March 29th, 2009 9:41 am Comment #273.
March 29, 2009 12:34 pm
In referencing blue eyes, President Lula of Brasil was referencing the Global North, the colonizers, the imperialists, the neo-imperialists, the slave owners, the genociders.
It's not racist, it's not about being against the color blue for eyes, the sky, whatever.
We feel, we have experienced what some fail to see out of those particular peepers.
Lula could have eschewed the rhetorical biomarker and just come straight to the point about unequal power and inequitable distribution of resources, about the origins of poverty, hunger, disease in the Global South. But would such a bland statement catch the eye of the NYT?
Perhaps I missed it in Dowd's column but I also recall that famous TV jousting on Blue Eyes vs. Brown eyes, between Mike Wallace (who brought it up again and again) and the late Shah of Iran. The Shah was making exactly the same point as Lula is. Go Brasil! Go Iran!
As for Obama's brown eyes in the Whites' House, that Change is not one we can (yet) believe in, judging by his planned blue-eyed Cheneyesque escalation of the deadly drone and convoy US/NATO trespass in Afghanistan-Pakistan.
Perhaps, if my child was killed by a US unmanned drone, while I was working in my fields, I would end up as a "militant". The Blue-eyed, green-eyed, you-name-it-eyed "militants" all lumped together in the demonizing mainstream US media as "Taliban" in the Khyber are making the same point as Lula.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, INDIA
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Op-Ed Columnist
Blue Eyed Greed?
Article
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 28, 2009
WASHINGTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/opinion/29dowd.html
NYTimes copyright
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYlvyZwHHU&feature=related
Shah of Iran, Mike Wallace
YouTube copyright
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See my Theory of Systemic Whiteness"
on this blog or Google it!
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