenship.” Still, Danticat finds hope for Haiti in the irrepressible spirits and unfulfilled longing of Haitian immigrants, particularly those now living in the United States.
The possibility of return to Haiti varies for Danticat’s characters. Wealthier Haitian Americans, such as the actress Gabrielle Founteneau and her family (in “The Book of the Dead”), visit every year. “There’s nothing like sinking your hand in sand from the beach of your own country,” says Mrs. Founteneau, Gabrielle’s mother. “It’s a wonderful feeling, wonderful.”
For the man she addresses, the “dew breaker” in hiding, returning to Haiti would mean only facing judgment that denies the possibility of transformation. The answers that Danticat suggests never fully eclipse the questions she poses. Has the “dew breaker,” now husband and father, become a new person — albeit one with an old face? Can the prey or the hunter ever move beyond memories of a violent past?
Another character in the collection, a victim of the “dew breaker,” seems to accept yesterday’s tormenter as transformed. In “Night Talkers,” Dany (one of the men wearing pink satin robes) goes back to Haiti after ten years to tell his aunt that he has found the man who murdered his parents. Seizing the opportunity to take revenge, he has failed to follow through — what if this man is not the man, but some other man, an innocent? Evil, as Danticat depicts it, is not only banal, it is infinitely mutable.
In his aunt’s village, Dany meets Claude, a Haitian teenager expelled from the United States for murdering his own father. Danticat presents Claude’s actions as distinct from those of the tonton macoutes and Haiti’s history of politicized violence. Still, the violence in his past clings to Claude like an invisible tattoo, one that has changed him irrevocably.
“I’m the luckiest fucker alive,” Claude tells Dany. “I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now.” Ironically, Claude’s crime has reunited him with his community and he belongs in a way that Dany never will. Irony plays a significant role in Danticat’s stories, an irony that circles back on itself like the primal image of the snake eating its tail.
In “Monkey Tails,” the most overtly political story in the collection, Michel (the other man wearing a pink satin robe) declares his intention to name his soon-to-be-born son Romain after his first real friend, the son of a tonton macoute. He reflects on Romain’s father, “Maybe Regulus would survive and emerge from all this a new man, repent for all his sins, reclaim all his children, offer them his name — if they still wanted it — beg their forgiveness, both for what he’d done to them and for what he had done to his country.”
Here, Danticat outlines a path to redemption, but her characters seem unprepared to seek it out. Danticat expresses her true hopes for Haiti in another story. In “The Funeral Singer,” three women gather to tell each other the stories of their past, and find a way to let go as they join the title character in her last funeral song. Haiti’s “not a lost cause yet,” says Mariselle, one of the women, “because it made us.” The three women resemble keepers of the hearth, at once young and ancient, staying awake to tend the sacred fire.
The personal, the political
Danticat’s stories and style draw heavily upon diverse Haitian influences. She acknowledges a debt to the oral tales told to her by her grandmother and aunt and the work of various Haitian authors, including Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, J.J. Dominique, and Jacques Stephen Alexis. Water imagery, a part of what makes Danticat’s prose so vivid, also permeates the canon of Haitian literature — and politics. President-in-exile Jean Bertrand Aristide’s initial campaign and enduring political party claimed its name “Lavalas” from the Creole word for an avalanche or a flood.
Danticat declines to characterize her work as political, but seeming allusions in The Dew Breaker to concrete incidents in Haitian political history are noteworthy. The final story in Danticat’s collection relates the assassination (by the “dew breaker”) of a preacher who delivers popular, incendiary sermons over Radio Lumière (Protestant). “What will we do with our beast?” the preacher asks devoted listeners.
The young Jean Bertrand Aristide began his political career as a pastor who delivered popular, incendiary sermons over Radio Soleil (Catholic) in the late 1980s. He became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1990. In contrast to the story’s preacher, Aristide survived numerous assassination attempts but a military coup forced him to flee Haiti for the United States only a few months after he assumed the presidency.
According to Charles Arthur, writing in Haiti in Focus, the three years Aristide spent courting the Clinton administration so changed him (and his political program) that his former supporters could barely recognize him upon his return. Allegations of corruption further eroded his support and contributed to his returning to exile this year.
The extent of Aristide’s transformation from populist preacher to “political animal,” from activist to prey to hunter, can find no better measurement than Aristide’s inclusion (by media rights organization Reporters Without Borders) on a 2003 list of “predators of press freedom.”
In becoming expatriates, the men and women of Danticat’s stories have refused to become either prey or hunters. Only slightly less helpless than they were in Haiti when it comes to revitalizing their country, the characters consider the possibility of joining that struggle with cautious fervor.
“I’m going back,” declares Freda, the title character in “The Funeral Singer.” “I’m going to join a militia and return to fight.” Freda’s friends discourage her ambitions, predicting her death should she become a fighter. The unasked question hangs in the air like the smoke from an extinguished flame: Should Freda choose to fight, can she become anything but the prey or the hunter?
Staring into the sea
The life of a Haitian immigrant, as represented by Danticat, is a river that flows between two worlds — the past and the present, the primal and the modern, Vodou and Christianity, the miraculous and the mundane. If the “dew breaker” were to look down into this water, he would not see his own reflection. It is too crowded with anguished faces, the faces of the 32,000 Haitians cut down by Dominican soldiers along the border, the faces of Haitians rubbed out by their own countrymen, the tonton macoutes, the faces of people across the waters who may never stop mourning what they have lost.
Danticat has given this man safe passage to a new world and provided him with an American dream — a slimmer build, an honest profession, and a wife and daughter who learned to love him before they knew his secrets. But Danticat has denied him a name and, in doing so, has made uncertain the authenticity of his transformation. Even now, he remains the “dew breaker,” “the fat man,” “the hunter.”
The collection of stories, a river in itself, flows backwards, from the present to the past, from the new world to the old. The waters of this river divide the woman and the man, bound by the blood of one country, and this man — this father, this husband, this killer — though he has escaped to one bank of the river, may not even exist on the other.
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Interview with Edwidge Danticat
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Atlantic Interview with Danticat
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Illusions of superiority
I always thought I was one of the “good” white people. Until one day.
I stepped onto the speakers’ platform at the Virginia Festival of Books in Charlottesville with Newsday editor Les Payne to discuss our chapters in his book When Race Becomes Real. Bernestine Singley, the other panelist, had edited the book.
As I walked to my seat, I was well aware of Payne’s impressive record. I had read his work, and I know he is a more experienced journalist than I am. He’s won more prizes and written more important books than me. Payne has traveled more widely and reported on more complex subjects. He is older than me, and has done more in his life than I have. I also have heard Payne speak before, and know that he is a more commanding and more forceful speaker than I am.
So, as I sat down at my seat, I did what came naturally; I felt superior to Les Payne. If it seems odd that I would feel superior to someone I knew to be more talented and accomplished than I am, then here is another relevant fact: Les Payne is African American, and I am white.
I didn’t recognize that feeling of superiority as I sat down, or as I made my remarks on the panel. It wasn’t until Payne started reading from a chapter in his book and explaining how he came to write his essays that my feeling became so painfully clear to me.
Payne talked about how, as a teenager born in the segregated South who attended high school in the North, he had struggled to overcome the internalized sense of inferiority which grew from the environment in which he had been raised. He talked with a quiet passion and power, about how deep that sense of inherent inferiority can appear in African Americans.
At some point, I made the obvious connection. Part of the reason that the struggle Payne described is so hard for African Americans is because white behavior is a constant expression of that feeling of superiority, expressed in a fashion both subtle and overt. My mind raced immediately to that feeling of superiority I felt as we had taken our seats. I had assumed, despite all that I knew about Les Payne, his record, and his speaking ability, that I would be the highlight of the panel. Why? It might be because I’m an egotistical white boy. Maybe I’m a white boy with delusions of grandeur. The former is almost certainly true. The latter may be an exaggeration. But whatever my own personal weaknesses are, one factor is obvious: I am white and Payne is African American, and that was the basis of my feeling.
The moment that particular feeling hit me, I was literally left speechless, fighting back tears, with a profound sense of sadness. I struggled to keep focused on Payne’s words, but it was difficult to do as my mind raced to cope with what I was feeling. Payne finished, and Ms. Singley started her reading. When the speaking period ended, I was forced to engage in the ending, and I did my best to answer a question asked of me. But I remained shaken.
One of the ‘good’ white people
Why all of this drama? It was because I fancied myself one of the “good” white people, one of the anti-racist white people. I am politically active, and have worked hard to incorporate an honest account of race and racism into my school’s teaching.
But in that moment, I had to confront that which I had not yet relinquished: the basic psychological features of racism. As Payne talked honestly of struggling with a sense of inferiority, I had to face that I had never really shaken a sense of my superiority. As I write these words, the feeling of that moment of sadness returns. Do not mistake this for superficial shame or guilt. Do not describe me as a self-indulgent white liberal. The sadness I feel is not for me. It is sadness about how deeply embedded in me is that fundamental reality of racism; the assumption that white people are superior.
That doesn’t mean I’m a racist. It doesn’t mean my political work or efforts in the classroom don’t matter. Instead, it means that what I say to my students about race — that the dynamics of domination and subordination run deep, affecting us in ways we don’t always see clearly — is true not only in theory. It is also true in my psyche.
I have long known that. On the platform with Payne that day, his words forced me to feel it. That wasn’t his intention; he was speaking to the audience — which was primarily African American — not to me. Whatever the intent, he did me that service. But I am most grateful to Payne not for that, but for something that happened later. After the event, I was planning to drive to Washington, D.C. When I mentioned that to Payne, he asked if he could ride with me and catch a flight from D.C. back to New York. I jumped at the chance, in part because I wanted to hear more about his research for his forthcoming book on Malcolm X, but also because I wanted to talk to him about what had happened to me on stage.
In the few we drove together, I took advantage of Payne’s experience in journalism and asked his opinion about a range of issues, in addition to pumping him for insights into Malcolm X’s life. And, finally, I asked if I could tell him about what had happened on stage.
It turned out, not surprisingly, that Les Payne is a gracious man. He listened to my story, nodding throughout. Nothing I said seemed to shock him. He is, after all an African American in the United States; I didn’t expect that I would shock him.
It was after I had finished that Payne did something for which I will always be grateful: He didn’t forgive me. That is, he made no attempt to make me feel better. He didn’t reassure me that I was, in fact, one of the good” white people. He simply acknowledged what I had told him, said he understood, and continued our discussion about the politics of race in the United States.
Part of me probably wanted him to forgive me. Part of me probably wanted the approval of African American person at that moment, to help eliminate the discomfort, which I was still feeling. But what would that have accomplished for him, for me, or for the world? Without knowing it, Payne during the panel had given me the gift of feeling uncomfortable. In the car at this time, perhaps with full knowledge of what he was doing, he gave me the gift of not letting me off the hook.
When I dropped him at the airport, I had no illusions. The day had meant much more to me than to him. He had been willing to teach me something, and then he went on to other things. His personal struggle with internalized inferiority was largely over; his chapter in the book made that clear, as did his interaction with me. It was easy to tell by the way he spoke and carried himself that Payne doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether white people are better than him. But I was left with the unfinished project of dealing with my internalized sense of superiority. And it was clear to both of us that such a project was my responsibility, not his.
The gender question
The story of that day in Charlottesville can’t end there, of course. On the platform with us was Bernestine Singley, who is every bit as black as Les Payne, and every bit as accomplished a lawyer and writer. Why am I focusing on him and not her? Why did he spark this realization in me and not her?
In part it was because of what Payne talked about on stage; his remarks and his chapter had pushed my buttons. Also, I have known Singley longer and have a more established relationship with her. We live in different cities and are not friends in a conventional sense, but I consider her (and I hope she considers me) a trustworthy ally and comrade in the struggle, and a friend in that context. Singley and I also have very different styles, and when we appear on panels together we clearly are
not competing.
With all that said, it’s also difficult to miss the fact that Singley is a woman and Payne is a man. There was not only a race dynamic on stage, but a gender dynamic. It’s likely that I was, in classic male fashion, focusing on the struggle for dominance with the other man on the panel. This perception of myself also is hard to face; in addition to being a good white person, you see, I’m also a good man. I’m one of the men who is on the right side. But I also am one of the men who, whatever side he is on, constantly struggles with the reality of living in a male-supremacist society that has taught me lessons about how to vie for dominance.
Introspection on these matters is difficult; people in privileged positions often are not in the best position to evaluate our own behavior. But looking back on that day, it appears to me I walked onto that platform with an assumption of my inherent superiority — so deeply woven into me that I could not in the moment see it — that had something to do with race and gender.
From those assumptions, it is hard to reach a conclusion other than: I was a fool.
I use that term consciously, because throughout history white people have often cast blacks as the fool to shore up our sense of superiority. But in that game, it is white people who are the fools, and it is difficult and painful to confront that. Somehow, I had allowed myself to believe the story that a racist and sexist society still tells. Yes, I know that Jim Crow segregation is gone and the overt ideology that supported it is mostly gone. But in the struggle to change the world, what matters is not only what law is, or what polite people say in public. What matters just as much, if not more, is what we really are, deep down.
All this matters not just because white people should learn to be better or nicer, but because as long as we whites believe we are better, deep down in places most of us have learned to hide, we will not feel compelled to change a society in which black unemployment is twice the white rate. And in which, as a recent study has found, a white man with a criminal record is more likely to called back for a job interview than a black man with no record.
In the United States, the typical black family has 58 percent as much income as a typical white family. And at the slow rate the black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it will take 150 years to close. At the current rate, blacks and whites won’t reach high school graduation parity until 2013, nearly 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. That is an ugly society.
The first step for white people is to face that ugliness, to tell the truth about the system we live in and tell the truth about ourselves. But that means nothing if we do not commit to change, not just to change ourselves, but to change the system. We have to face the ways in which white supremacy makes white people foolish but forces others to pay a much greater price.
We have to stop playing the fool and start playing for keeps.
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ARTICLES >
“The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To Abolish It”
By Noel Ignatiev
URL: http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.htmlArticles and essays on race, racism and white privilege
by Robert Jensen
URL: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/racearticles.htm
“
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Secret Asian Man
He bangs! He bangs!
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Making a nation of difference
Race to the finish line? Exploring the past, present, and future of racial and ethnic politics in the United States. A conversation with Rachel F. Moran.
Colored Waiting Room. Rome, Georgia, September 1943. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)
The interviewer: Laura Nathan / Austin, Texas
The interviewee: Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice, the University of California at Berkeley / Berkeley, California
Fifty years removed from that fateful May 1954 day when the Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal, scholars and people outside of academia frequently refer to the present epoch in American social history as the post-civil rights era. But what exactly does the post- entail here? How do we describe the post-civil rights era? Certainly, we can agree that the notion of “separate but equal” that maintained the black/white divide for over two centuries is no longer legally permissible. But did the Court’s ruling ensure full equality for all U.S. citizens, or did the Brown decision merely raise new questions about what should succeed “separate but equal” as the primarily social descriptor for the diverse collection of people residing in the United States? When I spoke with Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member at the Center for Social Justice at the University of California at Berkeley, she shared her thoughts on the end of segregation and suggested that racial, ethnic, and class differences continue to alienate millions of people residing within U.S. borders. In fact, as she suggested, events and cultural trends of the past fifty years have not ended the debate on equality in the United States. Rather new questions and conflicts concerning race and ethnicity have predominated the post-civil rights era.
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision is often heralded as the most decisive legal victory in the struggle to end segregation. But how effective do you think the Brown decision has been in altering attitudes about race?
Brown alone was limited in its ability to alter social practices. It was only after the Executive Branch and Congress backed the Supreme Court’s decision with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enlisted federal agencies to enforce this law that Brown’s broad [influence and significance could be grasped].
Some people say that Brown didn’t make a difference because schools have since re-segregated. But I don’t think this is the case. Many people have had newfound opportunities to occupy positions of authority and importance due to the end of segregated practices. That is, Brown adopted an individualist model, so now everybody has a right [to attend a given public school, regardless of their race]. There are, however, limits to the individual’s ability to alter racial and class differences, and the best prepared individuals change [and benefit] the most.
Although certain structural issues were not accounted for by Brown, the decision played a significant role in revising notions of what individual opportunity required. You still couldn’t undo structural vestiges as easily because the [U.S.] Constitution is built upon individual rights and limits the extent to which the federal government can regulate the states and tell them what to do. So there are gaps, but by rethinking individual rights and opportunities, people can influence these structures through the new opportunities [they gained from the Brown decision.] Those benefits are real and will be long-standing. We won’t see the black middle-class disappear. We won’t see a reversion back to pre-Brown segregation practices.
Do you think that race continues to play as prominent a role in the United States as it did during the mid-1950s? In what ways have white privilege and more covert manifestations of racial alienation become a means of perpetuating racism?
Well, it’s really difficult for people who didn’t grow up during the 1950s [or weren’t alive during that time] to remember how difficult things were and realize how much things have changed. It used to be that blacks would travel across state lines, uncertain as to whether there would be a hotel where they could sleep or a restaurant where they could eat on the other side. Black families would have to strategize about where they would sleep and eat.
People tend to forget that race was inscribed in ways that were deeply humiliating and very pervasive. There was a Denver hotel owner, for instance, who said [his hotel] would tolerate pets but not blacks or Hispanics.
Racial groups are not as stratified as they used to be; the civil rights model has become so engrained that people forget these things. That doesn’t mean race is unimportant, but the official participation in racial segregation is far less prevalent than it was in the ’50s. Even though the changes aren’t huge across the board, there are changes. There are black CEOs in major corporations. Blacks are now partners in Wall Street [law and stock brokerage] firms. In the [pre-civil rights] era, they couldn’t even get an interview.
This, of course, has created new dilemmas. Blacks have since found some kind of an identity built around race [through hip hop and other cultural phenomena]. Now there are questions about preserving this identity that they value while also participating in institutions that are predominately white. So these new dilemmas have … happened because change has occurred. Today race still affects the way we identify ourselves and relate to each other, and inequality is still real. But if you did not grow up with Jim Crow segregation, you can’t imagine what that was like.
We don’t know now what the endpoint is; we still don’t know what racial utopia is or what it should look like. The worst transgressions of treating race as a caste system are over, so now we have to ask all of these questions. But we still haven’t arrived at a full understanding of what we’ll end up as. Will we be multiracial? Colorblind? Or something else?
Saint Louis children and their parents protest transferring to a school open to black children. March 1933. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)
What impact do you think the contemporary debate concerning affirmative action in higher education and the rhetoric used by both its opponents and proponents has on the quest to achieve racial equality and privilege?
Well, I’m of the view that a lot of this debate [over affirmative action in higher education] is [actually] about access to elite institutions. Nearly everyone who is eligible to attend these institutions is privileged at some level. They have completed high school, and in the case of graduate admissions, college. And these applicants have [achieved] a level [of success] that makes it plausible for them to go on [to college or graduate school]. So it’s a fairly privileged cross-section of people who have an education and are successful and ambitious.
The rhetoric [surrounding affirmative action in higher education] focuses on leadership, so that the debate shifts from diversity as an internal pedagogical strategy to [understanding] elite institutions of public education and higher education as the training ground for leadership in various universities. This suggests that these institutions are the gateway to higher opportunities. There’s a huge [opportunity] gap between someone with a high school diploma and someone who doesn’t [have a high school or college degree]. [The disparity] is [growing], so the stakes … are higher. There’s a sense of scarcity; the costs of not making it are very high. People feel very vulnerable. There’s a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. So the affirmative action debate is really as much about how race affects who gets ahead. With fewer manufacturing jobs today, more people feel [like they have to get a college or even graduate degree]; there’s a feeling that it’s all or nothing. This bigger gap [between the haves and have-nots] gets masked, however, by the way that the affirmative action debate gets framed with regard to higher education. Centering the debate on a group of people who are academically competitive — regardless of their race — ignores the people who are left behind without meaningful access to educational opportunity.
African Americans often hear that they have been displaced by Hispanics as the largest minority group in the United States. How has the increase of Latinos affected the national conversation on race, which has historically been primarily a black/white dialogue?
Well, up until the 1970s, it was demographically a black/white dialogue. Back then, only one out of ten [people in the United States] would identify themselves as non-white, and nearly all non-whites considered themselves black. Today, far more Americans say they’re non-white, but the portion of the non-white group who identify themselves as black is smaller. And many issues affecting race relations and racial equality still haven’t been resolved.
It’s almost a bicoastal issue. On the East Coast, they’re still looking at the [U.S.] population in primarily black and white terms. But on the West Coast, they can’t [talk about race in those terms]. Latinos are now the majority in some parts of California. [There’s] a lag on the East Coast to come to grips with this presence [of other sizable minority populations in the United States]
African Americans [have] a unique history and connection. Many worry that their [history] will somehow get lost in the numbers, and problems they have as a community won’t get addressed. There is also some concern that African Americans won’t be able to build coalitions.
Although blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans share a number of concerns related to discrimination, Latino and Asian American communities also have some distinct concerns from blacks. Both groups have grown dramatically through immigration, and so they face language and cultural barriers, internal diversity because of a range of countries of origin, and the challenges of dealing with non-citizen status and naturalization. Relatively few blacks are immigrants, and so most are native-born, speak English, and are American citizens. The challenges for black immigrants are sometimes forgotten, just as the problems facing native-born Latinos and Asian Americans are ignored at times.
Latinos disproportionately find themselves in the ranks of the working poor, and so they often emphasize class-based concerns — lack of access to health care, inadequate job protections, insufficient resources for schools and neighborhoods — more than race issues.
Asians, because such a high proportion are recent immigrants, worry about being treated as foreigners. Also, some Asians are affluent and highly successful. Consequently, Asian groups worry about hitting a glass ceiling, being told that there are too many Asians at the top. So, a black/white model that is wholly preoccupied with race won’t last. What takes its place is the question, and I think that’s a complicated question. Unexpected events like 9/11 could change everything. Think about the way that Arabs have suddenly become a suspect class after September 11.
School segregation protest. (National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy of Images of American Political History)
That raises another question. What impact do you think racial politics and white privilege are playing in post-9/11 America? In Bush’s America where partisanship reigns and you’re either “with us or against us,” do you get the sense that more people are interrogating racial stereotypes and what constitutes race? Or have people in the United States become more complacent, questioning racism and race consciousness less frequently and less critically?
Issues of racial profiling for national security have prompted questions about what race means. The debate [over racial profiling and civil liberties after September 11] shows that it is very difficult to define what constitutes a protected category. It is not just a racial issue; these questions also have to do with national origin, immigration, religious issues, and questions of what constitutes a relevant form of identity for intrusive practices. These are tricky questions.
But [these complicated issues are] not what most people are talking about. They’re asking whether [one’s racial or ethnic identity] is a legitimate consideration in predicting dangerousness. They’re asking what kinds of evidence [should be admissible], how useful [such evidence] is, and how we should balance individual rights against the national good. Now there seems to be more of an instrumental balancing approach. Many people [characterize this approach as one concerning] foreign nationals and [the] threat [they pose to the United States]. Here you can see that race is being treated as distinct from national origin, religion, and political ideology, yet many Arab Americans feel that they are being racialized by these practices. This debate demonstrates how difficult it is to characterize difference in general and racial identity in particular.
Consider how politicians and the media often talk about “the Latino vote,” “the black vote,” “the female vote,” and “the Jewish vote,” stereotyping or playing up just one aspect of the identities of the people who identify themselves as such. To what extent do you think the parameters and interests of these communities become oversimplified as a result of the media’s characterizations of particular categories of people?
Politics has always had that feel for ethnicity, [where a politician’s message changes] depending on [his or her] audience. You always [have] a way in which you want to reach people [by speaking to their interests] in hopes that they’ll vote for you. So [politicians look at the ways in] which [particular] characteristics will reach people and make them sign on.
It’s even trickier now. We live in a world with all kinds of media. Now there are also so many more TV stations. But newspapers and television news no longer predominate. They are being replaced by the Internet. So there’s no way to compartmentalize the way you behave with one group and keep other groups from finding out.
[Politicians] must think about how [the way that they] cater to one audience will be perceived by others; they often say the most innocuous things to avoid angering [other elements of the population]. Now politics is more impersonal than ever. Candidates don’t connect with you; instead they have to create the illusion of connecting with the little audience at a rally as well as the whole world that might see [or hear sound bites from the rally] later [in the media’s coverage of the event].
People used to say that [President Bill] Clinton felt everybody’s pain. Politicians take on personas like that [by speaking in] very general and generic [terms] and [creating] a brand of self [that makes] it seem like you’re someone’s friend, emptying out concepts of friendship, identity, [and] community. Everything you do is replayed on C-SPAN and the six o’clock news, so it’s hard to have a [public] personality that is real. You only have a persona, an image that’s managed … That makes it harder to do racial politics; you can’t do anything that will alienate the middle. The Democratic Party feels [like it has] been hurt by doing racial politics and then losing the white male swing vote. This has created a conservatism regarding difference. Because you have to make everyone like you, you can’t tailor your message to any group.
… Recently, there was a study that said single women don’t vote as often as married women and tend to be more progressive [than married women]. So people started asking why the Democratic Party doesn’t reach out to [single women] and mobilize them. And the Democrats said they couldn’t do that because they’d look anti-family. It’s a case of leveling out politics to the blandest common denominator. The same is probably true for race, ethnicity, class, and other categories as well.
STORY INDEX
CONTRIBUTOR >
The writer
Laura Nathan, InTheFray Managing Editor
TOPICS > BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION >
Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education May 17,1954.
URL: http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html
TOPICS > POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA >
Racism in the post-civil rights era
URL: http://www.fetchbook.info/Racism_in_the_Post_Civil_Rights_Era.html
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Fleeing from the public/private distinction
Think the public/private distinction died in the 1960s? Think again.
To date, many states have yet to criminalize gender-based atrocities, such as domestic abuse, within their borders, making it particularly difficult for other parties to intervene. As James Wilets wrote in the Albany Law Review in 1997, many women’s “husbands abuse them and authorities deny help. They are raped or beaten by soldiers who want to terrorize communities or intimidate the women’s politically active husbands … they are abused in the name of custom – arranged marriages, genital mutilation, bride burnings … Unlike the traditional public acts of oppression, many of these practices are performed not by the state, or an invading army, but by the girl’s own family — mothers, aunts, sisters. They have thus been viewed as personal or cultural rather than as political matters warranting asylum.” Treating gender-based persecution as a private issue that the state could not intervene in as long as non-state actors perpetrated the harms, individual states have rarely afforded attention to the gender-based persecution that plagues women around the world.
By recognizing the sovereignty of the family — where most gender-based “crimes” occur — international law cedes authority to regulate the family to the national government. Yet many national governments never exercise this power to intervene in such life-threatening, dehumanizing situations because the authorities are complicit in, indifferent to, or unaware of the situation.
And with international relations and trade agreements on the line, many external states are hesitant to provide a haven for refugees from certain countries out of fear that doing so would undermine their relations with that country’s government. Historically, the United States has been no exception to this rule. For example, the United States repeatedly has to play down its criticism of China’s human rights policies that condone, amongst other things, compulsory abortions and sterilizations. Fearing the political repercussions of a criticized country like China exercising certain powers (i.e. – China’s use of its United Nations Security Council veto or increasing tariffs), the United States has often put its national interest above humanitarian interests. Even if granting asylum to women from another nation does not involve explicit criticism, the act of accepting the refugee exposes either the persecuting government’s involvement in the persecution or its refusal to protect the victim.
But as graphic accounts of female genital mutilation, rape, bride-burning, and compulsory abortions and sterilizations have begun to leak out of many African and Asian nations with the cessation of Cold War politics of secrecy, female refugees have increasingly come into the limelight, gaining some of the attention their tribulations demand. Increased refugee flows from countries like Bosnia and Rwanda, where leadership and sovereignty changed following the Cold War, have made it impossible to overlook genocidal atrocities any longer. Likewise, globalization guarantees the integration and exposure of many countries that might have otherwise remained isolated in order to conceal the patriarchal tyranny within their borders.
While the United States has allowed some women in for gender-based persecution in the last decade, they have found their way into the United States not as a result of specific gender-based guidelines in asylum law but rather because of some other guidelines in that law.
The lack of a specific gender-based persecution guidelines, however, has proven inadequate. And believe it or not, if this changes, women may be able to thank the war on terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security for their newfound refugee status. John Ashcroft, currently considering an appeal from a woman from Guatemala, is now drafting rules to allow women fleeing from rape, mutilation, and other gender-based abuses in other parts of the world to gain refuge in the United States.
I want to be optimistic about this move, though I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical inasmuch as the Bush administration has been anything but benevolent to women’s rights in the United States and abroad. But if the Bush administration is serious about this move and the guarantee of protection from gender-based persecution in asylum law, then perhaps the elements of Bush’s pro-life agenda — i.e. — protecting women from getting beaten to death by their husbands — and his collapse of the public/private distinction to make women’s health the government’s business that resonate in this move demonstrate that there can, in fact, be perks in his ideological agenda. But I suppose only time will tell.
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