In the aftermath of Mumbai's date with terror 11/26 it feels important to analyze a 60-year phenomenon -- a growing U.S. hegemony in South Asia. This process of U.S. dominance began just at the precise moment in the late 1940's (no accident of timing) that South Asia was emerging from centuries of exploitative British colonial rule. That 60+ year process in which British colonialism morphed into U.S. neoimperialism, has brought South Asians all the way to that fateful day in Mumbai last month.
11/26 still feels like today, not yet yesterday, as I write from home in New York, enroute next week to my home in Chennai, remembering my own twenty less-than-something Mumbai home of Haji Ali, Cuffe Parade and the dubbawallahs whose names I carelessly failed in my class privilege, to ask when they unfailingly brought my lunch to my desk in an office not far from VT.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. I am a U.S. citizen, I am classified as an NRI. I consistently fail to be dazzled by US hegemony. I find it abhorrent and ethically unsupportable. Indeed the US stance towards the world is in dire need of CHANGE, that charged word-of-the-moment in US, and in the Mumbai terror, South Asia contemporary geopolitics.
The NAM, the Non-Aligned Movement of newly free sovereign nation-states mainly in Africa and Asia soon found their hard won political liberation rapidly undercut by the geo-economic machinations of the World Bank and the IMF, both within the sphere of US control represented by the Federal Reserve. Nyerere's Tanzania became a debtor nation despite Nyerere's commitment to Ujamaa pan-African socialism. So did India despite Swadeshi and NAM.
The divide-and-rule strategy perfected by the colonial Brits was now given a virulently new lease of life by the neo-imperial US. across much of the Global South. The Mumbai terror attack must be framed within this larger world-system, in which the US invented the Cold War, produced and still maintains the largest number of nuclear warheads, controlled the work of the UN Security Council, satellitized a pro-Zionist Israel in West Asia (the Middle East to some) and made the world safe for Coke, not Democracy.
Last year in New Delhi US Secretary of State Condoleezza arrogantly disparaged NAM stating non-alignment has "lost its meaning".
Rice further suggested that India "move past old ways of thinking and old ways of acting." In other words, the diverse and unique historical trajectory of sovereign states struggling their way out of colonial oppression and emerging into liberatory democracy, has to be set aside to serve US strategic and market interests.
Pakistan, rendered vulnerable at the Mountbatten-engineered Partition (with the assistance of collusional, homegrown elites) particularly has felt the full impact of US meddling. That divisive meddling dates back to the Dulles era of the State Department in the Eisenhower administration with SEATO and CENTO ( both of which Pakistan became a member as an 'ally' of the US). Don't allies have to somewhat equal or equivalent? This unequal 'ally' relationship continues today, to the detriment of Pakistan.
The longstanding, invasive U.S. engagement in Afghanistan (within which Pakistan became enmeshed) is too well known to require cataloging here. Mumbai no more and no less than Islamabad or Kabul or London or Madrid or New York are global or glocal megacitities that stand at the intersection of dominant, yes hegemonic unipolarity represented by US capital and military shock and awe. The rest of the world is awakening to multipolarity and the US is still unipolar. How 20th century!
My point is not at all to externalize the terror that took our breaths away that recent November day in Mumbai. In fact my point is to affirm the need for continuing crossborder people-to-people civil society exchanges, exchanges that are made ever more difficult and divisive when Condi Rice and Mike Mullen pop in and out to "mediate" in South Asia, own "the road map" to illegal Zionist settlements in Palestine, threaten and sanction against Iran.
So long as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan don't shed their colonized, dependent mindset; allow the US to triangulate and dictate their historic and contemporary relationship; fail to look within ourselves to braid the bonds that bind us as blood-sharing kin; do not ensure that the arc of justice can bend proudly and surely towards all our peoples,
we may find ourselves continue to be restive as we cross the street in Mumbai.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Blog on a Roll: Go Green & Hold the Vinegar until 2009
I began my modest Blog without a great deal of forethought. I had a vague idea that I wanted to write empirically about democracy. And, as it turns out, I began my Blog somewhat auspiciously, on Mahatma Gandhi's Birth Anniversary Observance on October 2, 2007 in Union Square Park, New York City.
On that Blog-less fall day in Manhattan I protested, alone, but not heroically, the use of Gandhi's birthdate and observance, as a subterfuge to promote sectarian divisions in India by Hindu political fundamentalist, antinationalist, antisecularist NRIs, deploying religion as a political weapon.
My protest did not incur the approval of the Indian Consul who continued to officiate the event and did not ask the self-ascribed Hindutva demonstrators to not politicize the memorial observance, to not use Gandhi's birthday to advance their pseudo-nationalist, anti-secularist agenda.
The consular officials' (there were two) passivity was not tolerance of dissent but its undemocratic, unethical opposite -- the craven acceptance, possibly even membership, in 'Hindutva' sectarianism, by India's official consular representative in New York. Ah the perils of self-serving civil service bureaucracy in emergent democracy. What were the consular bureaucrats thinking? If the BJP came to power in the next election, they would be counted as supporters?
At this Gandhi commemoration event in Manhattan, the Hindutva elements of the BJP and the RSS were advancing their agenda of anti-Muslim and Hindu supremacist ideas. What was even more surprising was that the event was actually sponsored by the Indian Consulate, New York. Speaking as a field-based postcolonial sociologist, I was once again struck, but only in a predictive sense, by the fact that government machinery of the sovereign nation-state especially abroad, could easily be usurped by vested extra state actors. (see blog entry)
Being Hindu (not so much by religion and ritual, in which I don't participate but by personal philosophy, family culture and informed inclination), a lover of Islam and its ideals and a supporter of all faiths, including and especially various indigenous pantheisms of Africa, I can see the need to stand up in the public square of ideas,(not the marketplace, as the disgraced Wolfowitz would have us believe) to challenge and dismantle such faith-state distortions of secular multiethnic democracy.
Until I got to Union Square Park that early October day, to participate in what I initially thought would be a celebratory observance of Gandhi's life and work, I didn't realize how easily the ethical ideals of democracy might be distorted and subverted by extra-state actors acting against the GCG -- Greater Collective Good
(see blog entry).
Born in the early Independence period and raised in a family that discussed politics and culture, in the world's largest and most vibrant democracy, an unprecedented post-colonial democracy with ethical origins if not current ethical practice,
I saw at first hand, in India and later in my adopted home and my geopolitical democratic context of the USA,
the importance of empirical investigation of the Question:
What is Ethical Democracy?
This is why I am hoping in the upcoming year (if not next year, same time year after next) to take my Blog on the road in South Asia. Blog on a roll. I want to find out, to learn at first hand, from ordinary people like myself, across the sovereign nation-states of South Asia, what it means to us and what effort we collectively think it will take,
to accomplish the development of a society that is consistently both free and ethical.
The above two-part construction of participatory democracy could deliver some cautionary as well as optimistic lessons, for US democracy in particular and others, as well as learn from the ones just unfolding in South Africa and continuing to unfold in Ghana.
In my research (based upon 45 years' lived experience concurrently in the US and South Asia), US democracy is many things -- originating in slavery and genocide; privileging the racialized commodified discourse of Systemic Whiteness; neo-imperial expansionism and hegemony; collusional power elites of the military, industry, politics and media (what C. Wright Mills called "power elites"); a nation-state in which the distracting, inalienable and unlimited right to shop, mainly for worthless, throwaway goods may well trump the urgent need for ethical development of global democratic participation, environmental sustainablity, economic/ social justice and health. That is my critical thinking in US hegemony on its own wavering meandering path to ethical democracy.
Growth and development, we know from empirical evidence, overlap but are NOT identical or interchangeable.
Particularly at this time, I think we recognize that the development of Ethical Democracy in South Asia
is critical to the dissemination of civil society in our regions and nation-states, as well as with our neighbors.
We are learning every day the grave dangers to the flowering of democracy in South Asia, posed by state-sponsored terrorism as well as extra-state terror actors.
Unjust and inequitable allocations of resources, the selective denial of opportunity to come to the table, within the world-system context of U.S. hegemony, may well ignite intermittent, widespread and ongoing pathological retaliation.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, my Blog is now ready, after more than year of research and writing, to travel by foot (Gandhi's "padyatra" )and public mass transit, Go Green,
to attempt to make a breakthrough, to discover the roots (if any) of what Erik Erikson has called "ethical capacity", in the lived lives of diverse South Asian as
they, sometimes painfully, construct democracy.
Through these travels, I am hoping my Blog will morph into an Ethical Democracy Reader for use in South Asia and U.S. schools, an Ethical Democracy YouTube
Adventure in New Media for a new generation of Gandhian Swadeshi ethicists, Maulana Azad Indianists and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Frontierists.
The Blog and its spinoffs as decribed above may perhaps be worthy of the new generation of the orphaned 2-year Moishe Holtzberg, whose heartrending wails at the funeral of his slain parents, are also my inspiration (see blog entry)
Moishe's parents, courageous and hopeful young rabbis, were slain in Nariman House Mumbai, because they were guilty of the crime of lovingly practising their faith and caring for their Chabad Lubavitch community in Mumbai, New York and Palestine.
As Yeats noted in his poem Easter 1916, one of my all time favorites since the time I was a Calcutta schoolgirl, a "terrible beauty is born" when political protest wages long and without rest. No matter how just the cause, how high the principle, the voice becomes shrill, the features become frayed, the smile becomes vinegary, loses its lustre.
That moment, in my understanding of Yeats' poetic caution, is the moment to put away the vinegar and develop in myself that feathered thing called hope (Dickinson). "Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine" but it is (equally) the "dapple dawn-drawn" flight of "the windhover" (Hopkins)that bears watching and learning from.
In 2009, my modest Blog will I hope grow in critical humility. I want to make uncertain, meandering yet steadfast progress in expectation that the ARC of Justice may bend slowly but it will bend surely towards us all in South Asia and everywhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
On that Blog-less fall day in Manhattan I protested, alone, but not heroically, the use of Gandhi's birthdate and observance, as a subterfuge to promote sectarian divisions in India by Hindu political fundamentalist, antinationalist, antisecularist NRIs, deploying religion as a political weapon.
My protest did not incur the approval of the Indian Consul who continued to officiate the event and did not ask the self-ascribed Hindutva demonstrators to not politicize the memorial observance, to not use Gandhi's birthday to advance their pseudo-nationalist, anti-secularist agenda.
The consular officials' (there were two) passivity was not tolerance of dissent but its undemocratic, unethical opposite -- the craven acceptance, possibly even membership, in 'Hindutva' sectarianism, by India's official consular representative in New York. Ah the perils of self-serving civil service bureaucracy in emergent democracy. What were the consular bureaucrats thinking? If the BJP came to power in the next election, they would be counted as supporters?
At this Gandhi commemoration event in Manhattan, the Hindutva elements of the BJP and the RSS were advancing their agenda of anti-Muslim and Hindu supremacist ideas. What was even more surprising was that the event was actually sponsored by the Indian Consulate, New York. Speaking as a field-based postcolonial sociologist, I was once again struck, but only in a predictive sense, by the fact that government machinery of the sovereign nation-state especially abroad, could easily be usurped by vested extra state actors. (see blog entry)
Being Hindu (not so much by religion and ritual, in which I don't participate but by personal philosophy, family culture and informed inclination), a lover of Islam and its ideals and a supporter of all faiths, including and especially various indigenous pantheisms of Africa, I can see the need to stand up in the public square of ideas,(not the marketplace, as the disgraced Wolfowitz would have us believe) to challenge and dismantle such faith-state distortions of secular multiethnic democracy.
Until I got to Union Square Park that early October day, to participate in what I initially thought would be a celebratory observance of Gandhi's life and work, I didn't realize how easily the ethical ideals of democracy might be distorted and subverted by extra-state actors acting against the GCG -- Greater Collective Good
(see blog entry).
Born in the early Independence period and raised in a family that discussed politics and culture, in the world's largest and most vibrant democracy, an unprecedented post-colonial democracy with ethical origins if not current ethical practice,
I saw at first hand, in India and later in my adopted home and my geopolitical democratic context of the USA,
the importance of empirical investigation of the Question:
What is Ethical Democracy?
This is why I am hoping in the upcoming year (if not next year, same time year after next) to take my Blog on the road in South Asia. Blog on a roll. I want to find out, to learn at first hand, from ordinary people like myself, across the sovereign nation-states of South Asia, what it means to us and what effort we collectively think it will take,
to accomplish the development of a society that is consistently both free and ethical.
The above two-part construction of participatory democracy could deliver some cautionary as well as optimistic lessons, for US democracy in particular and others, as well as learn from the ones just unfolding in South Africa and continuing to unfold in Ghana.
In my research (based upon 45 years' lived experience concurrently in the US and South Asia), US democracy is many things -- originating in slavery and genocide; privileging the racialized commodified discourse of Systemic Whiteness; neo-imperial expansionism and hegemony; collusional power elites of the military, industry, politics and media (what C. Wright Mills called "power elites"); a nation-state in which the distracting, inalienable and unlimited right to shop, mainly for worthless, throwaway goods may well trump the urgent need for ethical development of global democratic participation, environmental sustainablity, economic/ social justice and health. That is my critical thinking in US hegemony on its own wavering meandering path to ethical democracy.
Growth and development, we know from empirical evidence, overlap but are NOT identical or interchangeable.
Particularly at this time, I think we recognize that the development of Ethical Democracy in South Asia
is critical to the dissemination of civil society in our regions and nation-states, as well as with our neighbors.
We are learning every day the grave dangers to the flowering of democracy in South Asia, posed by state-sponsored terrorism as well as extra-state terror actors.
Unjust and inequitable allocations of resources, the selective denial of opportunity to come to the table, within the world-system context of U.S. hegemony, may well ignite intermittent, widespread and ongoing pathological retaliation.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, my Blog is now ready, after more than year of research and writing, to travel by foot (Gandhi's "padyatra" )and public mass transit, Go Green,
to attempt to make a breakthrough, to discover the roots (if any) of what Erik Erikson has called "ethical capacity", in the lived lives of diverse South Asian as
they, sometimes painfully, construct democracy.
Through these travels, I am hoping my Blog will morph into an Ethical Democracy Reader for use in South Asia and U.S. schools, an Ethical Democracy YouTube
Adventure in New Media for a new generation of Gandhian Swadeshi ethicists, Maulana Azad Indianists and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Frontierists.
The Blog and its spinoffs as decribed above may perhaps be worthy of the new generation of the orphaned 2-year Moishe Holtzberg, whose heartrending wails at the funeral of his slain parents, are also my inspiration (see blog entry)
Moishe's parents, courageous and hopeful young rabbis, were slain in Nariman House Mumbai, because they were guilty of the crime of lovingly practising their faith and caring for their Chabad Lubavitch community in Mumbai, New York and Palestine.
As Yeats noted in his poem Easter 1916, one of my all time favorites since the time I was a Calcutta schoolgirl, a "terrible beauty is born" when political protest wages long and without rest. No matter how just the cause, how high the principle, the voice becomes shrill, the features become frayed, the smile becomes vinegary, loses its lustre.
That moment, in my understanding of Yeats' poetic caution, is the moment to put away the vinegar and develop in myself that feathered thing called hope (Dickinson). "Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine" but it is (equally) the "dapple dawn-drawn" flight of "the windhover" (Hopkins)that bears watching and learning from.
In 2009, my modest Blog will I hope grow in critical humility. I want to make uncertain, meandering yet steadfast progress in expectation that the ARC of Justice may bend slowly but it will bend surely towards us all in South Asia and everywhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Friday, December 12, 2008
Unpacking U.S. Hegemony 11/26/08
My comment in response to Arjun Appadurai's post (see pasted below my post) from the SSRC website.
http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/12/07/is-mumbais-resilience-endlessly-renewable/#comment-5255
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appadurai's skilfully layered analysis (see below) completely fails to mention, much less analyze, the significance of a growing U.S. hegemony in South Asia just as the latter was emerging from centuries of British colonial rule, bringing South Asians all the way to that fateful day in Mumbai last month.
11/26 still feels like today, not yet yesterday, as I write from home in New York, enroute next week to my home in Chennai, remembering my own teenage Mumbai home of Haji Ali, Cuffe Parade and the dubbawallahs whose names I carelessly failed to ask when they unfailingly brought my lunch to my desk in an office not far from VT.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. I am an NRI and I fail to be dazzled by US hegemony.
The NAM, the Non-Aligned Movement of newly free sovereign nation-states mainly in Africa and Asia soon found their hard won political liberation rapidly undercut by the geo-economic machinations of the World Bank and the IMF, both within the sphere of US control represented by the Federal Reserve. Nyerere's Tanzania became a debtor despite his commitment to Ujamaa pan-African socialism. So did India despite Swadeshi and NAM.
The divide-and-rule strategy perfected by the colonial Brits was now given a virulently new lease of life by the neo-imperial US. across much of the Global South. The Mumbai terror attack must be framed within this larger world-system in which the US invented the Cold War, produced and still maintains the largest number of nuclear warheads, controlled the work of the UN Security Council, satellitized a pro-Zionist Israel in West Asia (the Middle East to some) and made the world safe for Coke, not Democracy.
Pakistan, rendered vulnerable at the Mountbatten-engineered Partition (with the assistance of collusional, homegrown elites) particularly has felt the full impact of US meddling. That divisive meddling dates back to the Dulles era of the State Department in the Eisenhower administration with SEATO and CENTO ( both of which Pakistan became a member as an 'ally' of the US).
The longstanding, invasive U.S. engagement in Afghanistan (within which Pakistan became enmeshed) is too well known to require cataloging here. Mumbai no more and no less than Islamabad or Kabul or London or Madrid or New York are global or glocal megacitities that stand at the intersection of dominant, yes hegemonic unipolarity represented by US capital and military shock and awe. The rest of the world is awakening to multipolarity and the US is still unipolar. How 20th century!
My point is not at all to externalize the terror that took our breaths away that recent November day in Mumbai. In fact my point is to affirm the need for continuing crossborder people-to-people civil society exchanges, exchanges that are made ever more difficult and divisive when Condi Rice and Mike Mullen pop in and out to "mediate" in South Asia, to own "the road map" to illegal Zionist settlements in Palestine, to threaten and sanction against Iran.
So long as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan do not shed their colonized, dependent mindset; allow the US to triangulate their historic and contemporary relationship; fail to look within ourselves to braid the bonds that bind us as blood-sharing kin; do not ensure that the arc of justice can bend proudly and surely towards all our peoples, we may find ourselves continue to be restive as we cross the street in Mumbai.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
==================
www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ - 31k
Is Mumbai’s resilience endlessly renewable?
posted by Arjun Appadurai:
I grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s and early 1960s. I spoke Tamil with my mother, a combination of English and Tamil with my siblings and my father, and various brands of Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi with friends, domestic helpers, neighbors, bureaucrats and shopkeepers.
I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.
No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.
In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.
We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.
Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.
The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.
The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.
These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.
What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.
Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.
Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.
Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries. Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.
Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.
In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.
The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.
Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.
http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/12/07/is-mumbais-resilience-endlessly-renewable/#comment-5255
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Appadurai's skilfully layered analysis (see below) completely fails to mention, much less analyze, the significance of a growing U.S. hegemony in South Asia just as the latter was emerging from centuries of British colonial rule, bringing South Asians all the way to that fateful day in Mumbai last month.
11/26 still feels like today, not yet yesterday, as I write from home in New York, enroute next week to my home in Chennai, remembering my own teenage Mumbai home of Haji Ali, Cuffe Parade and the dubbawallahs whose names I carelessly failed to ask when they unfailingly brought my lunch to my desk in an office not far from VT.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. I am an NRI and I fail to be dazzled by US hegemony.
The NAM, the Non-Aligned Movement of newly free sovereign nation-states mainly in Africa and Asia soon found their hard won political liberation rapidly undercut by the geo-economic machinations of the World Bank and the IMF, both within the sphere of US control represented by the Federal Reserve. Nyerere's Tanzania became a debtor despite his commitment to Ujamaa pan-African socialism. So did India despite Swadeshi and NAM.
The divide-and-rule strategy perfected by the colonial Brits was now given a virulently new lease of life by the neo-imperial US. across much of the Global South. The Mumbai terror attack must be framed within this larger world-system in which the US invented the Cold War, produced and still maintains the largest number of nuclear warheads, controlled the work of the UN Security Council, satellitized a pro-Zionist Israel in West Asia (the Middle East to some) and made the world safe for Coke, not Democracy.
Pakistan, rendered vulnerable at the Mountbatten-engineered Partition (with the assistance of collusional, homegrown elites) particularly has felt the full impact of US meddling. That divisive meddling dates back to the Dulles era of the State Department in the Eisenhower administration with SEATO and CENTO ( both of which Pakistan became a member as an 'ally' of the US).
The longstanding, invasive U.S. engagement in Afghanistan (within which Pakistan became enmeshed) is too well known to require cataloging here. Mumbai no more and no less than Islamabad or Kabul or London or Madrid or New York are global or glocal megacitities that stand at the intersection of dominant, yes hegemonic unipolarity represented by US capital and military shock and awe. The rest of the world is awakening to multipolarity and the US is still unipolar. How 20th century!
My point is not at all to externalize the terror that took our breaths away that recent November day in Mumbai. In fact my point is to affirm the need for continuing crossborder people-to-people civil society exchanges, exchanges that are made ever more difficult and divisive when Condi Rice and Mike Mullen pop in and out to "mediate" in South Asia, to own "the road map" to illegal Zionist settlements in Palestine, to threaten and sanction against Iran.
So long as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan do not shed their colonized, dependent mindset; allow the US to triangulate their historic and contemporary relationship; fail to look within ourselves to braid the bonds that bind us as blood-sharing kin; do not ensure that the arc of justice can bend proudly and surely towards all our peoples, we may find ourselves continue to be restive as we cross the street in Mumbai.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
==================
www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ - 31k
Is Mumbai’s resilience endlessly renewable?
posted by Arjun Appadurai:
I grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s and early 1960s. I spoke Tamil with my mother, a combination of English and Tamil with my siblings and my father, and various brands of Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi with friends, domestic helpers, neighbors, bureaucrats and shopkeepers.
I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.
No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.
In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.
We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.
Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.
The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.
The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.
These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.
What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.
Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.
Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.
Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries. Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.
Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.
In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.
The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.
Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.
Truth Serum in Terror Questioning: Satyameva Jayate with a Twist?
The police in India are reported to be planning to inject the lone captured Mumbai terrorist, Mohammad Ajmal Amir with a so-called "truth serum" sodium pentothal, to get him to talk. (btw, the Mumbai police apparently gave him the last name Kasab, which means butcher because Ajmal said under interrogation that his father was a butcher).
Of course the murderer has to be questioned. But 'truth serum" injections?
Satyameva Jayate with a twist?
I am not aware of even one scientific study, in India or anywhere else, that demonstrates confessions elicited through injections of psychoactive drugs, are more reliable and timely than information elicited through conventional, humane interrogation methods.
Shouldn't we and our elected leaders take note of the lack of scientific evidence about the efficacy of injecting psychoactive drugs into a human in interrogations?
Have the police in Mumbai administered the injections already? Is the young man 'talking' ? No one except the police can claim to have heard him say anything whatsoever. Is he talking because he was injected? Or because he fears being injected, tortured, starved, beaten? Do we, the People have to defer to the veracity of the police on this matter?
Why is the India government completely silent on this issue? What are the Centre's policies and practices in interrogating detained persons suspected of terror activities?
Is the India government being vigorously queried by the media in India or elsewhere, whether the gunman is being tortured and/or making what appears to be almost daily confessions, under duress?
No. The media is silent, instead of investigative.
I have not seen even one report in the India media that has raised questions about the physical and mental condition as well as treatment of this prisoner.
Is this ethical and humane? Should a democratic civil society remain silent when its government and its law and order apparatus reportedly use interrogation methods against a prisoner that may not be humane?
What the terrorist did was both pathological and criminal. But the responsibility of a democratic civil society and its govt is to make ethical progress in its treatment of everyone within its borders and outside of it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
======================================================================
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-truth-serum
A Scientific American article follows on my topic:
Indian officials plan to inject captured Mumbai terrorist with the "truth serum," sodium pentothal, but history tells us that the technique isn't up to the task
By Brendan Borrell
INTERROGATION CHAIR: Can "truth serum" make criminals fess up?
© iStockPhoto / Stefan Klein
The baby-faced gunman of Mumbai, Azam Amir Kasab, now in the custody of Indian police, is the sole surviving attacker in the three-day rampage that began on the night of November 26 and left more than 170 people dead and scores of others injured.
After the attacks, Indian officials immediately began pointing fingers at longtime rival, Pakistan, as the source of the 10 militants—a charge that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari disputed last night on CNN. During police interrogations, Kasab himself claimed to hail from the Punjab region of Pakistan and to have trained with the Pakistan-based extremist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Of course, Kasab could be making this all up. The only way that interrogators can tap a man's memory is to ask him. But what if the person is unwilling to spill the beans or, at least, the real ones? If only there were only a way to plug a USB cable to the back of Kasab's head and just download the experiences.
While such technology may be the stuff of science fiction, Indian government officials have announced they will employ another technique that seems to leap from the pages of a 1940s pulp novel: truth serum. Also known as narcoanalysis, administering psychoactive drugs for interrogation purposes has been around for just under a century, but it has been viewed with skepticism from the start. Indeed, the practice is banned in most democracies, and evidence obtained from such an interrogation would have a hard time making it into an American court.
But could "truth serum" reliably extract the truth from this man and other criminal targets? We asked Alison Winter, a science historian at the University of Chicago, who has studied the origins and applications of truth serum.
What does the term "truth serum" mean?
That's a term that was used to describe the use of certain drugs, most commonly barbiturates like sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, to try to extract truthful statements from people about their past experiences. What the term really meant was that the people who used the serum believed that it made people unable to censor themselves and they would just empty their memories into a narrative statement.
Who discovered these effects?
In the mid-1910s, Dr. Robert House was an obstetrician who noticed that the popular obstetric anesthetic drug, scopolamine, also known as twilight sleep, would put his patients into a state where they would deliver information in a way that seemed automatic.
He didn't want to use it in interrogation, for the purpose of getting people to admit to criminal acts, so this is a quite different beginning from the association we have now. At the time, he wanted to use it to provide support for claims people made about their innocence -- not their guilt. If somebody said 'I wasn't at the crime, I was in the library but nobody saw me,' then, perhaps, this would give support for the claim, because you would think they could not lie under the drug's influence.
It was only later when other people used these drugs that they got the reputation for having the power to force people to provide information against their will.
How did they begin to be used for interrogation?
In the 1930s, there were these committees to evaluate corruption in American policing, and it first came out that police were using these drugs in interrogations to get suspects to incriminate themselves. But there's not a lot of documentation of that.
During World War II, these drugs were used in a very different way. They were the first intravenous anesthetics and were used to treat traumatized soldiers who had lost their memories or had aphasia [loss of the ability to speak or process language due to brain injury]. Doctors found that using these drugs would make it easier for people to say what happened, and this helped them feel better.
As a result, a lot of doctors who had been in the military during the war were familiar with these drugs. Sodium amytal and pentothal were no longer just used as surgical anesthetics, although that was their most common use, but they were sometimes used for this psychiatric purpose of getting people to talk. In most cases, the drugs were not used in interrogations, but to help people talk about their memories in psychiatric consultations. However, some of these military doctors eventually became consultants for police forces or they did psychiatric research for the government and began exploring different ways of using these drugs for interrogation.
Do experts believe they really work?
The idea of a "truth serum" has never been widely accepted. Although there have been waves of enthusiasm for the idea of a drug that can extract information reliably, there has been even more skepticism. Ever since the 1920s, many judges, psychiatrists, and scientists have rejected the idea that there is a drug that can get memories out intact. They have claimed, instead, that it makes people feel like talking, but it also puts them in a state of extreme suggestibility: people will pick up on cues about what questioners want to hear and repeat that back. This is one of the reasons that statements made under the influence of these drugs have never, as far as I know, been accepted in an American court.
After 9/11, there were discussions in the national papers about whether it's a good idea to interrogate suspects using these drugs. Every time there is a desperate need for information from people, you get speculation about whether these drugs are going to get that information. But you also get consistent warnings that the information may be less reliable than what you would get without the drugs. That skepticism was there right from the start 80 years ago.
Further Reading
* Terrorism database sheds light on the history of attacks in India
====================================================================================
Of course the murderer has to be questioned. But 'truth serum" injections?
Satyameva Jayate with a twist?
I am not aware of even one scientific study, in India or anywhere else, that demonstrates confessions elicited through injections of psychoactive drugs, are more reliable and timely than information elicited through conventional, humane interrogation methods.
Shouldn't we and our elected leaders take note of the lack of scientific evidence about the efficacy of injecting psychoactive drugs into a human in interrogations?
Have the police in Mumbai administered the injections already? Is the young man 'talking' ? No one except the police can claim to have heard him say anything whatsoever. Is he talking because he was injected? Or because he fears being injected, tortured, starved, beaten? Do we, the People have to defer to the veracity of the police on this matter?
Why is the India government completely silent on this issue? What are the Centre's policies and practices in interrogating detained persons suspected of terror activities?
Is the India government being vigorously queried by the media in India or elsewhere, whether the gunman is being tortured and/or making what appears to be almost daily confessions, under duress?
No. The media is silent, instead of investigative.
I have not seen even one report in the India media that has raised questions about the physical and mental condition as well as treatment of this prisoner.
Is this ethical and humane? Should a democratic civil society remain silent when its government and its law and order apparatus reportedly use interrogation methods against a prisoner that may not be humane?
What the terrorist did was both pathological and criminal. But the responsibility of a democratic civil society and its govt is to make ethical progress in its treatment of everyone within its borders and outside of it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
======================================================================
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-truth-serum
A Scientific American article follows on my topic:
Indian officials plan to inject captured Mumbai terrorist with the "truth serum," sodium pentothal, but history tells us that the technique isn't up to the task
By Brendan Borrell
INTERROGATION CHAIR: Can "truth serum" make criminals fess up?
© iStockPhoto / Stefan Klein
The baby-faced gunman of Mumbai, Azam Amir Kasab, now in the custody of Indian police, is the sole surviving attacker in the three-day rampage that began on the night of November 26 and left more than 170 people dead and scores of others injured.
After the attacks, Indian officials immediately began pointing fingers at longtime rival, Pakistan, as the source of the 10 militants—a charge that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari disputed last night on CNN. During police interrogations, Kasab himself claimed to hail from the Punjab region of Pakistan and to have trained with the Pakistan-based extremist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Of course, Kasab could be making this all up. The only way that interrogators can tap a man's memory is to ask him. But what if the person is unwilling to spill the beans or, at least, the real ones? If only there were only a way to plug a USB cable to the back of Kasab's head and just download the experiences.
While such technology may be the stuff of science fiction, Indian government officials have announced they will employ another technique that seems to leap from the pages of a 1940s pulp novel: truth serum. Also known as narcoanalysis, administering psychoactive drugs for interrogation purposes has been around for just under a century, but it has been viewed with skepticism from the start. Indeed, the practice is banned in most democracies, and evidence obtained from such an interrogation would have a hard time making it into an American court.
But could "truth serum" reliably extract the truth from this man and other criminal targets? We asked Alison Winter, a science historian at the University of Chicago, who has studied the origins and applications of truth serum.
What does the term "truth serum" mean?
That's a term that was used to describe the use of certain drugs, most commonly barbiturates like sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, to try to extract truthful statements from people about their past experiences. What the term really meant was that the people who used the serum believed that it made people unable to censor themselves and they would just empty their memories into a narrative statement.
Who discovered these effects?
In the mid-1910s, Dr. Robert House was an obstetrician who noticed that the popular obstetric anesthetic drug, scopolamine, also known as twilight sleep, would put his patients into a state where they would deliver information in a way that seemed automatic.
He didn't want to use it in interrogation, for the purpose of getting people to admit to criminal acts, so this is a quite different beginning from the association we have now. At the time, he wanted to use it to provide support for claims people made about their innocence -- not their guilt. If somebody said 'I wasn't at the crime, I was in the library but nobody saw me,' then, perhaps, this would give support for the claim, because you would think they could not lie under the drug's influence.
It was only later when other people used these drugs that they got the reputation for having the power to force people to provide information against their will.
How did they begin to be used for interrogation?
In the 1930s, there were these committees to evaluate corruption in American policing, and it first came out that police were using these drugs in interrogations to get suspects to incriminate themselves. But there's not a lot of documentation of that.
During World War II, these drugs were used in a very different way. They were the first intravenous anesthetics and were used to treat traumatized soldiers who had lost their memories or had aphasia [loss of the ability to speak or process language due to brain injury]. Doctors found that using these drugs would make it easier for people to say what happened, and this helped them feel better.
As a result, a lot of doctors who had been in the military during the war were familiar with these drugs. Sodium amytal and pentothal were no longer just used as surgical anesthetics, although that was their most common use, but they were sometimes used for this psychiatric purpose of getting people to talk. In most cases, the drugs were not used in interrogations, but to help people talk about their memories in psychiatric consultations. However, some of these military doctors eventually became consultants for police forces or they did psychiatric research for the government and began exploring different ways of using these drugs for interrogation.
Do experts believe they really work?
The idea of a "truth serum" has never been widely accepted. Although there have been waves of enthusiasm for the idea of a drug that can extract information reliably, there has been even more skepticism. Ever since the 1920s, many judges, psychiatrists, and scientists have rejected the idea that there is a drug that can get memories out intact. They have claimed, instead, that it makes people feel like talking, but it also puts them in a state of extreme suggestibility: people will pick up on cues about what questioners want to hear and repeat that back. This is one of the reasons that statements made under the influence of these drugs have never, as far as I know, been accepted in an American court.
After 9/11, there were discussions in the national papers about whether it's a good idea to interrogate suspects using these drugs. Every time there is a desperate need for information from people, you get speculation about whether these drugs are going to get that information. But you also get consistent warnings that the information may be less reliable than what you would get without the drugs. That skepticism was there right from the start 80 years ago.
Further Reading
* Terrorism database sheds light on the history of attacks in India
====================================================================================
Thursday, December 11, 2008
State Sponsors of Terror & extra-State Terror Actors: the Challenge to Ethical Democracy
What the article below fails to note is that the U.S. is a state sponsor of terror.
So is Pakistan.
So is Saudi Arabia.
Money flows freely among these three to fund terror. It's been flowing for at least 60 years.
And as you can see China is playing a subversive balance-of-power role in the UNSC vote, by offering limited strategic support to Pakistan. While it quietly executes so-called Islamic militants, the Uighurs, Turkic Muslims, in China.
However, the US action, acting on India counterterrorism intelligence, in the UNSC while long overdue is a welcome step in the right direction.
Only when (white) Americans died in Mumbai, did the US take action against Pakistan. Corpses of color don't count in US racialized discourse, whether in Iraq or at home.
But even though the US has acted in the UN Security Council, the US will continue to contribute to terror on the ground in South Asia and West Asia because the US govt is currently a terror agent in Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in the past, other places, Greece for example which recently had riots.
The ordinary people of Pakistan want prosperity, health and peace just like all the peoples of South Asia and West Asia (btw, I never refer to this area as the Middle East, a colonial and later US neo-imperial geopolitical construct). However the Pakistan government has been a terror pawn of the US ever since the US-led action against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The US sponsorship of terror, at the same time as it is selectively fighting terror, will have to change fundamentally (double entendre intended), before we see any substantive progress in the so-called US-led war on terror.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==================================================================================
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — A United Nations Security Council committee put three Pakistani leaders of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba and a Saudi operative on a terrorist watch list Wednesday as new evidence surfaced that the group blamed for the Mumbai attacks has expanded its activities and its fundraising well beyond South Asia.
A U.N. document obtained by McClatchy said that LeT has sent operatives to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, established a branch in Saudi Arabia and been raising funds in Europe. The group may also have received money from al Qaida, suggesting that it has close ties with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network based along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, the document said.
Although Pakistan's government outlawed LeT in May 2002, it "continues to operate and engage in or support terrorist activities abroad," the document said.
"Is there real concern about Lashkar trying to expand its footprint? The answer is yes," said a U.S. counterterrorism official in response to questions about the document, which the U.N. committee reviewed before voting to add the four to the watch list. He requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.
U.S. intelligence officials worry that as the U.S.-led campaign against al Qaida has taken a toll on its leaders, restricted the movement of its members and curbed its financial support, bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, have cultivated ties with other militant Islamist groups, especially non-Arab ones such as LeT.
The U.N. document, which describes some of LeT's activities and fundraising, names LeT founder Muhammad Saeed as the group's "overall leader and chief," and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged military coordinator who was arrested by security forces on Sunday on the Pakistan-held side of the divided Kashmir region.
The U.N. Security Council al Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee also added Haji Muhammad Ashraf, whom the U.N. document calls Lashkar's finance chief, and Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahariq, whom it describes as a key propagandist who once coordinated fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia, to the watch list.
The committee said in a statement that three of the four reside in Pakistan: Saeed, who insists that he left LeT to run a charity that the U.S. considers a LeT front organization, Lakhvi and Ashraf. It said that Bahariq is from Saudi Arabia.
Individuals and groups placed on the U.N. list are subject to international sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans. LeT was included on the list in May 2005.
The U.S. and India sought to have the U.N. designate the four as part of an crackdown on LeT, which is accused of training and sending the 10 gunmen who attacked two luxury hotels, a Jewish center, a train station and other targets during a three-day rampage earlier this month in Mumbai. More than 170 people died, including six Americans.
India also sought to have the U.N. committee include on the list Hamid Gul, a retired Pakistani Army general who headed the country's main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, in the late 1980s. However, China, a close ally of Pakistan that has veto power on the Security Council, apparently blocked Gul's inclusion.
Gul, a harsh critic of the U.S., insists that he has no connections to any extremist groups.
The U.N. document said that Saeed plays "a key role" in LeT's operational and fundraising activities.
"In 2005, (LeT founder) Saeed determined where graduates of an LeT camp in Pakistan should be sent to fight, and personally organized the infiltration of LeT militants into Iraq during a trip to Saudi Arabia," the document said. "Saeed also arranged for an LeT operative to be sent to Europe as LeT's European fundraising coordinator."
Lakhvi, the group's alleged military coordinator, "has directed LeT operations, including in Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq and Southeast Asia. In 2006, Lakhvi instructed LeT associates to train operatives for suicide bombings," the document said. "In 2004, Lakhvi sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq, having directed an LeT operative to travel to Iraq in 2003 to assess the situation there."
The document alleged that Lakhvi has also been involved in fundraising activities, "reportedly receiving al Qaida-affiliated donations on behalf of LeT."
Ashraf has overseen Lashkar's finances since 2003, the document said. It alleged that he traveled to the Middle East to collect money and help the "Saudi Arabia-based LeT leadership with expanding its organization and increasing fundraising activities."
Bahariq was "credited with being the main financier behind the establishment of the LeT," which was founded in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, said the document. He then went on to become the group's leader in Saudi Arabia and coordinated fundraising with Saudi non-governmental groups and businessmen, it said.
"As of mid-2005, Bahaziq played a key role in LeT's propaganda and media operations," it continued.
The Mumbai attacks have fueled serious tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
The Bush administration has been pressing Islamabad to crack down on Lashkar and other extremist groups in an effort to dissuade India from launching retaliatory military strikes against Pakistan.
Washington fears that Indian retaliation could spark a fourth Indo-Pakistan war that would free al Qaida and other Islamic militant groups to intensify their insurgency in Afghanistan.
ON THE WEB
Read the press release of the U.N. Security Council al Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY:
U.S. forces mistakenly kill 6 Afghan policemen
India says Pakistan must sustain resolve
Pakistan has made start but must do more
Video Report: Pakistan under pressure over terrorists
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
==================================================================================
So is Pakistan.
So is Saudi Arabia.
Money flows freely among these three to fund terror. It's been flowing for at least 60 years.
And as you can see China is playing a subversive balance-of-power role in the UNSC vote, by offering limited strategic support to Pakistan. While it quietly executes so-called Islamic militants, the Uighurs, Turkic Muslims, in China.
However, the US action, acting on India counterterrorism intelligence, in the UNSC while long overdue is a welcome step in the right direction.
Only when (white) Americans died in Mumbai, did the US take action against Pakistan. Corpses of color don't count in US racialized discourse, whether in Iraq or at home.
But even though the US has acted in the UN Security Council, the US will continue to contribute to terror on the ground in South Asia and West Asia because the US govt is currently a terror agent in Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in the past, other places, Greece for example which recently had riots.
The ordinary people of Pakistan want prosperity, health and peace just like all the peoples of South Asia and West Asia (btw, I never refer to this area as the Middle East, a colonial and later US neo-imperial geopolitical construct). However the Pakistan government has been a terror pawn of the US ever since the US-led action against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The US sponsorship of terror, at the same time as it is selectively fighting terror, will have to change fundamentally (double entendre intended), before we see any substantive progress in the so-called US-led war on terror.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==================================================================================
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — A United Nations Security Council committee put three Pakistani leaders of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba and a Saudi operative on a terrorist watch list Wednesday as new evidence surfaced that the group blamed for the Mumbai attacks has expanded its activities and its fundraising well beyond South Asia.
A U.N. document obtained by McClatchy said that LeT has sent operatives to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, established a branch in Saudi Arabia and been raising funds in Europe. The group may also have received money from al Qaida, suggesting that it has close ties with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network based along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, the document said.
Although Pakistan's government outlawed LeT in May 2002, it "continues to operate and engage in or support terrorist activities abroad," the document said.
"Is there real concern about Lashkar trying to expand its footprint? The answer is yes," said a U.S. counterterrorism official in response to questions about the document, which the U.N. committee reviewed before voting to add the four to the watch list. He requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.
U.S. intelligence officials worry that as the U.S.-led campaign against al Qaida has taken a toll on its leaders, restricted the movement of its members and curbed its financial support, bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, have cultivated ties with other militant Islamist groups, especially non-Arab ones such as LeT.
The U.N. document, which describes some of LeT's activities and fundraising, names LeT founder Muhammad Saeed as the group's "overall leader and chief," and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged military coordinator who was arrested by security forces on Sunday on the Pakistan-held side of the divided Kashmir region.
The U.N. Security Council al Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee also added Haji Muhammad Ashraf, whom the U.N. document calls Lashkar's finance chief, and Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahariq, whom it describes as a key propagandist who once coordinated fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia, to the watch list.
The committee said in a statement that three of the four reside in Pakistan: Saeed, who insists that he left LeT to run a charity that the U.S. considers a LeT front organization, Lakhvi and Ashraf. It said that Bahariq is from Saudi Arabia.
Individuals and groups placed on the U.N. list are subject to international sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans. LeT was included on the list in May 2005.
The U.S. and India sought to have the U.N. designate the four as part of an crackdown on LeT, which is accused of training and sending the 10 gunmen who attacked two luxury hotels, a Jewish center, a train station and other targets during a three-day rampage earlier this month in Mumbai. More than 170 people died, including six Americans.
India also sought to have the U.N. committee include on the list Hamid Gul, a retired Pakistani Army general who headed the country's main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, in the late 1980s. However, China, a close ally of Pakistan that has veto power on the Security Council, apparently blocked Gul's inclusion.
Gul, a harsh critic of the U.S., insists that he has no connections to any extremist groups.
The U.N. document said that Saeed plays "a key role" in LeT's operational and fundraising activities.
"In 2005, (LeT founder) Saeed determined where graduates of an LeT camp in Pakistan should be sent to fight, and personally organized the infiltration of LeT militants into Iraq during a trip to Saudi Arabia," the document said. "Saeed also arranged for an LeT operative to be sent to Europe as LeT's European fundraising coordinator."
Lakhvi, the group's alleged military coordinator, "has directed LeT operations, including in Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq and Southeast Asia. In 2006, Lakhvi instructed LeT associates to train operatives for suicide bombings," the document said. "In 2004, Lakhvi sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq, having directed an LeT operative to travel to Iraq in 2003 to assess the situation there."
The document alleged that Lakhvi has also been involved in fundraising activities, "reportedly receiving al Qaida-affiliated donations on behalf of LeT."
Ashraf has overseen Lashkar's finances since 2003, the document said. It alleged that he traveled to the Middle East to collect money and help the "Saudi Arabia-based LeT leadership with expanding its organization and increasing fundraising activities."
Bahariq was "credited with being the main financier behind the establishment of the LeT," which was founded in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, said the document. He then went on to become the group's leader in Saudi Arabia and coordinated fundraising with Saudi non-governmental groups and businessmen, it said.
"As of mid-2005, Bahaziq played a key role in LeT's propaganda and media operations," it continued.
The Mumbai attacks have fueled serious tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
The Bush administration has been pressing Islamabad to crack down on Lashkar and other extremist groups in an effort to dissuade India from launching retaliatory military strikes against Pakistan.
Washington fears that Indian retaliation could spark a fourth Indo-Pakistan war that would free al Qaida and other Islamic militant groups to intensify their insurgency in Afghanistan.
ON THE WEB
Read the press release of the U.N. Security Council al Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY:
U.S. forces mistakenly kill 6 Afghan policemen
India says Pakistan must sustain resolve
Pakistan has made start but must do more
Video Report: Pakistan under pressure over terrorists
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
==================================================================================
U.S. Secretary of Hunger & Food Justice?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/opinion/11kristof.html
My published comment,` #36:
December 11th, 2008 5:34 am
Why not a Secretary of Hunger & Food Justice?
Tell it like it is. That way US foodways would be linked to the world which is what we need in our collective, globalized, interdependent lives.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
My published comment,` #36:
December 11th, 2008 5:34 am
Why not a Secretary of Hunger & Food Justice?
Tell it like it is. That way US foodways would be linked to the world which is what we need in our collective, globalized, interdependent lives.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Answering Challenges to Processes of Ethical Democracy
This comment was posted on Bill Moyers' Journal comments page today, in response to my post there on Ethical vs. Strategic interests in making and maintaining democracy and the importance of aligning them, as vital to expanding Ethical Democracy civil society processes within and across nation-states.
Stanley Wrzyszczynski (see below) has speciously elected to mis-characterize my core ETHICAL point, namely that the SOVEREIGN nation-states, even failed or failing states, of the South Asia region have the right to conduct relationships among themselves, without the self-serving interference of a hegemonic capital-driven aggressive and invading superpower. Therefore, my point about ETHICAL geopolitical interests vs. the above-described US geopolitical stance is NOT, as SW disparagingly notes, "nationalistic" (what's wrong with that anyway?), but I am arguing on ethical grounds, for an intra-regional, neighborly approach among South Asia nations. Neighbors have mutually overlapping interests. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are neighbors. Iran and Russia are neighbors are also neighbors. The US is not.
SW, What would you advocate? U.S.-directed Pan-Zionism for our South Asia region? That prescription has disastrous consequences in West Asia (to us), Middle East to you!
And also as usual, we need to be guided by the enlightened and progressive US how to treat women in our countries, as your additional gratuitous comment seems to imply. This is absurd paternalism.
[Please note I don't reply to posts to my post on any site in which I participate. Instead I post my replies to your comments right here on my own Blog].
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
FROM: Stanley Wrzyszczynski
Chitra KarunaKaran,
What you say cannot be disputed. In the absence of US imperialism, do you believe other mega rich nation states will not intervene (such as China, Russia, the EU, etc.)? Alas, you elide certain aspects that are “strategically” left unmentioned; internal factional violence runs concurrent with imperial hegemony (Shi ite /Sunni, Hindu/Moslem, Kurds/nearly everyone else, etc.). This is not unusual within the context. The disappearance of imperial hegemony will not eliminate these, for this animosity pre- exists any imperial presence. What you ascribe to imperial hegemony may have more to do with the wonderfully clichéd “globalization.” The interdependence and inter-effecting of all areas of the world with each other through electronic technologies and immediate communications (for transfer of goods and services) may be masked by what you ascribe as imperial hegemony. Most agree that the imperial hegemony of the US, like the British before, is on the wane. Yet the rise of immediate access to goods, information, cultural influences, climate change, education, armaments, etc. due to “globalization” continues and increases. This underlying reason for the vehement animosity may be displaced by what you describe as imperial hegemony. After all, keeping women barefoot and pregnant is a lot easier to do if they are not privileged to know what other women in the world can be or do. Much of the restlessness is on account of access to what previously was denied. Cell phones originally were designed for easy and readily available communication, not as triggering mechanisms for roadside bombs. The nationalistic solution to the strife, that you advocate, is a bit outdated and inadequate, some would say even reactionary.
Posted by: stanley wrzyszczynski | December 7, 2008 10:15 AM
Stanley Wrzyszczynski (see below) has speciously elected to mis-characterize my core ETHICAL point, namely that the SOVEREIGN nation-states, even failed or failing states, of the South Asia region have the right to conduct relationships among themselves, without the self-serving interference of a hegemonic capital-driven aggressive and invading superpower. Therefore, my point about ETHICAL geopolitical interests vs. the above-described US geopolitical stance is NOT, as SW disparagingly notes, "nationalistic" (what's wrong with that anyway?), but I am arguing on ethical grounds, for an intra-regional, neighborly approach among South Asia nations. Neighbors have mutually overlapping interests. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are neighbors. Iran and Russia are neighbors are also neighbors. The US is not.
SW, What would you advocate? U.S.-directed Pan-Zionism for our South Asia region? That prescription has disastrous consequences in West Asia (to us), Middle East to you!
And also as usual, we need to be guided by the enlightened and progressive US how to treat women in our countries, as your additional gratuitous comment seems to imply. This is absurd paternalism.
[Please note I don't reply to posts to my post on any site in which I participate. Instead I post my replies to your comments right here on my own Blog].
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
FROM: Stanley Wrzyszczynski
Chitra KarunaKaran,
What you say cannot be disputed. In the absence of US imperialism, do you believe other mega rich nation states will not intervene (such as China, Russia, the EU, etc.)? Alas, you elide certain aspects that are “strategically” left unmentioned; internal factional violence runs concurrent with imperial hegemony (Shi ite /Sunni, Hindu/Moslem, Kurds/nearly everyone else, etc.). This is not unusual within the context. The disappearance of imperial hegemony will not eliminate these, for this animosity pre- exists any imperial presence. What you ascribe to imperial hegemony may have more to do with the wonderfully clichéd “globalization.” The interdependence and inter-effecting of all areas of the world with each other through electronic technologies and immediate communications (for transfer of goods and services) may be masked by what you ascribe as imperial hegemony. Most agree that the imperial hegemony of the US, like the British before, is on the wane. Yet the rise of immediate access to goods, information, cultural influences, climate change, education, armaments, etc. due to “globalization” continues and increases. This underlying reason for the vehement animosity may be displaced by what you describe as imperial hegemony. After all, keeping women barefoot and pregnant is a lot easier to do if they are not privileged to know what other women in the world can be or do. Much of the restlessness is on account of access to what previously was denied. Cell phones originally were designed for easy and readily available communication, not as triggering mechanisms for roadside bombs. The nationalistic solution to the strife, that you advocate, is a bit outdated and inadequate, some would say even reactionary.
Posted by: stanley wrzyszczynski | December 7, 2008 10:15 AM
Friday, December 5, 2008
Ethical Concerns vs. Strategic Interests: The US in South Asia
The U.S. political system, in which all discourses (including my blog), are commodified and branded, has a core problem. This commodified political/economic system is UNABLE TO ALIGN its strategic interests with its ETHICAL interests.
US history has demonstrated that this govt and her people have ethical interests. That is a very good thing. However, ethical concerns are nearly always overturned by perceived US strategic interests.
I will highlight the South Asia case as an example:
1. The US has no ETHICAL interest in India or Pakistan or Afghanistan.
2. The US is primarily interested in advancing what the US considers its own narrowly defined, completely self-interested strategic interest in the subcontinental region.
This strategic interest of the US does NOT coincide with the strategic, intra-regional or domestic interests of Pakistan, India or Afghanistan each of whom have mutually overlapping ethical and strategic interests, which are not shared by the US.
3. The US strategic interest benefits from a compliant India, weak Pakistan and weak Afghanistan, ALL of whom can then serve as a base for US ground and air intelligence operations.
India's alleged "belligerence" against Pakistan, serves the US strategic interest, because the US can then continue to maintain an ostensibly mediating strategic presence on the ground in the region, as well as have a hold on the Security Council in the UN and other intergovernmental agencies, on the question of peace and stability in South Asia.
4. The US strategic interest is part of a longterm, but not necessarily consistent or well-reasoned policy strategy, which began in the State Department of the Eisenhower administration, under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles(1953-1959) with the creation of SEATO and CENTO, to counteract NAM -- The Non Aligned Movement, an historic alliance of formerly colonized and therefore oppressed, newly liberatory sovereign nation-states of Africa, Asia and Latin America, with rich natural resources.
5. The US strategic interest in South Asia is to maintain a dominant presence in the region to counteract the influence of Russia and now Iran, on the Western sector adjoining the South Asia region.
6. The US strategic interest in South Asia is to maintain a dominant presence in the region to counteract the influence of China on the Eastern sector adjoining the South Asia region.
7. The satellitization by the US of Pakistan and now Afghanistan is consistent with and linked to the US strategic interest in West Asia, where Israel has been voluntarily satellitized, to confound and impede stability, peace, civil society development and democracy in West Asia (constructed as "The Middle East" first by imperial Britain and now by the neo-imperial US). Middle of What? East of Where? The intentional construction of the Middle East as a non-place serves the US strategic interest, just as in the period of U.S. slavery and plantation economy, the construction of the slave as Negro, made him/her a non-person without a place.
8. Ethical Democracy in South Asia is best advanced by mutual collaboration among India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and all other sovereign nation-states of the South Asia geopolitical region.
People-to-people crossborder civil society development exchanges are a vital strategy for the accomplishment of this objective.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
US history has demonstrated that this govt and her people have ethical interests. That is a very good thing. However, ethical concerns are nearly always overturned by perceived US strategic interests.
I will highlight the South Asia case as an example:
1. The US has no ETHICAL interest in India or Pakistan or Afghanistan.
2. The US is primarily interested in advancing what the US considers its own narrowly defined, completely self-interested strategic interest in the subcontinental region.
This strategic interest of the US does NOT coincide with the strategic, intra-regional or domestic interests of Pakistan, India or Afghanistan each of whom have mutually overlapping ethical and strategic interests, which are not shared by the US.
3. The US strategic interest benefits from a compliant India, weak Pakistan and weak Afghanistan, ALL of whom can then serve as a base for US ground and air intelligence operations.
India's alleged "belligerence" against Pakistan, serves the US strategic interest, because the US can then continue to maintain an ostensibly mediating strategic presence on the ground in the region, as well as have a hold on the Security Council in the UN and other intergovernmental agencies, on the question of peace and stability in South Asia.
4. The US strategic interest is part of a longterm, but not necessarily consistent or well-reasoned policy strategy, which began in the State Department of the Eisenhower administration, under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles(1953-1959) with the creation of SEATO and CENTO, to counteract NAM -- The Non Aligned Movement, an historic alliance of formerly colonized and therefore oppressed, newly liberatory sovereign nation-states of Africa, Asia and Latin America, with rich natural resources.
5. The US strategic interest in South Asia is to maintain a dominant presence in the region to counteract the influence of Russia and now Iran, on the Western sector adjoining the South Asia region.
6. The US strategic interest in South Asia is to maintain a dominant presence in the region to counteract the influence of China on the Eastern sector adjoining the South Asia region.
7. The satellitization by the US of Pakistan and now Afghanistan is consistent with and linked to the US strategic interest in West Asia, where Israel has been voluntarily satellitized, to confound and impede stability, peace, civil society development and democracy in West Asia (constructed as "The Middle East" first by imperial Britain and now by the neo-imperial US). Middle of What? East of Where? The intentional construction of the Middle East as a non-place serves the US strategic interest, just as in the period of U.S. slavery and plantation economy, the construction of the slave as Negro, made him/her a non-person without a place.
8. Ethical Democracy in South Asia is best advanced by mutual collaboration among India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and all other sovereign nation-states of the South Asia geopolitical region.
People-to-people crossborder civil society development exchanges are a vital strategy for the accomplishment of this objective.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
A Precious Child, A Community in Mumbai and New York
Recently I wrote a comment to the pages of Chabad.org in response to an article on the terror murders at Nariman House, Mumbai
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/777699/jewish/I-Loved-Them-Like-My-Own-Children.htm
My comment:
Nariman House Will Rise Again
The heartrending sobs of little Moishe Holtzberg at the funeral ceremony of his slain parents (whose only crime was to love their faith, their family and their community) should be enough to silence the terrorists.
Sadly it will not be so. I have made a modest donation to support Chabad Lubavitch Nariman House in my beloved city of Mumbai, a city that has given so much, suffered so much and has the gritty courage to continue.
That precious child is my inspiration. Ethical Democracy starts and keeps going, with the least among us, the most vulnerable among us.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/777699/jewish/I-Loved-Them-Like-My-Own-Children.htm
My comment:
Nariman House Will Rise Again
The heartrending sobs of little Moishe Holtzberg at the funeral ceremony of his slain parents (whose only crime was to love their faith, their family and their community) should be enough to silence the terrorists.
Sadly it will not be so. I have made a modest donation to support Chabad Lubavitch Nariman House in my beloved city of Mumbai, a city that has given so much, suffered so much and has the gritty courage to continue.
That precious child is my inspiration. Ethical Democracy starts and keeps going, with the least among us, the most vulnerable among us.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
The Beginning of the End of U.S. Unipolarity and Exceptionalism?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04thu1.html
Gloom But Not Doom
NYTimes unsigned Editorial
Published: December 3, 2008
-----
My Commment: #49.
December 04, 2008 9:52 am
Link
December 4, 2008 1:30 am
"Dreaded multipolarity?" The New York Times "dreads" many and diverse faces and voices at the table of the 21st century?
The writer(s) of this editorial confound cause with consequence (example coercive power, greedy consumption, unrelenting meddling can ignite pathological retaliation) and the writers fail to recognize that US supremacist unipolarity and exceptionalism are the root cause of much dissent and suffering across geopolitical regions and within sovereign nation-states.
The NYTimes editorial concludes:
Their (NIC) report on the concept states that “leadership is not an entitlement; it has to be earned and sustained. Leadership that serves common goals is the best way to inspire the many different peoples of the world to make shared commitments.” That is a good place to start.
But this conclusion reiterates what has gone before, instead of repudiating U.S. exceptionalism. The US continues to see itself as a pre-emptive leader instead of engaging in empathic consensus for the Greater Collective Good. Does the rest of the world need to be "inspired" by the U.S. sitting at the head of the table, or can we project the possibility that even the least of individuals, groups and nation-states can get their fair share when they come/are allowed at the table?
In fact, the beginning of the end of the "dreaded" unipolarity of US exceptionalism is cause for cautious celebration and audacious hope.
Are we there there yet?
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice
Gloom But Not Doom
NYTimes unsigned Editorial
Published: December 3, 2008
-----
My Commment: #49.
December 04, 2008 9:52 am
Link
December 4, 2008 1:30 am
"Dreaded multipolarity?" The New York Times "dreads" many and diverse faces and voices at the table of the 21st century?
The writer(s) of this editorial confound cause with consequence (example coercive power, greedy consumption, unrelenting meddling can ignite pathological retaliation) and the writers fail to recognize that US supremacist unipolarity and exceptionalism are the root cause of much dissent and suffering across geopolitical regions and within sovereign nation-states.
The NYTimes editorial concludes:
Their (NIC) report on the concept states that “leadership is not an entitlement; it has to be earned and sustained. Leadership that serves common goals is the best way to inspire the many different peoples of the world to make shared commitments.” That is a good place to start.
But this conclusion reiterates what has gone before, instead of repudiating U.S. exceptionalism. The US continues to see itself as a pre-emptive leader instead of engaging in empathic consensus for the Greater Collective Good. Does the rest of the world need to be "inspired" by the U.S. sitting at the head of the table, or can we project the possibility that even the least of individuals, groups and nation-states can get their fair share when they come/are allowed at the table?
In fact, the beginning of the end of the "dreaded" unipolarity of US exceptionalism is cause for cautious celebration and audacious hope.
Are we there there yet?
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Ordinary Indians, Ordinary Pakistanis & Ethical Democracy
Calling All Pakistanis
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/opinion/03friedman.html
See my comment #92
Dear Mr. Friedman:
It is regrettable that you describe the BJP as "nationalist."
Is it "nationalist" to divide and even conduct pogroms against communities, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, even immigrants into Mumbai, from other Indian states, who share subcontinental history and tradition? No, the BJP and its affiliate the RSS (whose member assassinated Gandhi) pose a grave domestic threat to Indian democracy. No they claim to be nationalists and you are buying into their self-promotion by ascribing nationalist aspiration to them. Deeds speak louder than words.
On your major point about the need for ethical protest by ordinary persons, I agree with you. But I would not put the onus only on the ordinary persons of Pakistan, as you do.
Perhaps the U.S. State Department could use some ethical introspection for its meddling in Pakistan since the Dulles era?
Ordinary Indians including myself have responsibility in maintaining our unprecedented democracy. Ordinary Indians must persevere in rejecting the BJP and other divisive political elements. Ordinary Indians must speak out against Indian army atrocities in Kashmir.
The heartrending wails of little Moishe Holtzberg at the funeral ceremony of his slain parents (whose only crime was that they cherished their faith their family and and their community), should be enough to soften ALL our words and our actions at every step in the current tragic situation.
Sadly, it will not. But we can work towards such an ethical moment in South Asia.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
===================================================================================
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/opinion/03friedman.html
See my comment #92
Dear Mr. Friedman:
It is regrettable that you describe the BJP as "nationalist."
Is it "nationalist" to divide and even conduct pogroms against communities, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, even immigrants into Mumbai, from other Indian states, who share subcontinental history and tradition? No, the BJP and its affiliate the RSS (whose member assassinated Gandhi) pose a grave domestic threat to Indian democracy. No they claim to be nationalists and you are buying into their self-promotion by ascribing nationalist aspiration to them. Deeds speak louder than words.
On your major point about the need for ethical protest by ordinary persons, I agree with you. But I would not put the onus only on the ordinary persons of Pakistan, as you do.
Perhaps the U.S. State Department could use some ethical introspection for its meddling in Pakistan since the Dulles era?
Ordinary Indians including myself have responsibility in maintaining our unprecedented democracy. Ordinary Indians must persevere in rejecting the BJP and other divisive political elements. Ordinary Indians must speak out against Indian army atrocities in Kashmir.
The heartrending wails of little Moishe Holtzberg at the funeral ceremony of his slain parents (whose only crime was that they cherished their faith their family and and their community), should be enough to soften ALL our words and our actions at every step in the current tragic situation.
Sadly, it will not. But we can work towards such an ethical moment in South Asia.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
===================================================================================
A pro-Zionist Dream Team for Obama?
A team of Whizzes by Bob Herbert
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html
Let me predict that the NYTimes will censor my comment and fail to publish it.
December 02, 2008 12:45 am
Do you detect a pro-Zionist subtext to Obama's appointments?
It seems like every appointee must prove they are Israel loyalists.
And they are. No fresh faces, no out-of-the-box thinkers on Human Rights for Palestinians whose homeland was cruelly appropriated by imposing the State of Israel in West Asia (I never refer to West Asia as The Middle East).
And the 'settlements' (illegal encroachments?) that continue to be developed.
The US cannnot sow the wind, reap the whirlwind and call it foreign policy.
The Arc of Justice........
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html
Let me predict that the NYTimes will censor my comment and fail to publish it.
December 02, 2008 12:45 am
Do you detect a pro-Zionist subtext to Obama's appointments?
It seems like every appointee must prove they are Israel loyalists.
And they are. No fresh faces, no out-of-the-box thinkers on Human Rights for Palestinians whose homeland was cruelly appropriated by imposing the State of Israel in West Asia (I never refer to West Asia as The Middle East).
And the 'settlements' (illegal encroachments?) that continue to be developed.
The US cannnot sow the wind, reap the whirlwind and call it foreign policy.
The Arc of Justice........
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
Monday, December 1, 2008
South Asia's Stability vs. U.S. Hegemony: What India Can Do
India must continue to 1) talk with Pakistan, 2) initiate confidence-building measures with Pakistan 3) increase people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.
This is not because our heart bleeds FOR Pakistan, (our anger and frustration against the U-S-trained and funded ISI are justified), but because the above 3-point defensive strategy would be strategically the most effective policy to further India's stability and prosperity in the region and elsewhere.
At the same time India must increase its vigilance and security a thousandfold. An "If You See Something Say Something" defensive strategy that directly involves We The People. This is the most urgent priority. Security at home and confidence-building across the border must go hand in hand.
Let the India Govt. DECOUPLE the recent terror act from its admirably resolute policy to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan.
Q. Which is the country that continues to destabilize South Asia? The USA.
The US will continue to exploit its "special" relationship Pakistan, which dates back to the creation of SEATO in the Dulles era of the U.S. State Department. Pakistan, being vulnerable to terror within its own borders (masterminded by the Soviet-era, US-trained ISI & Taliban) and because Pakistan is now bankrupt as well, a weakened Pakistan will play to the spin of the U.S. The Pakistan Govt. has fewer policy options and the Pak govt. is allegedly controlled by "rogue elements" within the ISI.
The flagrant U.S. abuse of Democracy in South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and West Asia (I never call it the Middle East) during the Bush-Cheney regime is hard evidence that the U.S. is neither a proponent nor emissary of Democracy and cannot be trusted or collaborated with by the world's largest and most vibrant democracy.
It is up to India to deploy, display and demonstrate its superior foreign policy expertise and thereby outmaneuver the neo-imperial US in our own geopolitical region.
India's foreign policy expertise was honed by long and consistently ethical post-colonial Global South membership experience dating back to the Non Aligned Movement (an historic coalition of formerly oppressed revolutionary liberatory nation-states of Africa and Asia, disparaged by who else? Condoleezza Rice last year in New Delhi).
Let's take 3 and continue to be free.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
This is not because our heart bleeds FOR Pakistan, (our anger and frustration against the U-S-trained and funded ISI are justified), but because the above 3-point defensive strategy would be strategically the most effective policy to further India's stability and prosperity in the region and elsewhere.
At the same time India must increase its vigilance and security a thousandfold. An "If You See Something Say Something" defensive strategy that directly involves We The People. This is the most urgent priority. Security at home and confidence-building across the border must go hand in hand.
Let the India Govt. DECOUPLE the recent terror act from its admirably resolute policy to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan.
Q. Which is the country that continues to destabilize South Asia? The USA.
The US will continue to exploit its "special" relationship Pakistan, which dates back to the creation of SEATO in the Dulles era of the U.S. State Department. Pakistan, being vulnerable to terror within its own borders (masterminded by the Soviet-era, US-trained ISI & Taliban) and because Pakistan is now bankrupt as well, a weakened Pakistan will play to the spin of the U.S. The Pakistan Govt. has fewer policy options and the Pak govt. is allegedly controlled by "rogue elements" within the ISI.
The flagrant U.S. abuse of Democracy in South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and West Asia (I never call it the Middle East) during the Bush-Cheney regime is hard evidence that the U.S. is neither a proponent nor emissary of Democracy and cannot be trusted or collaborated with by the world's largest and most vibrant democracy.
It is up to India to deploy, display and demonstrate its superior foreign policy expertise and thereby outmaneuver the neo-imperial US in our own geopolitical region.
India's foreign policy expertise was honed by long and consistently ethical post-colonial Global South membership experience dating back to the Non Aligned Movement (an historic coalition of formerly oppressed revolutionary liberatory nation-states of Africa and Asia, disparaged by who else? Condoleezza Rice last year in New Delhi).
Let's take 3 and continue to be free.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Outsourcing the Rose Bowl? New Media, New Labor
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?hp
Maureen, your generally wonderful and nearly always witty column as usual raises so many interesting questions about our diverse MULTIPOLAR world, not just about journalism. That's the keyword -- multipolar. Unipolar is so 20th Century! The US including its journalists need to wake up to this fact. It will be healthy for US journalism, because there will be fresh and diverse perspectives through this new paperless glocal new media.
The quote about the Rose Bowl, I could see, being of Indian origin myself, was accurate -- it was in ONE of the scores of vibrant not necessarily grammatical Indian Englishes that are spoken and written in India.
EVERY country is outsourcing and ("insourcing"?) some product or service to and from someplace else. China and India both manufacturing and service powerhouses, outsource their commerce between themselves and with other producers.
New Media and New Labor (not Tony Blair's I-am-Bush's-poodle brand) are inextricably intertwined.
The Pasadena news is being 'contented' in India only because India is English-speaking, has an IT knowledge surplus, lots of workers and a 'free' market still controlled by the G-8
Now, where do you think Le Monde is being produced? I am not sure, but hopefully soon in Cote d'Ivoire!
Frankly, I'm waiting for Pasadena newsmaking to be outsourced to Palestine, where they desperately need the work, non-intervention by the U.S. and not a moment too soon -- PEACE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
Maureen, your generally wonderful and nearly always witty column as usual raises so many interesting questions about our diverse MULTIPOLAR world, not just about journalism. That's the keyword -- multipolar. Unipolar is so 20th Century! The US including its journalists need to wake up to this fact. It will be healthy for US journalism, because there will be fresh and diverse perspectives through this new paperless glocal new media.
The quote about the Rose Bowl, I could see, being of Indian origin myself, was accurate -- it was in ONE of the scores of vibrant not necessarily grammatical Indian Englishes that are spoken and written in India.
EVERY country is outsourcing and ("insourcing"?) some product or service to and from someplace else. China and India both manufacturing and service powerhouses, outsource their commerce between themselves and with other producers.
New Media and New Labor (not Tony Blair's I-am-Bush's-poodle brand) are inextricably intertwined.
The Pasadena news is being 'contented' in India only because India is English-speaking, has an IT knowledge surplus, lots of workers and a 'free' market still controlled by the G-8
Now, where do you think Le Monde is being produced? I am not sure, but hopefully soon in Cote d'Ivoire!
Frankly, I'm waiting for Pasadena newsmaking to be outsourced to Palestine, where they desperately need the work, non-intervention by the U.S. and not a moment too soon -- PEACE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING
"IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING."
This is the slogan that has protected us in New York City, since 9/11. This is the mentality, the thought process, the active public engagement we in India need.
The 72-year old harbor official in Mumbai who SAW the young men getting out of a speedboat at night with overloaded backpacks, should have SAID something because he SAW something. This is EVERY citizen's obligation.
Don't leave it to the politicians especially the rightwing, antisecular, anticonstitutional Hindutva elements, or sluggish, status-preserving lifetime salaried bureaucrats.
It's up to The People to say something, to kick the butts of their elected leaders, these paid/bribed political hacks, to DO the PEOPLES WILL.
NDTV and other media, Stop talking to the talking heads. Step aside and let The PEOPLE speak. Let the People Engage in vigilant antiterrorism, for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
That is a critical and preferred path towards a People's
Democracy. We aren't there yet, either in India or the U.S. or South Africa or Brasil or anywhere else.
DEMOCRACY'S WORK IS NEVER DONE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
This is the slogan that has protected us in New York City, since 9/11. This is the mentality, the thought process, the active public engagement we in India need.
The 72-year old harbor official in Mumbai who SAW the young men getting out of a speedboat at night with overloaded backpacks, should have SAID something because he SAW something. This is EVERY citizen's obligation.
Don't leave it to the politicians especially the rightwing, antisecular, anticonstitutional Hindutva elements, or sluggish, status-preserving lifetime salaried bureaucrats.
It's up to The People to say something, to kick the butts of their elected leaders, these paid/bribed political hacks, to DO the PEOPLES WILL.
NDTV and other media, Stop talking to the talking heads. Step aside and let The PEOPLE speak. Let the People Engage in vigilant antiterrorism, for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
That is a critical and preferred path towards a People's
Democracy. We aren't there yet, either in India or the U.S. or South Africa or Brasil or anywhere else.
DEMOCRACY'S WORK IS NEVER DONE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Global South Journalists -- Two Sellouts to U.S. dominant mainstream media
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Chithra KarunaKaran
South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA)
http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/11/mumbai-attacks-critique-the-media-coverage/comments/page/2/#comments
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
a Time magazine article partly contributed by two journalists of South Asian origin.
Malcolm X had an excellently apt phrase which describes the standing of these two journalists vis a vis the dominant mainstream US media. Those who do not know X's accurate but often censored phrase, should look it up in his autobiography, as narrated to Alex Haley.
My comment:
South Asian colonial history is more critically appraised by subaltern writers -- Time magazine and its writers do not qualify.
Britain's role in West Asia (I never refer to it as the Middle East) and South Asia continues, particularly through its "special" relationship with the U.S.
It is interesting to note that in this article rightwing Time completely fails to narrate the U.S. neo-imperial distortion of West Asian and South Asian sub-continental geopolitics,
beginning all the way back from the imposed establishment of the state of Israel in West Asia and the creation of SEATO in South and South East Asia in the Dulles era of the U.S. Sate Department.
That constitutes the more recent and therefore relevant 60+years' U.S. dominant-power context update of the present terrorist activity, that Time cleverly (intentionally?) fails to provide in the above-mentioned article partially written by two Global South Journalists
The US took over from the Brits and expanded its own supremacist control over these regions, deploying a combination of the old divide-and-rule strategy & new capital gained from exploiting Global South natural resources.
Of course the subcontinental elites colluded, no doubt about that. They continue to collude to advance their own narrow profit-centered interests, at the expense of the Greater Collective Good -- food, shelter, health for The People.
The US 'model' of 'democracy' founded on and enriched by the profits from slavery and genocide and advanced through 'free' market exploitation of emerging post-colonial sovereign liberatory nation-states, needs to be emphatically and critically rejected in policy and practice by Global South regional economies and nation-states.
South-South cooperation is essential, real and already underway.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Times of India feeds and the BBC reports are far superior to anything coming out of the NYT or any section of the US media. However I have been writing comments on NYT, especially on the Lede blog.
I also listened to a terrific audio on The Times of South Africa website describing a dramatic rescue of 150 guests from the Taj by a South African "close protection" security specialist. Check it out.
Even though Bush is despicable, he had apt words in response to the horrific Mumbai events. Obama went one better and both focused on India's diverse democracy.
My suggestion is Let us all keep our Eyes on the Prize -- Indian Democracy. Indian Democracy is the prize the terrorists are really after.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in contrast spoke as if he had been recently mummified. No sense of emotional connection to his suffering fellow citizens. Modi was his usual brash condemnable self and Patil was smirking about the Indian security response. Why does this fool still have a job?
I also picked up a story in Time magazine which I posted on my blog along with my comment which is pasted below:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
by aryn baker, With reporting by Jyoti Thottam / Mumbai and Ershad Mahmud / Islamabad
Jyoti Thottam and her Pakistani colleague both work for rightwing Time. Malcolm X had a choice phrase which describes their standing. Time and saja censorship would prevent me from using his phrase here, but it is an excellently apt one for these two sellout so-called journalists.
South Asian colonial history is more critically appraised by subaltern writers -- Time magazine and its writers do not qualify.
Britain's role in West Asia and South Asia which continues particularly through its "special" relationship with the U.S.
It is interesting to note that rightwing Time completely fails to narrate the U.S. neo-imperial distortion of West Asian and South Asian sub-continental geopolitics,
beginning all the way back from the imposed establishment of the state of Israel in West Asia and the creation of SEATO in the Dulles era of the U.S. Sate Department.
That constitutes the more recent 60+years' dominant-power context update of the present terrorist activity, that Time cleverly fails to provide.
The US took over from the Brits and expanded its own supremacist control over these regions,
with a combination of the old divide-and-rule strategy & new capital gained from exploiting Global South resources.
The US 'model' of 'democracy' founded on slavery and genocide and advanced through 'free' market exploitation of emerging post-colonial sovereign liberatory nation-states, needs to be emphatically and critically rejected in policy and practice by Global South regional economies and nation-states.
South-South cooperation is essential, real and already underway.
It's time Global South journalists located in the US stopped selling out/embedding with US mainstream media.
Oops, wrong place to make this observation, SAJA is part of the problem because it is located within the entrenched dominant U.S. media perspective that cravenly goes along with US foreign policy.
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Chithra KarunaKaran
Posted by: Chithra KarunaKaran | November 29, 2008 at 09:03 PM
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
===================================================================================================================
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
Chithra KarunaKaran
South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA)
http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/11/mumbai-attacks-critique-the-media-coverage/comments/page/2/#comments
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
a Time magazine article partly contributed by two journalists of South Asian origin.
Malcolm X had an excellently apt phrase which describes the standing of these two journalists vis a vis the dominant mainstream US media. Those who do not know X's accurate but often censored phrase, should look it up in his autobiography, as narrated to Alex Haley.
My comment:
South Asian colonial history is more critically appraised by subaltern writers -- Time magazine and its writers do not qualify.
Britain's role in West Asia (I never refer to it as the Middle East) and South Asia continues, particularly through its "special" relationship with the U.S.
It is interesting to note that in this article rightwing Time completely fails to narrate the U.S. neo-imperial distortion of West Asian and South Asian sub-continental geopolitics,
beginning all the way back from the imposed establishment of the state of Israel in West Asia and the creation of SEATO in South and South East Asia in the Dulles era of the U.S. Sate Department.
That constitutes the more recent and therefore relevant 60+years' U.S. dominant-power context update of the present terrorist activity, that Time cleverly (intentionally?) fails to provide in the above-mentioned article partially written by two Global South Journalists
The US took over from the Brits and expanded its own supremacist control over these regions, deploying a combination of the old divide-and-rule strategy & new capital gained from exploiting Global South natural resources.
Of course the subcontinental elites colluded, no doubt about that. They continue to collude to advance their own narrow profit-centered interests, at the expense of the Greater Collective Good -- food, shelter, health for The People.
The US 'model' of 'democracy' founded on and enriched by the profits from slavery and genocide and advanced through 'free' market exploitation of emerging post-colonial sovereign liberatory nation-states, needs to be emphatically and critically rejected in policy and practice by Global South regional economies and nation-states.
South-South cooperation is essential, real and already underway.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Times of India feeds and the BBC reports are far superior to anything coming out of the NYT or any section of the US media. However I have been writing comments on NYT, especially on the Lede blog.
I also listened to a terrific audio on The Times of South Africa website describing a dramatic rescue of 150 guests from the Taj by a South African "close protection" security specialist. Check it out.
Even though Bush is despicable, he had apt words in response to the horrific Mumbai events. Obama went one better and both focused on India's diverse democracy.
My suggestion is Let us all keep our Eyes on the Prize -- Indian Democracy. Indian Democracy is the prize the terrorists are really after.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in contrast spoke as if he had been recently mummified. No sense of emotional connection to his suffering fellow citizens. Modi was his usual brash condemnable self and Patil was smirking about the Indian security response. Why does this fool still have a job?
I also picked up a story in Time magazine which I posted on my blog along with my comment which is pasted below:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
by aryn baker, With reporting by Jyoti Thottam / Mumbai and Ershad Mahmud / Islamabad
Jyoti Thottam and her Pakistani colleague both work for rightwing Time. Malcolm X had a choice phrase which describes their standing. Time and saja censorship would prevent me from using his phrase here, but it is an excellently apt one for these two sellout so-called journalists.
South Asian colonial history is more critically appraised by subaltern writers -- Time magazine and its writers do not qualify.
Britain's role in West Asia and South Asia which continues particularly through its "special" relationship with the U.S.
It is interesting to note that rightwing Time completely fails to narrate the U.S. neo-imperial distortion of West Asian and South Asian sub-continental geopolitics,
beginning all the way back from the imposed establishment of the state of Israel in West Asia and the creation of SEATO in the Dulles era of the U.S. Sate Department.
That constitutes the more recent 60+years' dominant-power context update of the present terrorist activity, that Time cleverly fails to provide.
The US took over from the Brits and expanded its own supremacist control over these regions,
with a combination of the old divide-and-rule strategy & new capital gained from exploiting Global South resources.
The US 'model' of 'democracy' founded on slavery and genocide and advanced through 'free' market exploitation of emerging post-colonial sovereign liberatory nation-states, needs to be emphatically and critically rejected in policy and practice by Global South regional economies and nation-states.
South-South cooperation is essential, real and already underway.
It's time Global South journalists located in the US stopped selling out/embedding with US mainstream media.
Oops, wrong place to make this observation, SAJA is part of the problem because it is located within the entrenched dominant U.S. media perspective that cravenly goes along with US foreign policy.
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Chithra KarunaKaran
Posted by: Chithra KarunaKaran | November 29, 2008 at 09:03 PM
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
===================================================================================================================
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862650,00.html
Friday, November 28, 2008
A People's Democracy in a Time of Terror
129. November 28, 2008 3:15 pm Link November 28, 2008 9:32 am Link
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/eyewitness-updates-nariman-house/?apage=2#comments
Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah Holtzberg, paid with their precious lives because they loved their Chabad Lubavitch religious beliefs and exercised their right to practice their religion freely in Mumbai India, with their peaceful co-adherents. The youthful and courageous Holtzbergs had lived in India since 2003, according to news reports.
Can anyone imagine Rabbi Holtzberg and his family and community living and practicing their religion -- in PAKISTAN?
Does anyone ever hear anything about Pakistan's minorities? Who are they? Where do they live? For that matter, what about Saudi Arabia's religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities, why are they made invisible?
Remember what happened to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose throat was slit by terrorists in Pakistan?
Democracy is always imperfect and always in need of continual work by The People.
In India our democracy is most certainly imperfect and we in India must make tireless efforts in the spirit of Gandhi, a democracy that is an outgrowth of our own history and civilization.
A start towards democracy, ETHICAL DEMOCRACY, built upon her own unique and complex history is essential, in Pakistan.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
==================================
Chithra Karunakaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
I was interested in two sets of comments sent by Bradsher of the NYTimes The Lede blog. My own comments are followed by his:
My Comment #1.
Even though there is no clear evidence and there probably will not be, of exactly who is behind the attacks, the Indian Prime Minister has already claimed without hard evidence there are “external linkages.” This causes people to distrust their popularly elected govt. The Indian leadership, not just the government but also the numerous regional parties and alliances, have to face up to the strong possibility that this is a homegrown terror event with multiple homegrown causes. Such an admission would force the current coalition govt and opposition leaders at the federal regional and local levels to work together to address and resolve major social, economic and political inequities on the ground, including ending Indian army atrocities in Kashmir as well as attempt to quell cross-border incursions from Pakistan.
India is an unprecedented democracy, therefore shemust reach into her own particular extraordinary history of revolutionary liberatory dissent led by Gandhi and others,and it cannot merely imitate the West’s response to terror attacks, which have complex underlying causes that need to be understood before we can act on them.
Bradsher wrote;
There is still great uncertainty about who was responsible for the attacks and why it has taken so long for the Indian Army to overcome the attackers.
============================================
Comment #2
This is Indian democracy in action. This is a country of enormous numbers of people. We the People get a ringside seat! I see numerous examples of the Indian “way of democratic process” every time I return ‘home.’ Of course the safety of the public is important but can it be allowed to overrule the people’s right to know. first hand?
Bradsher wrote:
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:10
The Indian army has not tried to clear residents from more than a radius of a block or two around combat sites. That radius might be adequate to protect spectators from grenade blasts, but it won’t save them from bullets fired by high-powered rifles, which can be deadly over distance of a couple miles.
The roads, rooftops and balconies around Nariman House are now crowded with over a thousand local gawkers. It is not clear if any have been injured.
==============================================
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/eyewitness-updates-nariman-house/?apage=2#comments
Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah Holtzberg, paid with their precious lives because they loved their Chabad Lubavitch religious beliefs and exercised their right to practice their religion freely in Mumbai India, with their peaceful co-adherents. The youthful and courageous Holtzbergs had lived in India since 2003, according to news reports.
Can anyone imagine Rabbi Holtzberg and his family and community living and practicing their religion -- in PAKISTAN?
Does anyone ever hear anything about Pakistan's minorities? Who are they? Where do they live? For that matter, what about Saudi Arabia's religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities, why are they made invisible?
Remember what happened to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose throat was slit by terrorists in Pakistan?
Democracy is always imperfect and always in need of continual work by The People.
In India our democracy is most certainly imperfect and we in India must make tireless efforts in the spirit of Gandhi, a democracy that is an outgrowth of our own history and civilization.
A start towards democracy, ETHICAL DEMOCRACY, built upon her own unique and complex history is essential, in Pakistan.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
==================================
Chithra Karunakaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
I was interested in two sets of comments sent by Bradsher of the NYTimes The Lede blog. My own comments are followed by his:
My Comment #1.
Even though there is no clear evidence and there probably will not be, of exactly who is behind the attacks, the Indian Prime Minister has already claimed without hard evidence there are “external linkages.” This causes people to distrust their popularly elected govt. The Indian leadership, not just the government but also the numerous regional parties and alliances, have to face up to the strong possibility that this is a homegrown terror event with multiple homegrown causes. Such an admission would force the current coalition govt and opposition leaders at the federal regional and local levels to work together to address and resolve major social, economic and political inequities on the ground, including ending Indian army atrocities in Kashmir as well as attempt to quell cross-border incursions from Pakistan.
India is an unprecedented democracy, therefore shemust reach into her own particular extraordinary history of revolutionary liberatory dissent led by Gandhi and others,and it cannot merely imitate the West’s response to terror attacks, which have complex underlying causes that need to be understood before we can act on them.
Bradsher wrote;
There is still great uncertainty about who was responsible for the attacks and why it has taken so long for the Indian Army to overcome the attackers.
============================================
Comment #2
This is Indian democracy in action. This is a country of enormous numbers of people. We the People get a ringside seat! I see numerous examples of the Indian “way of democratic process” every time I return ‘home.’ Of course the safety of the public is important but can it be allowed to overrule the people’s right to know. first hand?
Bradsher wrote:
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:10
The Indian army has not tried to clear residents from more than a radius of a block or two around combat sites. That radius might be adequate to protect spectators from grenade blasts, but it won’t save them from bullets fired by high-powered rifles, which can be deadly over distance of a couple miles.
The roads, rooftops and balconies around Nariman House are now crowded with over a thousand local gawkers. It is not clear if any have been injured.
==============================================
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Terror Strikes & India Grieves
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/27/world/asia/27mumbai.html?s=1&pg=8
My Comment NYT#193. (a version)
November 26, 2008 9:30 pm
India and ALL the sovereign nation-states of South Asia can go forward ONLY if We the People collectively WAGE PEACE & JUSTICE while increasing VIGILANCE and SECURITY, vigorously encouraging our governments to pursue the governance we DESERVE.
I thank every person for their comments that show CONCERN for those who suffered and died and have been injured in these horrific attacks and I send my sympathy to their families and communities who have suffered such a grevious loss.
I deplore all comments on these NYT Comment pages against Muslims and Islam, made in response to the terror attacks inflicted upon the innocent people of Mumbai, allegedly by a group calling themselves the Deccan Mujahadeen. Terrorism has no religion, though religion is used as an excuse.
Economic/ Social/Political Justice is a powerful antidote against terror. A few of the millions who are despairing and marginalized by hunger, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, discrimination can and do become pathological. They violate the rights of countless others with murderous, callous indifference. They can even lead seemingly comfortable middle class lives and still experience marginalization, as in the London bombings. Ethnic Tamil Hindus and ethnic Buddhists have been operating for decades with violence and murder in Sri Lanka.
What role have neo-imperial nation-states (U.S.) and former colonial powers (U.K.) played through invasion, occupation, sanctions, threats, settlement, militaristic intervention, resource consumption, in other formerly colonized, now emerging sovereign nation-states? Retaliatory extra-state terrorism and long-term state-sponsored corporate terrorism appear to be linked.
Mumbai is one amazing resilient global megacity, whether temporarily submerged by a powerful monsoon or by a powerful series of bloody bomb blasts. Mumbaikars are worthy of their/our great city and they are in our meditations and in our collective action.
Gandhi's lived message ("my life is my message") of peace and non-violence in this precise moment of terrorist violence, is especially relevant.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
My Comment NYT#193. (a version)
November 26, 2008 9:30 pm
India and ALL the sovereign nation-states of South Asia can go forward ONLY if We the People collectively WAGE PEACE & JUSTICE while increasing VIGILANCE and SECURITY, vigorously encouraging our governments to pursue the governance we DESERVE.
I thank every person for their comments that show CONCERN for those who suffered and died and have been injured in these horrific attacks and I send my sympathy to their families and communities who have suffered such a grevious loss.
I deplore all comments on these NYT Comment pages against Muslims and Islam, made in response to the terror attacks inflicted upon the innocent people of Mumbai, allegedly by a group calling themselves the Deccan Mujahadeen. Terrorism has no religion, though religion is used as an excuse.
Economic/ Social/Political Justice is a powerful antidote against terror. A few of the millions who are despairing and marginalized by hunger, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, discrimination can and do become pathological. They violate the rights of countless others with murderous, callous indifference. They can even lead seemingly comfortable middle class lives and still experience marginalization, as in the London bombings. Ethnic Tamil Hindus and ethnic Buddhists have been operating for decades with violence and murder in Sri Lanka.
What role have neo-imperial nation-states (U.S.) and former colonial powers (U.K.) played through invasion, occupation, sanctions, threats, settlement, militaristic intervention, resource consumption, in other formerly colonized, now emerging sovereign nation-states? Retaliatory extra-state terrorism and long-term state-sponsored corporate terrorism appear to be linked.
Mumbai is one amazing resilient global megacity, whether temporarily submerged by a powerful monsoon or by a powerful series of bloody bomb blasts. Mumbaikars are worthy of their/our great city and they are in our meditations and in our collective action.
Gandhi's lived message ("my life is my message") of peace and non-violence in this precise moment of terrorist violence, is especially relevant.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tibet's Middle Way & Ethical Democracy
Barnett's piece "Did Britain just sell Tibet?" will almost certainly increase the profile of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University. Barnett will likely join the other talking heads on the US TV circuit, as yet another neoliberal dominant mainstream voice in the US-led global recession, which contextualizes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's suggestion to China to provide capital to the IMF in return for voting power. Of course China is pleased with that craven suggestion, based on justifiable nationalistic pride in China's economic successes.
Q. Will the Tibetan people's interests be best served by either the British Government, The U.S. govt. or think tank programs in U.S. academe? The answer has got be an unqualified no, for now and the foreseeable future. Both the US (including its academic and other institutions) and Britain have very little to contribute. They both have the potential to do harm to the long term interest of Tibetans and Tibet.
The geopolitical configurations and reconfigurations of South and South East Asia (of which Tibet is a part) must be left to the sovereign nation-states of these regions because they are neighbors with historical ties and rapidly evolving contemporary cultural and economic relationships with nation states both within and outside their respective regions. BRIC (Brasil, India, China) would constitute such an example.
There is a dynamic balance of competing interests between the power economies of the sovereign nation-states of China and India.
The majority of Tibetan exiles live in India. China, a dictatorship "claimed" Tibet. India, a democracy "claimed" Sikkim. China's 'Tibetan question' is somewhat equivalent to India's 'Kashmir question'. Both think there is no "question."
The tacit support of one for the other in the corridors and conference halls of the U.N. have maintained the balance of power between them in the larger South and South East Asia regional contexts. Other sovereign-states, (even when they might only qualify as failing or failed states) in the region, Pakistan, Afghanistan are also part of the strategic equation. In addition, Russia is our neighbor. Iran is our neighbor, Iraq is our neighbor. The U.S. and Britain are not.
British Colonial control is still a shameful memory in the South and South East Asia regions. Britain was in the habit of "selling" territory and people of these regions during their period of Empire. U.S. neo-imperialism causes grave distrust among all countries in South and South East Asia.
The Dalai Lama has chosen the "non-violent Middle Way" to avoid the slaughter of Tibetans in their homeland and the destruction of their living religious and cultural heritage
To continue to persevere with this preferred Middle Way, in a highly complex inter-regional context with possible global repercussions,it is Tibetans and their leaders, first and foremost, who can best engage with the Chinese and their leaders, from safe havens and democratic spaces in Tibet, India and elsewhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/opinion/25barnett.html?hp
====================================================================================
Q. Will the Tibetan people's interests be best served by either the British Government, The U.S. govt. or think tank programs in U.S. academe? The answer has got be an unqualified no, for now and the foreseeable future. Both the US (including its academic and other institutions) and Britain have very little to contribute. They both have the potential to do harm to the long term interest of Tibetans and Tibet.
The geopolitical configurations and reconfigurations of South and South East Asia (of which Tibet is a part) must be left to the sovereign nation-states of these regions because they are neighbors with historical ties and rapidly evolving contemporary cultural and economic relationships with nation states both within and outside their respective regions. BRIC (Brasil, India, China) would constitute such an example.
There is a dynamic balance of competing interests between the power economies of the sovereign nation-states of China and India.
The majority of Tibetan exiles live in India. China, a dictatorship "claimed" Tibet. India, a democracy "claimed" Sikkim. China's 'Tibetan question' is somewhat equivalent to India's 'Kashmir question'. Both think there is no "question."
The tacit support of one for the other in the corridors and conference halls of the U.N. have maintained the balance of power between them in the larger South and South East Asia regional contexts. Other sovereign-states, (even when they might only qualify as failing or failed states) in the region, Pakistan, Afghanistan are also part of the strategic equation. In addition, Russia is our neighbor. Iran is our neighbor, Iraq is our neighbor. The U.S. and Britain are not.
British Colonial control is still a shameful memory in the South and South East Asia regions. Britain was in the habit of "selling" territory and people of these regions during their period of Empire. U.S. neo-imperialism causes grave distrust among all countries in South and South East Asia.
The Dalai Lama has chosen the "non-violent Middle Way" to avoid the slaughter of Tibetans in their homeland and the destruction of their living religious and cultural heritage
To continue to persevere with this preferred Middle Way, in a highly complex inter-regional context with possible global repercussions,it is Tibetans and their leaders, first and foremost, who can best engage with the Chinese and their leaders, from safe havens and democratic spaces in Tibet, India and elsewhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/opinion/25barnett.html?hp
====================================================================================
Monday, November 24, 2008
A neocon tries to make sense
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/opinion/24kristol.html?_r=1&hp
November 24th, 2008 6:39 am
Kristol:
The truth is, Schumer hasn’t a well-grounded view, or even a well-informed clue, as to how large the stimulus package “has to be".
But you Kristol do? At this particular financial market moment, No ONE does. The crystal ball is covered with soot.
But like Schumer, it is better to err on the side of The People, than to err against them. Kristol generally supports the latter stance whether in Iraq or at home.
My personal solution is to bail myself out. Spend as little as possible and grow or otherwise produce something of my own making -- a winter herb garden, crocheted gifts. Silly impractical me, but I have shown fiscal restraint all my life and I am not an economist or a talking head.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
November 24th, 2008 6:39 am
Kristol:
The truth is, Schumer hasn’t a well-grounded view, or even a well-informed clue, as to how large the stimulus package “has to be".
But you Kristol do? At this particular financial market moment, No ONE does. The crystal ball is covered with soot.
But like Schumer, it is better to err on the side of The People, than to err against them. Kristol generally supports the latter stance whether in Iraq or at home.
My personal solution is to bail myself out. Spend as little as possible and grow or otherwise produce something of my own making -- a winter herb garden, crocheted gifts. Silly impractical me, but I have shown fiscal restraint all my life and I am not an economist or a talking head.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Sunday, November 23, 2008
U.S. Exceptionalism & the American Terrorism Industry
Comment #
162. November 23, 2008 1:12 pm Link
Mr. Kristof:
How about the most important foreign policy strategy for the US? Stop meddling in Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.
This non-interference is what most sovereign nation-states in the world are practising in their own foreign policy relationships. And even on those occasions when they don't, it is NOT for the U.S. to play SuperCop.
Who elected the U.S., Who appointed the U.S., to perform this extra-legal, extra-state function?
Most sovereign states are attempting multi-polar alliances but the US continues to be uni-polar, dominant and supremacist. How 20th century!
Mr. Kristof, I don't think it is for YOU or anyone in the U.S. to prescribe the following:
"Third, we should push much harder for a peace deal in Kashmir — including far more pressure on India — because Kashmir grievances empower Pakistani militants."
The relations between India and Pakistan are the ongoing concern of these two sovereign nation-states. It is a complex dynamic socio-historical relationship. Both Pakistanis and Indians continue to face the grave challenges of hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, homelessness, disease.
Both ordinary Pakistanis and ordinary Indians are threatened by daily acts of terrorism in their streets, shopping areas and places of work; We don't need the US, with its laughable "intelligence" capabilities to hunt "insurgents." while actually killing innocent civilians.
In fact I am an admirer of the ordinary people of Pakistan and have deep friendships with a few of them. Like people everywhere in the world, especially if they can escape being meddled with by dominant self-serving superpowers or their own homegrown unscrupulous political elites, ordinary Pakistanis want peace, education, shelter, health, prosperity. They have suffered under uncaring political leadership and the machinations of the US in the South Asia region, all the way back to the Dulles era.
I really don't expect Kristof to understand this core point, because the strategic ideology of U.S. EXCEPTIONALISM ('we are the best, we are the greatest, we are the biggest, we can do whatever we want, wherever we want') pervades his thinking, no less than it pervades the thinking of the DoD or the Congress or the White House or the Department of State. Generations of Americans have been fed the hype of American individualism which since the Cold War era has morphed into US exceptionalism.
The U.S. presently runs a terrorism industry -- invading and occupying sovereign nation-states, hunting "terrorists" and "insurgents" increasing its undercover presence in parts of the world through "secret orders". Even the numerous books that detail US activities in Iraq and Afghanistan; the embedded anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists of the Human Terrain System (HTS) of the U.S. Army; the wounded veterans, the amputees and their resulting rehab with remarkable advances in engineering of prosthetic limbs etc etc, the PTSD sufferers and their innovative clinical interventions -- all these are spinoffs of the U.S. terrorism industry.
I respect Kristof's personal courage and writing. But Kristof just doesn't get it and it doesn't surprise me.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Link to Nicholas Kristof's article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23kristof.html
===================================================================================
162. November 23, 2008 1:12 pm Link
Mr. Kristof:
How about the most important foreign policy strategy for the US? Stop meddling in Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.
This non-interference is what most sovereign nation-states in the world are practising in their own foreign policy relationships. And even on those occasions when they don't, it is NOT for the U.S. to play SuperCop.
Who elected the U.S., Who appointed the U.S., to perform this extra-legal, extra-state function?
Most sovereign states are attempting multi-polar alliances but the US continues to be uni-polar, dominant and supremacist. How 20th century!
Mr. Kristof, I don't think it is for YOU or anyone in the U.S. to prescribe the following:
"Third, we should push much harder for a peace deal in Kashmir — including far more pressure on India — because Kashmir grievances empower Pakistani militants."
The relations between India and Pakistan are the ongoing concern of these two sovereign nation-states. It is a complex dynamic socio-historical relationship. Both Pakistanis and Indians continue to face the grave challenges of hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, homelessness, disease.
Both ordinary Pakistanis and ordinary Indians are threatened by daily acts of terrorism in their streets, shopping areas and places of work; We don't need the US, with its laughable "intelligence" capabilities to hunt "insurgents." while actually killing innocent civilians.
In fact I am an admirer of the ordinary people of Pakistan and have deep friendships with a few of them. Like people everywhere in the world, especially if they can escape being meddled with by dominant self-serving superpowers or their own homegrown unscrupulous political elites, ordinary Pakistanis want peace, education, shelter, health, prosperity. They have suffered under uncaring political leadership and the machinations of the US in the South Asia region, all the way back to the Dulles era.
I really don't expect Kristof to understand this core point, because the strategic ideology of U.S. EXCEPTIONALISM ('we are the best, we are the greatest, we are the biggest, we can do whatever we want, wherever we want') pervades his thinking, no less than it pervades the thinking of the DoD or the Congress or the White House or the Department of State. Generations of Americans have been fed the hype of American individualism which since the Cold War era has morphed into US exceptionalism.
The U.S. presently runs a terrorism industry -- invading and occupying sovereign nation-states, hunting "terrorists" and "insurgents" increasing its undercover presence in parts of the world through "secret orders". Even the numerous books that detail US activities in Iraq and Afghanistan; the embedded anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists of the Human Terrain System (HTS) of the U.S. Army; the wounded veterans, the amputees and their resulting rehab with remarkable advances in engineering of prosthetic limbs etc etc, the PTSD sufferers and their innovative clinical interventions -- all these are spinoffs of the U.S. terrorism industry.
I respect Kristof's personal courage and writing. But Kristof just doesn't get it and it doesn't surprise me.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Link to Nicholas Kristof's article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23kristof.html
===================================================================================
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Aging & Ethical Democracy
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/unenforced-filial-responsibility-laws/
21. November 22, 2008 8:44 am
Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/us/22home.html?hp
Aging & Ethical Democracy
I’m trying to understand this. The fact is, elderly persons could indeed move to retirement communities even in these parlous economic times times. They should if they want to. But their children, inheritors of their parents’ assets, want the biggest bang for their real estate buck and you simply cant get that now.
I say don’t hold parents and grandparents hostage to the economic situation. Don’t foreclose their finite future. If you cant sell, rent it out and wait out the economic maelstrom. The elderly have a few more golden years to live and the present mess isn’t going to straighten out for a while.
Also, to continue to live out their years in familiar surroundings is psychologically beneficial for the elderly and their younger kin. Transitions are stressful. Staying put in the home you love and dying in it eventually is maybe the best thing. So maybe NOT being able to move because of the real estate mess is actually a blessing in disguise for the elderly and their children and grandchildren.
Money isn’t everything as we are all finding out. The problem is not money but greed.
In fact, money turns out to be worthless but it can turn the world upside down.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
21. November 22, 2008 8:44 am
Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/us/22home.html?hp
Aging & Ethical Democracy
I’m trying to understand this. The fact is, elderly persons could indeed move to retirement communities even in these parlous economic times times. They should if they want to. But their children, inheritors of their parents’ assets, want the biggest bang for their real estate buck and you simply cant get that now.
I say don’t hold parents and grandparents hostage to the economic situation. Don’t foreclose their finite future. If you cant sell, rent it out and wait out the economic maelstrom. The elderly have a few more golden years to live and the present mess isn’t going to straighten out for a while.
Also, to continue to live out their years in familiar surroundings is psychologically beneficial for the elderly and their younger kin. Transitions are stressful. Staying put in the home you love and dying in it eventually is maybe the best thing. So maybe NOT being able to move because of the real estate mess is actually a blessing in disguise for the elderly and their children and grandchildren.
Money isn’t everything as we are all finding out. The problem is not money but greed.
In fact, money turns out to be worthless but it can turn the world upside down.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Time to Retire the Electoral College?
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/20/opinion/20thu1.html?s=1&pg=5
Post #110.
November 20, 2008 9:48 am
Link
Nothing and nobody should stand between The People and their vote in a democracy. Maybe a significant movement of tectonic plates but certainly not the Electoral College
The Electoral College, each individual within which, has only ONE vote, (the one they and all of us cast on Election Day), gets to vote TWICE, in a show of dominant power over the mass public electorate. In fact the electoral college loomed over the entire primary season as well as the election itself, as electoral college votes were counted state by state to determine the outcome.
Its unsavory beginnings as a holdover from slavery should be really enough to get the electoral college thrown out.
I agree that the U.S. Electoral College should be abolished, but the need for a constitutional amendment, like the battle for the ERA, will mean this will not happen.
If the media continues to throw light on the Electoral College not only before December 15, perhaps there will be enough momentum for an amendment to the Constitution. This constitutional amendment might follow after successful ballot referenda in every state?
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers
November 20, 2008 7:28 am
Nothing and nobody should stand between The People and their vote in a democracy. Maybe a significant movement of tectonic plates but certainly not the Electoral College
The Electoral College, each individual within which, has only ONE vote, (the one they and all of us cast on Election Day), gets to vote TWICE, in a show of dominant power over the mass public electorate. In fact the electoral college loomed over the entire primary season as well as the election itself, as electoral college votes were counted state by state to determine the outcome.
Its unsavory beginnings as a holdover from slavery should be really enough to get the electoral college thrown out.
I agree that the U.S. Electoral College should be abolished, but the need for a constitutional amendment, like the battle for the ERA, will mean this will not happen.
If the media continues to throw light on the Electoral College not only before December 15, perhaps there will be enough momentum for an amendment to the Constitution. This constitutional amendment might follow after successful ballot referenda in every state?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
Post #110.
November 20, 2008 9:48 am
Link
Nothing and nobody should stand between The People and their vote in a democracy. Maybe a significant movement of tectonic plates but certainly not the Electoral College
The Electoral College, each individual within which, has only ONE vote, (the one they and all of us cast on Election Day), gets to vote TWICE, in a show of dominant power over the mass public electorate. In fact the electoral college loomed over the entire primary season as well as the election itself, as electoral college votes were counted state by state to determine the outcome.
Its unsavory beginnings as a holdover from slavery should be really enough to get the electoral college thrown out.
I agree that the U.S. Electoral College should be abolished, but the need for a constitutional amendment, like the battle for the ERA, will mean this will not happen.
If the media continues to throw light on the Electoral College not only before December 15, perhaps there will be enough momentum for an amendment to the Constitution. This constitutional amendment might follow after successful ballot referenda in every state?
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers
November 20, 2008 7:28 am
Nothing and nobody should stand between The People and their vote in a democracy. Maybe a significant movement of tectonic plates but certainly not the Electoral College
The Electoral College, each individual within which, has only ONE vote, (the one they and all of us cast on Election Day), gets to vote TWICE, in a show of dominant power over the mass public electorate. In fact the electoral college loomed over the entire primary season as well as the election itself, as electoral college votes were counted state by state to determine the outcome.
Its unsavory beginnings as a holdover from slavery should be really enough to get the electoral college thrown out.
I agree that the U.S. Electoral College should be abolished, but the need for a constitutional amendment, like the battle for the ERA, will mean this will not happen.
If the media continues to throw light on the Electoral College not only before December 15, perhaps there will be enough momentum for an amendment to the Constitution. This constitutional amendment might follow after successful ballot referenda in every state?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
====================================================================================
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Unconscious Racial Bias & Ethical Democracy
16. November 18, 2008 9:26 am Link
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
What were the doctors? All white or racially and ethnically diverse?
Who were the patients? All Black or racially and ethically and economically diverse?
I may have missed these points in my quick initial reading of this article, so please excuse.
Some thoughts:
Race INTERSECTS with class, gender and sexual orientation but race frequently TRUMPS these other factors, in U.S. society.
We continue to be a racialized society in which Whiteness is the dominant system, structure and ideology, albeit highly nuanced in these times.
One doesn’t have the be white to perform and uphold Whiteness, a point that is essential to the maintenance of the dominant power of the Whiteness system.
A finding of unconscious racial bias is therefore a more plausible result, given the racialization of all discourses in U.S. society.
I might add:
commodified racialized discourses (from Black slavery and indigenous genocide onwards).
Chithra Karunakaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Findings
In Bias Test, Shades of Gray
Viktor Koen
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By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 17, 2008
Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias.
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The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.
But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.
Does this result really prove dangerous bias in the emergency room? Or, as critics suggest, does it illustrate problems with the way researchers have been using split-second reactions on a computer test to diagnose an epidemic of racial bias?
In a series of scathing critiques, some psychologists have argued that this computerized tool, the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., has methodological problems and uses arbitrary classifications of bias. If Barack Obama’s victory seemed surprising, these critics say, it’s partly because social scientists helped create the false impression that three-quarters of whites are unconsciously biased against blacks.
The I.A.T., which has been taken by millions of people on an academic Web site, measures respondents’ reaction times as they follow instructions to associate words like “joy” or “awful” with either blacks or whites. It generally takes whites longer to associate positive words with blacks than with whites, although some do show no bias. (To meet one of these exceptional cases, go to TierneyLab, at nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
The test is widely used in research, and some critics acknowledge that it’s a useful tool for detecting unconscious attitudes and studying cognitive processes. But they say it’s misleading for I.A.T. researchers to give individuals ratings like “slight,” “moderate” or “strong” — and advice on dealing with their bias — when there isn’t even that much consistency in the same person’s scores if the test is taken again.
“One can decrease racial bias scores on the I.A.T. by simply exposing people to pictures of African-Americans enjoying a picnic,” says Hart Blanton, a psychologist at Texas A&M. “Yet respondents who take this test on the Web are given feedback suggesting that some enduring quality is being assessed.” He says that even the scoring system itself has been changed arbitrarily in recent years. “People receiving feedback about their ‘strong’ racial biases,” Dr. Blanton says, “are encouraged in sensitivity workshops to confront these tendencies as some ugly reality that has meaning in their daily lives. But unbeknownst to respondents who take this test, the labels given to them were chosen by a small group of people who simply looked at a distribution of test scores and decided what terms seemed about right. This is not how science is done.”
Two of the leading I.A.T. researchers, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, say that some of the past criticism about their measurement techniques has been useful. But they dismiss most of the current objections as moot because the I.A.T.’s validity has been confirmed repeatedly.
In a new a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, Dr. Greenwald, Dr. Banaji and fellow psychologists conclude that scores on I.A.T. reliably predict people’s behavior and attitudes, and that the test is a better predictor of interracial behavior than self-description. Their critics reach a different conclusion after reanalyzing the data in some of those studies, which they say are inconsistent and sometimes demonstrate the reverse of what has been reported. They have suggested addressing the scientific dispute over bias — and the researchers’ arguments about the legal implications for affirmative-action policies — by having the two sides join in an “adversarial collaboration.”
One critic, Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he had found prominent research groups and scholars willing to mediate joint experiments. But so far nothing has happened — and each side blames the other. Dr. Greenwald says he tried proposing a joint experiment to Dr. Tetlock only to have it rejected. Dr. Tetlock says that he tried a counterproposal and offered to work out a compromise, but that the I.A.T. researchers had refused two invitations to sit down with independent mediators.
After all the mutual invective in the I.A.T. debate, maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the two sides to collaborate. But these social scientists are supposed to be experts in overcoming bias and promoting social harmony. If they can’t figure out how to get along with their own colleagues, how seriously should we take their advice for everyone else?
Journal List > J Gen Intern Med > v.22(9); Sep 2007
Abstract
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PubMed articles by:
Green, A.
Carney, D.
Pallin, D.
Banaji, M.
J Gen Intern Med. 2007 September; 22(9): 1231–1238.
Published online 2007 June 27. doi: 10.1007/s11606-007-0258-5.
PMCID: PMC2219763
Copyright © Society of General Internal Medicine 2007
Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients
Alexander R. Green, MD, MPH,corresponding author1 Dana R. Carney, PhD,2 Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH,3 Long H. Ngo, PhD,4 Kristal L. Raymond, MPH,5 Lisa I. Iezzoni, MD, MSc,4 and Mahzarin R. Banaji, PhD2
1The Disparities Solutions Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 50 Staniford Street, Suite 901, Boston, MA 02114 USA
2Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Boston, MA USA
3Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
4Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
5University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC USA
6The Institute for Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
Alexander R. Green, Phone: +1-617-7241913, Fax: +1-617-7264120, Email: argreen@partners.org.
corresponding authorCorresponding author.
Received October 30, 2006; Revised March 23, 2007; Accepted June 1, 2007.
Small right arrow pointing to: This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
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>Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
Abstract
Context
Studies documenting racial/ethnic disparities in health care frequently implicate physicians’ unconscious biases. No study to date has measured physicians’ unconscious racial bias to test whether this predicts physicians’ clinical decisions.
Objective
To test whether physicians show implicit race bias and whether the magnitude of such bias predicts thrombolysis recommendations for black and white patients with acute coronary syndromes.
Design, Setting, and Participants
An internet-based tool comprising a clinical vignette of a patient presenting to the emergency department with an acute coronary syndrome, followed by a questionnaire and three Implicit Association Tests (IATs). Study invitations were e-mailed to all internal medicine and emergency medicine residents at four academic medical centers in Atlanta and Boston; 287 completed the study, met inclusion criteria, and were randomized to either a black or white vignette patient.
Main Outcome Measures
IAT scores (normal continuous variable) measuring physicians’ implicit race preference and perceptions of cooperativeness. Physicians’ attribution of symptoms to coronary artery disease for vignette patients with randomly assigned race, and their decisions about thrombolysis. Assessment of physicians’ explicit racial biases by questionnaire.
Results
Physicians reported no explicit preference for white versus black patients or differences in perceived cooperativeness. In contrast, IATs revealed implicit preference favoring white Americans (mean IAT score = 0.36, P < .001, one-sample t test) and implicit stereotypes of black Americans as less cooperative with medical procedures (mean IAT score 0.22, P < .001), and less cooperative generally (mean IAT score 0.30, P < .001). As physicians’ prowhite implicit bias increased, so did their likelihood of treating white patients and not treating black patients with thrombolysis (P = .009).
Conclusions
This study represents the first evidence of unconscious (implicit) race bias among physicians, its dissociation from conscious (explicit) bias, and its predictive validity. Results suggest that physicians’ unconscious biases may contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in use of medical procedures such as thrombolysis for myocardial infarction.
KEY WORDS: unconscious bias, thrombolysis, race, clinical decisions, disparities
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Abstract
>BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
BACKGROUND
Widely documented racial/ethnic disparities are particularly striking in the treatment of cardiovascular disease,1,2 with whites up to twice as likely as blacks to receive thrombolytic therapy for myocardial infarction.3–7 Whether health professionals’ biases contribute to such disparities in care has been a subject of speculation and study.1,8–14 For example, physicians might believe that black patients are less likely to adhere to treatment recommendations than whites, and thus offer treatment less often.12 Some researchers speculate that unconscious bias is more likely to underlie treatment disparities than overt prejudice.12,15–18
The computer-based Implicit Association Test (IAT), first introduced in 1998, is now used widely to measure bias that may not be consciously recognized.19 The IAT measures the time it takes subjects to match representatives of social groups (e.g., age, gender, and race) to particular attributes (e.g., good, bad, cooperative, and stubborn). The IAT operationalizes unconscious bias by hypothesizing that subjects will match a group representative to an attribute more quickly if they connect these factors in their minds, regardless of their awareness of this connection. For instance, the more strongly subjects associate pictures of white persons with good concepts and pictures of black persons with bad concepts, the more quickly they will match them, and vice versa. The computerized IAT measures the aggregate time required for these matching tasks under two conditions (pairings). A difference in average matching speed for opposite pairings (e.g., black+bad/white+good vs black+good/white+bad) determines the IAT score (Fig. 1). Subjects are typically aware that they are making these connections but unable to control them given the rapid response times and structure of the test. To understand the IAT procedure, readers can sample the test at www.implicit.harvard.edu.20
Figure 1 Figure 1
Implicit Association Test (IAT) sample screens and stimuli. This figure displays sample screens and stimuli from the race preference (black-white/good-bad) IAT. Sample screens a, b, c, and d represent examples of pairing tasks that participants rapidly (more ...)
Although more than 200 studies have employed numerous versions of the IAT,19,20–24 and data from 5 million tests has accumulated from www.implicit.harvard.edu, the test has not been used to systematically observe the behavior of health care professionals. Given questions about the source of observed disparities in health service use, the IAT might provide insight into the contribution of implicit biases among physicians. In this study, we used a race preference IAT to measure implicit biases among emergency medicine and internal medicine residents. We also developed two new tests to measure stereotypes about general cooperativeness and specific cooperation with medical procedures. We tested whether both preferences and stereotypes affected physicians’ clinical decisions for white and black patients. More specifically, using a case vignette with patient race assigned randomly, three IATs, and a questionnaire, we sought to determine whether implicit or explicit race biases predict physicians’ decisions to give thrombolysis for acute myocardial infarction.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
>METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
METHODS
Participants and Study Procedures
In April and May 2005, we e-mailed a study invitation and three weekly reminders to all 776 internal medicine and emergency medicine residents in four academic medical centers in Boston, Mass, and Atlanta, Ga. The emails included a link to the research web site and a login code. Using an honor system administered by the chief residents, we offered participants a $10 gift certificate and entry into a lottery ($200 and $100 prizes for each site) for completing the 20-minute, anonymous, web-based study. Of the 776 residents, 393 (50.6%) participants completed the randomized vignette questionnaire and explicit bias section of the study. We excluded 25 participants who were not residents in an eligible program (n = 2) or had previously completed part of the study (n = 23). Fifty-seven participants failed to complete the IATs or had unusable IAT results, as described elsewhere.21 Twenty-four participants failed to complete the demographics section. This left 287 participants (37.0% of 776) who completed all aspects of the study. On a posttest question, 67 of these 287 participants reported some awareness of what the study was about through discussions with colleagues who had completed it. Because this awareness may have biased their responses to the case vignette, we omitted these participants from the analyses. All results (unless otherwise specified) are based on the 220 participants (28.4%) who completed the study and were unaware of the nature of the study.
Study Design
We created a web-based survey instrument that randomly assigned participants to see a picture of a black or white patient while reading a clinical vignette. From hundreds of shareware photographs, we chose 58 whose facial expressions appeared neutral. We created new patient images by morphing together these photographs using Photo Morpher Software (Morpheus Software, LLC, Santa Barbara, Calif, USA). The 21 best quality images were chosen and 19 independent evaluators (physicians, research assistants, and graduate students of various racial/ethnic backgrounds and not involved in the study) reviewed these. We chose four (two black and two white) that were most closely matched on apparent age (approximately 50 years) and attractiveness (7-point scale). The vignette (see Appendix) describes a 50-year-old male presenting to the emergency department with chest pain and an electrocardiogram suggestive of anterior myocardial infarction. It is stated that primary angioplasty is not an option and no absolute contraindications to thrombolysis are evident.
We asked participants to rate the likelihood that the chest pain was because of coronary artery disease (CAD) (5-point scale, very unlikely to very likely), whether they would give the patient thrombolysis (yes/no), and the strength of their recommendation (5-point scale, definitely to definitely not). To assess explicit bias, the software then asked participants several questions about whether they preferred white or black Americans (5-point scale with preference expressed as somewhat or slightly prefer black or white Americans, and 10-point thermometer scale of warm feelings toward each group separately). We also asked about their beliefs about patients’ cooperativeness in general and with regard to medical procedures such as thrombolysis (5-point scale—black patients somewhat less cooperative, slightly less cooperative, equally cooperative; white patients slightly less cooperative or somewhat less cooperative). Finally, the online survey included queries about respondent demographics, effectiveness of thrombolysis, and pre- and posttest opinions on unconscious bias and IATs. The vignettes and survey are available upon request.
Participants also completed three IATs corresponding to the explicit bias questions. The Race Preference IAT measured implicit association of white and black race with good and bad terms. We created the next two IATs specifically for this study. The Race Cooperativeness IAT measured implicit associations between race and general cooperativeness. The Race Medical Cooperativeness IAT measured implicit associations between race and cooperativeness with medical recommendations. All IAT scores are expressed as normally distributed continuous variables. For efficiency we used a 5-block structure for the IATs, with the specific pairing received first (e.g., black-bad/white-good) counterbalanced across participants. We scored IATs according to published guidelines with zero representing no racial bias, positive values representing prowhite bias, and negative scores representing problack bias (range typically −0.6 to 1.2).21 Figure 1 shows the faces representing white or black race and the terms used as stimuli for the concepts of good/bad and cooperativeness/uncooperativeness.
Analysis
We examined differences in demographic characteristics, likelihood of CAD, and decisions to treat with thrombolysis between participants assigned to black versus white patients using chi-square and t tests as appropriate. We compared mean IAT scores for various demographic groups using t tests. To look for relative disparity by race between diagnosis and treatment, we compared participants’ ratings of the likelihood that the chest pain was because of CAD (the diagnosis variable, 1–5 scale as above) with the likelihood of treating the patient with thrombolysis (the treatment variable, yes/no). To do this we put both the diagnosis and treatment variables on the same scale using z-scores. We then subtracted the treatment variable from the diagnosis variable to create a delta variable. A delta score of zero indicated that treatment was commensurate with diagnosis. A negative score indicated that treatment was more likely than diagnosis, and a positive score indicated that diagnosis was more likely than treatment. We used a one-way ANOVA to test whether diagnosis-treatment delta was different for black versus white patients.
To test whether bias predicted physicians’ use of thrombolysis for black and white patients, we used moderated multiple linear regression analysis with thrombolysis decision as the dependent variable, bias (implicit or explicit) as the independent variable, and patient race (black or white) as the moderator, adjusting for analysis-relevant covariates (e.g., physician race, sex, socioeconomic background, explicit race bias, implicit race bias, and belief in the effectiveness of thrombolysis). We then added the 67 physicians who were aware of the nature of the study back into the dataset and used moderated multiple linear regression to examine the potentially moderating impact of physician awareness on the relation between bias and thrombolysis decision. We performed all analyses using SPSS statistical software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill, USA). The study received approval from the Institutional Review Boards at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Partners HealthCare System, and Emory University.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
>RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
RESULTS
Table 1 describes demographic characteristics of the participants stratified by whether they were randomly assigned a black or white patient. Participants assigned black vs white patients did not differ significantly, except that first- and second-year residents were more likely to be assigned white patients. Year of residency did not have any significant effect on either likelihood of recommending thrombolysis (chi-square P = .98) or on IAT scores however. Table 1 shows mean IAT scores for all three IATs by participants’ demographic characteristics. Physician race was the only consistent demographic predictor of IAT scores. Black physicians had mean scores on all three IATs near zero, whereas all other groups had scores in the positive, prowhite range. Emergency medicine residents also had somewhat less prowhite IAT sores on the general cooperativeness IAT. There was no difference in the IAT scores of participants randomized to black versus white patient vignettes.
Table 1 Table 1
Baseline Characteristics and IAT Scores of Physician Participants
Physicians’ Explicit and Implicit Racial Biases
On the measures of explicit bias, participants expressed equal preference for black and white Americans on the 5-point scale of race preference (mean difference = 0.03, P = .36) and on the 10-point thermometer scale measuring warmth toward black and white Americans separately (mean difference = 0.04, P = .61). They reported black and white patients to be equally cooperative on a 5-point scale of cooperativeness with medical procedures (mean difference = 0.01, P = 1.00) and on a 10-point thermometer scale measuring cooperativeness separately for black and white patients (mean difference = 0.08, P = .49).
On the measures of implicit bias, all three IATs showed statistically significant effects (P < .001), with stronger associations of negative attributes (e.g., bad and uncooperative) to blacks than to whites. Figure 2 displays a graph of the magnitude of physicians’ bias on the 4 explicit measures (top half) and 3 implicit measures (bottom half). Because measures of explicit bias (5- and 10-point scales) and implicit bias (reaction time scores ranging from −1.01 to +1.35) were on different scales, the magnitude of physicians’ bias across the seven measures could only be directly compared by converting them all to the same metric—Cohen’s effect size d. Cohen’s d is conceptually defined as the magnitude of an effect independent of sample size (see conversion formula at the bottom of Fig. 2) and is widely used in empirical research and meta-analysis in the behavioral sciences. Cohen’s d values range in size from small (0.20), to medium (0.50), and large (0.80).25 As shown in Figure 2, none of the explicit effects approached the cutoff for a small effect. In contrast, all of the implicit effects were medium or large in magnitude.
Figure 2 Figure 2
Magnitude of physicians’ explicit (self-reported) and implicit (Implicit Association Test) race bias on a standardized scale—Cohen’s effect size d
Aggregate scores on the three separate IATs were all somewhat correlated (average pairwise correlation r = .32, P = .001). We found some correlation between implicit bias (IAT score) and explicit bias (composite 5-point scale and 10-point feeling thermometer) for general racial preference (r = .28, P = .001) and no correlation for cooperativeness with medical procedures (r = .05, P = .50).
Diagnosis of CAD and Treatment with Thrombolysis
On a scale from 1 (less than 20% likely) to 5 (more than 80% likely), physicians were more likely to diagnose black patients (M = 4.08) than white patients (M = 3.71) with CAD as a cause of their chest pain (P = .02). However, participants were equally likely to give thrombolysis for black (52%) and white (48%) patients (chi-square P = .68). In absolute numbers 29.8% (33/112) of physicians who saw a white patient vignette thought he was very likely to have CAD versus 40.1% (43/108) for black patients. Within this subgroup 58.2% of physicians were very likely to offer white patients thrombolysis versus 42.7% for black patients (P = .12) (results not shown). Using the delta score (z-score relating likelihood of diagnosis and treatment) we were able to adjust for covariates and show a racial disparity in thrombolysis relative to CAD diagnosis. For blacks, delta was 0.11, indicating lower likelihood of thrombolysis relative to the physician’s perception of the likelihood of acute myocardial infarction. For whites, delta was −0.14, indicating higher likelihood of thrombolysis (P = .06).
Implicit (But Not Explicit) Bias Predicts Differences in Physicians’ Thrombolysis Decisions
Physicians’ explicit (self-reported) attitudes toward patients (preference) or stereotypes about cooperativeness by race did not influence their decision to give thrombolysis for black versus white patients. A moderated multiple linear regression analysis showed no evidence of an interaction between self-reported attitude and patient race on thrombolysis recommendation (P = .82) (results not shown). This result remained nonsignificant after controlling for physicians’ implicit bias, race, sex, socioeconomic status (SES), and belief in thrombolysis effectiveness (P = .64).
Physicians’ implicit biases, however, showed strong associations with their decisions to give thrombolysis. Figure 3 illustrates how each of the three IAT results and the combined IAT composite predicted thrombolysis decisions for black and white patients. Subpanel A shows that as the degree of antiblack bias on the race preference IAT increased, recommendations for thrombolysis for black patients decreased. The interaction between implicit antiblack bias and patient race on treatment recommendation was significant (P = .009). After controlling for physicians’ explicit race bias, race, sex, SES, and belief in thrombolysis effectiveness, the interaction effect of patient race and thrombolysis remained significant. A composite IAT measure combining all three IATs (race, attitude, and stereotypes) showed the same pattern (subpanel D) and was statistically significant both with and without the covariates included in the model (P = .04). The same general pattern also held for the medical cooperativeness IAT (subpanel C); however, the interaction was not statistically significant (P =.21).
Figure 3 Figure 3
Relationship between physician race preference Implicit Association Test (IAT) score and thrombolysis decisions by patient race. *P < .05, **P = .05–0.11, B values are standardized regression coefficients (more ...)
Participants Who Were Aware of the Study’s Purpose
Results presented above excluded the 67 participants who reported some awareness of the nature of the study. Additional analyses including these 67 aware physicians demonstrated a two-way interaction between awareness and IAT score on thrombolysis recommendation (P = .001) (Fig. 4). As unaware physicians’ bias on the composite IAT variable increased, their likelihood of recommending thrombolysis to black patients decreased, as described above. In contrast, increase in bias among aware physicians was associated with more thrombolysis for black patients. All P values remained significant after adjusting for covariates and the same general pattern held for all three IATs.
Figure 4 Figure 4
Relation between physicians’ awareness of the study’s purpose and Implicit Association Test (IAT) bias on recommendation for thrombolysis (black patients only). B values are standardized regression coefficients that describe the magnitude (more ...)
Before completing the IAT section of the study, 60.5% of physicians agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Subconscious biases about patients based on their race may affect the way I make decisions about their care without my realizing it.” When shown the same statement after taking the IATs, 71.6% of physicians agreed or strongly agreed with this statement (difference in mean 5-point score = 0.33, P < .001 by paired t test). Meanwhile 74.8% felt that taking IATs is a worthwhile experience for physicians, and 76.1% felt that learning more about unconscious biases could improve their care of patients.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
>COMMENT
REFERENCES
COMMENT
The IAT has been used to study implicit preferences and stereotypes for over a decade. It is a new method in its application to studying health care provider bias as a potential root cause of racial/ethnic disparities in health care. This is the first study to use a sociocognitive measure of bias among physicians, and to correlate this with treatment decisions according to patient race. It also represents the first time that the IAT, first published in 1998,19 has been modified to measure and demonstrate an implicit stereotype specific to medical care (i.e., that black patients are less willing to undergo medical procedures).
Not surprisingly, most physicians did not admit to any racial biases explicitly. However, on the implicit measures of bias (IATs), most nonblack physicians demonstrated some degree of bias favoring whites over blacks. Participants’ scores on the race preference IAT showed a range of implicit race bias similar to previous experiments on nonphysicians.21,26 The new cooperativeness IATs were normally distributed and somewhat correlated with the well-studied race preference IAT, suggesting that they measure different but related components of race bias.
Findings of implicit bias and its effects on clinical decisions may surprise physicians who tend to view their work as both altruistic and evidence-based.27 Implicit race biases are prevalent in the United States in general,26 and as such it should not be surprising that they are prevalent among physicians as well. The neural and cognitive processes underlying these biases are assumed to reflect both evolutionary bases and socially acquired orientations. The content of implicit biases(e.g., that black Americans are less cooperative than white Americans) are assumed to derive from sociocultural learning (e.g., explicit instruction and implicit messages) that accumulate over time. Implicit biases are primarily unconscious and do not imply overt racism. This is supported by the strong dissociation in the average level of expressed, explicit preferences and elicited, implicit ones, as well as the low correlation between explicit and implicit preference observed in this study. Critics of implicit measure of social cognition have asserted that such preferences and beliefs may reflect messages about the state of social groups in the larger culture but cannot be said to reflect an individual’s own preferences. If that were the case, doctors’ own decisions should not have been predicted so clearly by their implicit biases. The fact that they do remind us that implicit biases may affect the behavior even of those individuals who have nothing but the best intentions,24 including those in medical professions.12,13,15 The IAT is but one method for detecting implicit social cognition and it is the first to be put to use in the present study in a medical context. As such, the meaning and significance of implicit biases in health care deserves much greater investigation.
We found no difference in the crude rate of thrombolysis between study participants assigned a black patient versus those assigned a white patient. However, this race equality in treatment occurred in the presence of greater diagnosis of CAD in black than white patients. Equal treatment in the face of unequal diagnosis between the two groups constitutes a disparity.
The result of interest did not depend on demonstrating disparities in treatment. Rather, this study was designed to determine whether physicians’ implicit biases (IAT scores) predicted different patterns of thrombolysis recommendation for black and white patients. We found that implicit bias against blacks (as measured by the race preference IAT) was negatively correlated with likelihood of recommending thrombolysis for black patients and positively correlated with likelihood of recommending thrombolysis for white patients. This finding suggests that unconscious race biases among physicians may influence their decisions about important interventions such as thrombolysis for suspected myocardial infarction. Whereas several studies have pointed to unconscious biases as one potential root cause for racial and ethnic disparities in health care,9–14 this is the first evidence directly supporting this link. We were encouraged to find most resident physicians open to the idea that unconscious biases could affect their clinical decisions, and that learning more about these biases could improve their care of patients. After completing the IATs, residents acknowledged greater vulnerability to unconscious bias than they did at the start, suggesting that the experience heightened their awareness. Also, those physicians who were aware that the study had to do with racial bias, and who had higher levels of implicit prowhite bias, were more likely to recommend thrombolysis to black patients than physicians with low bias—the opposite of the study’s main effect. This suggests that implicit bias can be recognized and modulated to counteract its effect on treatment decisions. These finding support the IAT’s value as an educational tool.
There are several limitations inherent in this study. Response rates were relatively low and the sample size smaller than ideal, making it difficult to detect smaller effects that may exist. Resident physicians, particularly those at large academic health centers in Boston and Atlanta may differ from physicians who typically make thrombolysis decisions, so it remains to be seen if those with greater experience show the same pattern. Nevertheless, our primary findings are based on an experimental manipulation involving randomized assignment of the physician to a black or white patient vignette, which provides confidence in the causal interpretations that are drawn. A second limitation derives from the use of a computerized presentation of a patient, which may, for reasons that may not be obvious, have contributed to an outcome that may not occur in a typical in-person encounter. The result of predictive validity we report may be an overestimation, but equally likely an underestimation of the role of implicit bias in clinical decision making.
Future studies might do well to examine actual patient-physician interactions, introducing such dimensions as communication, rapport, and other nonverbal behaviors that are known to be related to implicit discrimination. It may in fact be the subtleties of interracial interactions that lay the foundation for differential treatment to occur.28 IATs can be developed to provide a broader range of clinically relevant stereotypes, in addition to the tests we used. Studies should continue to obtain detailed measures of participant awareness because this did show impact on treatment decisions in our study.
In conclusion, our findings suggest that physicians, like others, may harbor unconscious preferences and stereotypes that influence clinical decisions. Further study is needed to confirm our findings, and to determine the extent to which unconscious racial biases contribute to health care disparities. Given the potential existence of these biases, new approaches to addressing disparities might include confidential feedback mechanisms to make physicians aware of disparities in their own cohort of patients, securely and privately administered IATs to increase physicians’ awareness of unconscious bias, and targeted education to mitigate its effects on clinical decision making. We cannot and do not suggest that unconscious bias among health professionals is the largest or most important factor leading to disparities in health care. However, the fact that it is, by its very nature, hidden from conscious awareness suggests that it receive explicit attention.
Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Joseph Betancourt at Massachusetts General Hospital and to Ron Walls and Tom Stair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for support and mentorship; to Elizabeth Donahue at Massachusetts General Hospital for assistance preparing the manuscript; and to Elizabeth Mela at Harvard University for help with all stages of this research and manuscript preparation. We are also grateful to Brian Nosek and his team at University of Virginia for developing the web-based study software and implementation. We are especially grateful to those who helped us coordinate data collection at each site: Art Kellerman, Phillip Shayne, Donald Brady, Joshua Larned, and Inginia Genao at Emory University, Carlo Rosen, Nate Shapiro, Eileen Reynolds, and Janet Buccola at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Valerie Stone and Deborah Wexler at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Eric Nadel, Peter Reese, and Joel Katz at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Funding and Support This study was funded by the Esther B. Kahn Fund of the Department of Emergency Medicine of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Green received support from a National Research Service Award, grant no. T32HP11001-15. Dr. Banaji and Dr.Carney received support from the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University and Dr. Banaji received support for the development of the internet-based portion of this study from the National Institute of Mental Health Grant HL-0000013 as well as the Mind Science Foundation. The funding organizations had no role in the design and conduct of the study, including data collection and management, analysis, interpretation of the data, and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.
Conflict Of Interest None disclosed.
Appendix
Clinical case vignette
Mr. Thompson is a 50-year-old man with a history of well-controlled hypertension and smoking, but no other risk factors for CAD, who presents to the emergency department with chest pain. He appears to be in a lot of pain describing it as “sharp, like being stabbed with a knife” and pointing to the midsternum. He has had it about 3 hours, and it has waxed and waned, but is now an 8 out of 10 in intensity. The pain is not exacerbated by movement or deep inspiration. It does not radiate and is not accompanied by shortness of breath, nausea, or diaphoresis. His vital signs, oxygen saturation, and physical exam are normal except for some mild sternal tenderness to palpation. His EKG shows 2 mm horizontal ST elevations in the anterior leads (not J-point elevation), but there is no prior EKG for comparison and there is no time for cardiac enzymes. He did not have access to a cardiac catheterization lab. He has no absolute contraindications to thrombolysis.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
>REFERENCES
REFERENCES
1.
Smedley BD, Stith AY, Nelson, AR, eds. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare. Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine; 2003.
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Kressin NR, Petersen LA. Racial differences in the use of invasive cardiovascular procedures: review of the literature and prescription for future research. Ann Intern Med. 2001;135(5):352–66. [PubMed].
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Petersen LA, Wright SM, Peterson ED, Daley J. Impact of race on cardiac care and outcomes in veterans with acute myocardial infarction. Med Care. 2002;40(1 suppl):I86–96. [PubMed].
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Allison JJ, Kiefe CI, Centor RM, Box JB, Farmer RM. Racial differences in the medical treatment of elderly Medicare patients with acute myocardial infarction. J Gen Intern Med. 1996;11(12):736–43. [PubMed].
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Canto JG, Allison JJ, Kiefe CI, et al. Relation of race and sex to the use of reperfusion therapy in medicare beneficiaries with acute myocardial infarction. N Engl J Med. 2000;342(15):1094–100. [PubMed].
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Weitzman S, Cooper L, Chambless L, Rosamond W, Clegg L. Gender, racial, and geographic differences in the performance of cardiac diagnostic and therapeutic procedures for hospitalized acute myocardial infarction in four states. Am J Cardiol. 1997;79(6):722–6. [PubMed].
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Taylor JHA, Canto JG, Sanderson B, Rogers WJ, Hilbe J. Management and outcomes for black patients with acute myocardial infarction in the reperfusion era. Am J Cardiol. 1998;82(9):1019–23. [PubMed].
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Physicians for Human Rights. The right to equal treatment. Available at http://www.phrusa.org/research/domestic/race/race_report/index.html. Cited 12 Nov 2005.
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Weisse CS, Sorum PC, Sanders KN, Syat BL. Do gender and race affect decisions about pain management? J Gen Intern Med. 2001;16(4):211–7. [PubMed].
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Fincher C, Williams JE, MacLean V, Allison JJ, Kiefe CI, Canto JG. Racial disparities in coronary heart disease: a sociological view of the medical literature on physician bias. Ethn Dis. 2004;14(3):360–71. [PubMed].
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Ayanian JZ, Cleary PD, Weissman JS, Epstein AM. The effect of patients’ preferences on racial differences in access to renal transplantation. N Engl J Med. 1999;341(22):1661–9. [PubMed].
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Bogart LM, Catz SL, Kelly JA, Benotsch EG. Factors influencing physicians’ judgments of adherence and treatment decisions for patients with HIV disease. Med Decis Making. 2001;21(1):28–36. [PubMed].
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van Ryn M. Research on the provider contribution to race/ethnicity disparities in medical care. Med Care. 2002;40(1 suppl):I140–51. [PubMed].
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van Ryn M, Burke J. The effect of patient race and socio-economic status on physicians’ perceptions of patients. Soc Sci Med. 2000;50(6):813–28. [PubMed].
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Schulman KA, Berlin JA, Harless W, et al. The effect of race and sex on physicians’ recommendations for cardiac catheterization. N Engl J Med. 1999;340(8):618–26. [PubMed].
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Devine PG. Stereotypes and prejudice: their automatic and controlled components. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1989;56(1):5–18.
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van Ryn M, Fu SS. Paved with good intentions: do public health and human service providers contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in health? Am J Public Health. 2003;93(2):248–55. [PubMed].
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Einbinder LC, Schulman KA. The effect of race on the referral process for invasive cardiac procedures. Med Care Res Rev. 2000;57(suppl 1):162–80. [PubMed].
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Greenwald AG, McGhee DE, Schwartz JL. Measuring individual differences in implicit social cognition: the implicit association test. Am J Public Health. 1998;74(6):1464–80.
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Fazio RH, Jackson JR, Dunton BC, Williams C. Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: a bona fide pipeline? J Pers Soc Psychol. 1995;69(6):1013–27. [PubMed].
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Greenwald AG, Nosek BA, Banaji MR. Understanding and using the implicit association test: an improved scoring algorithm. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003;85(2):197–216. [PubMed].
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Greenwald AG, Banaji MR. Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self–esteem, and stereotypes. Psychol Rev. 1995;102(1):4–27. [PubMed].
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Banaji MR. Implicit attitudes can be measured. In: Roediger H, III, Nairne J, Neath I, Surprenant A, eds. The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G Crowder. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 2001:117–50.
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Poehlman TA, Uhlmann E, Greenwald AG, Banaji MR. Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity.
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Cohen J. Statistical power analysis for the behavior sciences. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum; 1988.
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Nosek BA, Banaji MR, Greenwald AG. Harvesting implicit group attitudes and beliefs from a demonstration web site. Group Dyn. 2002;6(1):101–15.
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Betancourt J. Not me! Doctors, decisions, and disparities in health care. Cardiovas Rev Rep. 2004;25(3):105–9.
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Dovidio JF, Gaertner SL, Kawakami K, Hodson G. Why can’t we just get along? Interpersonal biases and interracial distrust. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol. 2002;8(2):88–102. [PubMed].
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What were the doctors? All white or racially and ethnically diverse?
Who were the patients? All Black or racially and ethically and economically diverse?
I may have missed these points in my quick initial reading of this article, so please excuse.
Some thoughts:
Race INTERSECTS with class, gender and sexual orientation but race frequently TRUMPS these other factors, in U.S. society.
We continue to be a racialized society in which Whiteness is the dominant system, structure and ideology, albeit highly nuanced in these times.
One doesn’t have the be white to perform and uphold Whiteness, a point that is essential to the maintenance of the dominant power of the Whiteness system.
A finding of unconscious racial bias is therefore a more plausible result, given the racialization of all discourses in U.S. society.
I might add:
commodified racialized discourses (from Black slavery and indigenous genocide onwards).
Chithra Karunakaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Findings
In Bias Test, Shades of Gray
Viktor Koen
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By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 17, 2008
Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias.
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The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.
But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.
Does this result really prove dangerous bias in the emergency room? Or, as critics suggest, does it illustrate problems with the way researchers have been using split-second reactions on a computer test to diagnose an epidemic of racial bias?
In a series of scathing critiques, some psychologists have argued that this computerized tool, the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., has methodological problems and uses arbitrary classifications of bias. If Barack Obama’s victory seemed surprising, these critics say, it’s partly because social scientists helped create the false impression that three-quarters of whites are unconsciously biased against blacks.
The I.A.T., which has been taken by millions of people on an academic Web site, measures respondents’ reaction times as they follow instructions to associate words like “joy” or “awful” with either blacks or whites. It generally takes whites longer to associate positive words with blacks than with whites, although some do show no bias. (To meet one of these exceptional cases, go to TierneyLab, at nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
The test is widely used in research, and some critics acknowledge that it’s a useful tool for detecting unconscious attitudes and studying cognitive processes. But they say it’s misleading for I.A.T. researchers to give individuals ratings like “slight,” “moderate” or “strong” — and advice on dealing with their bias — when there isn’t even that much consistency in the same person’s scores if the test is taken again.
“One can decrease racial bias scores on the I.A.T. by simply exposing people to pictures of African-Americans enjoying a picnic,” says Hart Blanton, a psychologist at Texas A&M. “Yet respondents who take this test on the Web are given feedback suggesting that some enduring quality is being assessed.” He says that even the scoring system itself has been changed arbitrarily in recent years. “People receiving feedback about their ‘strong’ racial biases,” Dr. Blanton says, “are encouraged in sensitivity workshops to confront these tendencies as some ugly reality that has meaning in their daily lives. But unbeknownst to respondents who take this test, the labels given to them were chosen by a small group of people who simply looked at a distribution of test scores and decided what terms seemed about right. This is not how science is done.”
Two of the leading I.A.T. researchers, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, say that some of the past criticism about their measurement techniques has been useful. But they dismiss most of the current objections as moot because the I.A.T.’s validity has been confirmed repeatedly.
In a new a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, Dr. Greenwald, Dr. Banaji and fellow psychologists conclude that scores on I.A.T. reliably predict people’s behavior and attitudes, and that the test is a better predictor of interracial behavior than self-description. Their critics reach a different conclusion after reanalyzing the data in some of those studies, which they say are inconsistent and sometimes demonstrate the reverse of what has been reported. They have suggested addressing the scientific dispute over bias — and the researchers’ arguments about the legal implications for affirmative-action policies — by having the two sides join in an “adversarial collaboration.”
One critic, Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he had found prominent research groups and scholars willing to mediate joint experiments. But so far nothing has happened — and each side blames the other. Dr. Greenwald says he tried proposing a joint experiment to Dr. Tetlock only to have it rejected. Dr. Tetlock says that he tried a counterproposal and offered to work out a compromise, but that the I.A.T. researchers had refused two invitations to sit down with independent mediators.
After all the mutual invective in the I.A.T. debate, maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the two sides to collaborate. But these social scientists are supposed to be experts in overcoming bias and promoting social harmony. If they can’t figure out how to get along with their own colleagues, how seriously should we take their advice for everyone else?
Journal List > J Gen Intern Med > v.22(9); Sep 2007
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Banaji, M.
J Gen Intern Med. 2007 September; 22(9): 1231–1238.
Published online 2007 June 27. doi: 10.1007/s11606-007-0258-5.
PMCID: PMC2219763
Copyright © Society of General Internal Medicine 2007
Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients
Alexander R. Green, MD, MPH,corresponding author1 Dana R. Carney, PhD,2 Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH,3 Long H. Ngo, PhD,4 Kristal L. Raymond, MPH,5 Lisa I. Iezzoni, MD, MSc,4 and Mahzarin R. Banaji, PhD2
1The Disparities Solutions Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 50 Staniford Street, Suite 901, Boston, MA 02114 USA
2Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Boston, MA USA
3Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
4Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
5University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC USA
6The Institute for Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
Alexander R. Green, Phone: +1-617-7241913, Fax: +1-617-7264120, Email: argreen@partners.org.
corresponding authorCorresponding author.
Received October 30, 2006; Revised March 23, 2007; Accepted June 1, 2007.
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>Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
Abstract
Context
Studies documenting racial/ethnic disparities in health care frequently implicate physicians’ unconscious biases. No study to date has measured physicians’ unconscious racial bias to test whether this predicts physicians’ clinical decisions.
Objective
To test whether physicians show implicit race bias and whether the magnitude of such bias predicts thrombolysis recommendations for black and white patients with acute coronary syndromes.
Design, Setting, and Participants
An internet-based tool comprising a clinical vignette of a patient presenting to the emergency department with an acute coronary syndrome, followed by a questionnaire and three Implicit Association Tests (IATs). Study invitations were e-mailed to all internal medicine and emergency medicine residents at four academic medical centers in Atlanta and Boston; 287 completed the study, met inclusion criteria, and were randomized to either a black or white vignette patient.
Main Outcome Measures
IAT scores (normal continuous variable) measuring physicians’ implicit race preference and perceptions of cooperativeness. Physicians’ attribution of symptoms to coronary artery disease for vignette patients with randomly assigned race, and their decisions about thrombolysis. Assessment of physicians’ explicit racial biases by questionnaire.
Results
Physicians reported no explicit preference for white versus black patients or differences in perceived cooperativeness. In contrast, IATs revealed implicit preference favoring white Americans (mean IAT score = 0.36, P < .001, one-sample t test) and implicit stereotypes of black Americans as less cooperative with medical procedures (mean IAT score 0.22, P < .001), and less cooperative generally (mean IAT score 0.30, P < .001). As physicians’ prowhite implicit bias increased, so did their likelihood of treating white patients and not treating black patients with thrombolysis (P = .009).
Conclusions
This study represents the first evidence of unconscious (implicit) race bias among physicians, its dissociation from conscious (explicit) bias, and its predictive validity. Results suggest that physicians’ unconscious biases may contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in use of medical procedures such as thrombolysis for myocardial infarction.
KEY WORDS: unconscious bias, thrombolysis, race, clinical decisions, disparities
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Abstract
>BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
BACKGROUND
Widely documented racial/ethnic disparities are particularly striking in the treatment of cardiovascular disease,1,2 with whites up to twice as likely as blacks to receive thrombolytic therapy for myocardial infarction.3–7 Whether health professionals’ biases contribute to such disparities in care has been a subject of speculation and study.1,8–14 For example, physicians might believe that black patients are less likely to adhere to treatment recommendations than whites, and thus offer treatment less often.12 Some researchers speculate that unconscious bias is more likely to underlie treatment disparities than overt prejudice.12,15–18
The computer-based Implicit Association Test (IAT), first introduced in 1998, is now used widely to measure bias that may not be consciously recognized.19 The IAT measures the time it takes subjects to match representatives of social groups (e.g., age, gender, and race) to particular attributes (e.g., good, bad, cooperative, and stubborn). The IAT operationalizes unconscious bias by hypothesizing that subjects will match a group representative to an attribute more quickly if they connect these factors in their minds, regardless of their awareness of this connection. For instance, the more strongly subjects associate pictures of white persons with good concepts and pictures of black persons with bad concepts, the more quickly they will match them, and vice versa. The computerized IAT measures the aggregate time required for these matching tasks under two conditions (pairings). A difference in average matching speed for opposite pairings (e.g., black+bad/white+good vs black+good/white+bad) determines the IAT score (Fig. 1). Subjects are typically aware that they are making these connections but unable to control them given the rapid response times and structure of the test. To understand the IAT procedure, readers can sample the test at www.implicit.harvard.edu.20
Figure 1 Figure 1
Implicit Association Test (IAT) sample screens and stimuli. This figure displays sample screens and stimuli from the race preference (black-white/good-bad) IAT. Sample screens a, b, c, and d represent examples of pairing tasks that participants rapidly (more ...)
Although more than 200 studies have employed numerous versions of the IAT,19,20–24 and data from 5 million tests has accumulated from www.implicit.harvard.edu, the test has not been used to systematically observe the behavior of health care professionals. Given questions about the source of observed disparities in health service use, the IAT might provide insight into the contribution of implicit biases among physicians. In this study, we used a race preference IAT to measure implicit biases among emergency medicine and internal medicine residents. We also developed two new tests to measure stereotypes about general cooperativeness and specific cooperation with medical procedures. We tested whether both preferences and stereotypes affected physicians’ clinical decisions for white and black patients. More specifically, using a case vignette with patient race assigned randomly, three IATs, and a questionnaire, we sought to determine whether implicit or explicit race biases predict physicians’ decisions to give thrombolysis for acute myocardial infarction.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
>METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
METHODS
Participants and Study Procedures
In April and May 2005, we e-mailed a study invitation and three weekly reminders to all 776 internal medicine and emergency medicine residents in four academic medical centers in Boston, Mass, and Atlanta, Ga. The emails included a link to the research web site and a login code. Using an honor system administered by the chief residents, we offered participants a $10 gift certificate and entry into a lottery ($200 and $100 prizes for each site) for completing the 20-minute, anonymous, web-based study. Of the 776 residents, 393 (50.6%) participants completed the randomized vignette questionnaire and explicit bias section of the study. We excluded 25 participants who were not residents in an eligible program (n = 2) or had previously completed part of the study (n = 23). Fifty-seven participants failed to complete the IATs or had unusable IAT results, as described elsewhere.21 Twenty-four participants failed to complete the demographics section. This left 287 participants (37.0% of 776) who completed all aspects of the study. On a posttest question, 67 of these 287 participants reported some awareness of what the study was about through discussions with colleagues who had completed it. Because this awareness may have biased their responses to the case vignette, we omitted these participants from the analyses. All results (unless otherwise specified) are based on the 220 participants (28.4%) who completed the study and were unaware of the nature of the study.
Study Design
We created a web-based survey instrument that randomly assigned participants to see a picture of a black or white patient while reading a clinical vignette. From hundreds of shareware photographs, we chose 58 whose facial expressions appeared neutral. We created new patient images by morphing together these photographs using Photo Morpher Software (Morpheus Software, LLC, Santa Barbara, Calif, USA). The 21 best quality images were chosen and 19 independent evaluators (physicians, research assistants, and graduate students of various racial/ethnic backgrounds and not involved in the study) reviewed these. We chose four (two black and two white) that were most closely matched on apparent age (approximately 50 years) and attractiveness (7-point scale). The vignette (see Appendix) describes a 50-year-old male presenting to the emergency department with chest pain and an electrocardiogram suggestive of anterior myocardial infarction. It is stated that primary angioplasty is not an option and no absolute contraindications to thrombolysis are evident.
We asked participants to rate the likelihood that the chest pain was because of coronary artery disease (CAD) (5-point scale, very unlikely to very likely), whether they would give the patient thrombolysis (yes/no), and the strength of their recommendation (5-point scale, definitely to definitely not). To assess explicit bias, the software then asked participants several questions about whether they preferred white or black Americans (5-point scale with preference expressed as somewhat or slightly prefer black or white Americans, and 10-point thermometer scale of warm feelings toward each group separately). We also asked about their beliefs about patients’ cooperativeness in general and with regard to medical procedures such as thrombolysis (5-point scale—black patients somewhat less cooperative, slightly less cooperative, equally cooperative; white patients slightly less cooperative or somewhat less cooperative). Finally, the online survey included queries about respondent demographics, effectiveness of thrombolysis, and pre- and posttest opinions on unconscious bias and IATs. The vignettes and survey are available upon request.
Participants also completed three IATs corresponding to the explicit bias questions. The Race Preference IAT measured implicit association of white and black race with good and bad terms. We created the next two IATs specifically for this study. The Race Cooperativeness IAT measured implicit associations between race and general cooperativeness. The Race Medical Cooperativeness IAT measured implicit associations between race and cooperativeness with medical recommendations. All IAT scores are expressed as normally distributed continuous variables. For efficiency we used a 5-block structure for the IATs, with the specific pairing received first (e.g., black-bad/white-good) counterbalanced across participants. We scored IATs according to published guidelines with zero representing no racial bias, positive values representing prowhite bias, and negative scores representing problack bias (range typically −0.6 to 1.2).21 Figure 1 shows the faces representing white or black race and the terms used as stimuli for the concepts of good/bad and cooperativeness/uncooperativeness.
Analysis
We examined differences in demographic characteristics, likelihood of CAD, and decisions to treat with thrombolysis between participants assigned to black versus white patients using chi-square and t tests as appropriate. We compared mean IAT scores for various demographic groups using t tests. To look for relative disparity by race between diagnosis and treatment, we compared participants’ ratings of the likelihood that the chest pain was because of CAD (the diagnosis variable, 1–5 scale as above) with the likelihood of treating the patient with thrombolysis (the treatment variable, yes/no). To do this we put both the diagnosis and treatment variables on the same scale using z-scores. We then subtracted the treatment variable from the diagnosis variable to create a delta variable. A delta score of zero indicated that treatment was commensurate with diagnosis. A negative score indicated that treatment was more likely than diagnosis, and a positive score indicated that diagnosis was more likely than treatment. We used a one-way ANOVA to test whether diagnosis-treatment delta was different for black versus white patients.
To test whether bias predicted physicians’ use of thrombolysis for black and white patients, we used moderated multiple linear regression analysis with thrombolysis decision as the dependent variable, bias (implicit or explicit) as the independent variable, and patient race (black or white) as the moderator, adjusting for analysis-relevant covariates (e.g., physician race, sex, socioeconomic background, explicit race bias, implicit race bias, and belief in the effectiveness of thrombolysis). We then added the 67 physicians who were aware of the nature of the study back into the dataset and used moderated multiple linear regression to examine the potentially moderating impact of physician awareness on the relation between bias and thrombolysis decision. We performed all analyses using SPSS statistical software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill, USA). The study received approval from the Institutional Review Boards at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Partners HealthCare System, and Emory University.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
>RESULTS
COMMENT
REFERENCES
RESULTS
Table 1 describes demographic characteristics of the participants stratified by whether they were randomly assigned a black or white patient. Participants assigned black vs white patients did not differ significantly, except that first- and second-year residents were more likely to be assigned white patients. Year of residency did not have any significant effect on either likelihood of recommending thrombolysis (chi-square P = .98) or on IAT scores however. Table 1 shows mean IAT scores for all three IATs by participants’ demographic characteristics. Physician race was the only consistent demographic predictor of IAT scores. Black physicians had mean scores on all three IATs near zero, whereas all other groups had scores in the positive, prowhite range. Emergency medicine residents also had somewhat less prowhite IAT sores on the general cooperativeness IAT. There was no difference in the IAT scores of participants randomized to black versus white patient vignettes.
Table 1 Table 1
Baseline Characteristics and IAT Scores of Physician Participants
Physicians’ Explicit and Implicit Racial Biases
On the measures of explicit bias, participants expressed equal preference for black and white Americans on the 5-point scale of race preference (mean difference = 0.03, P = .36) and on the 10-point thermometer scale measuring warmth toward black and white Americans separately (mean difference = 0.04, P = .61). They reported black and white patients to be equally cooperative on a 5-point scale of cooperativeness with medical procedures (mean difference = 0.01, P = 1.00) and on a 10-point thermometer scale measuring cooperativeness separately for black and white patients (mean difference = 0.08, P = .49).
On the measures of implicit bias, all three IATs showed statistically significant effects (P < .001), with stronger associations of negative attributes (e.g., bad and uncooperative) to blacks than to whites. Figure 2 displays a graph of the magnitude of physicians’ bias on the 4 explicit measures (top half) and 3 implicit measures (bottom half). Because measures of explicit bias (5- and 10-point scales) and implicit bias (reaction time scores ranging from −1.01 to +1.35) were on different scales, the magnitude of physicians’ bias across the seven measures could only be directly compared by converting them all to the same metric—Cohen’s effect size d. Cohen’s d is conceptually defined as the magnitude of an effect independent of sample size (see conversion formula at the bottom of Fig. 2) and is widely used in empirical research and meta-analysis in the behavioral sciences. Cohen’s d values range in size from small (0.20), to medium (0.50), and large (0.80).25 As shown in Figure 2, none of the explicit effects approached the cutoff for a small effect. In contrast, all of the implicit effects were medium or large in magnitude.
Figure 2 Figure 2
Magnitude of physicians’ explicit (self-reported) and implicit (Implicit Association Test) race bias on a standardized scale—Cohen’s effect size d
Aggregate scores on the three separate IATs were all somewhat correlated (average pairwise correlation r = .32, P = .001). We found some correlation between implicit bias (IAT score) and explicit bias (composite 5-point scale and 10-point feeling thermometer) for general racial preference (r = .28, P = .001) and no correlation for cooperativeness with medical procedures (r = .05, P = .50).
Diagnosis of CAD and Treatment with Thrombolysis
On a scale from 1 (less than 20% likely) to 5 (more than 80% likely), physicians were more likely to diagnose black patients (M = 4.08) than white patients (M = 3.71) with CAD as a cause of their chest pain (P = .02). However, participants were equally likely to give thrombolysis for black (52%) and white (48%) patients (chi-square P = .68). In absolute numbers 29.8% (33/112) of physicians who saw a white patient vignette thought he was very likely to have CAD versus 40.1% (43/108) for black patients. Within this subgroup 58.2% of physicians were very likely to offer white patients thrombolysis versus 42.7% for black patients (P = .12) (results not shown). Using the delta score (z-score relating likelihood of diagnosis and treatment) we were able to adjust for covariates and show a racial disparity in thrombolysis relative to CAD diagnosis. For blacks, delta was 0.11, indicating lower likelihood of thrombolysis relative to the physician’s perception of the likelihood of acute myocardial infarction. For whites, delta was −0.14, indicating higher likelihood of thrombolysis (P = .06).
Implicit (But Not Explicit) Bias Predicts Differences in Physicians’ Thrombolysis Decisions
Physicians’ explicit (self-reported) attitudes toward patients (preference) or stereotypes about cooperativeness by race did not influence their decision to give thrombolysis for black versus white patients. A moderated multiple linear regression analysis showed no evidence of an interaction between self-reported attitude and patient race on thrombolysis recommendation (P = .82) (results not shown). This result remained nonsignificant after controlling for physicians’ implicit bias, race, sex, socioeconomic status (SES), and belief in thrombolysis effectiveness (P = .64).
Physicians’ implicit biases, however, showed strong associations with their decisions to give thrombolysis. Figure 3 illustrates how each of the three IAT results and the combined IAT composite predicted thrombolysis decisions for black and white patients. Subpanel A shows that as the degree of antiblack bias on the race preference IAT increased, recommendations for thrombolysis for black patients decreased. The interaction between implicit antiblack bias and patient race on treatment recommendation was significant (P = .009). After controlling for physicians’ explicit race bias, race, sex, SES, and belief in thrombolysis effectiveness, the interaction effect of patient race and thrombolysis remained significant. A composite IAT measure combining all three IATs (race, attitude, and stereotypes) showed the same pattern (subpanel D) and was statistically significant both with and without the covariates included in the model (P = .04). The same general pattern also held for the medical cooperativeness IAT (subpanel C); however, the interaction was not statistically significant (P =.21).
Figure 3 Figure 3
Relationship between physician race preference Implicit Association Test (IAT) score and thrombolysis decisions by patient race. *P < .05, **P = .05–0.11, B values are standardized regression coefficients (more ...)
Participants Who Were Aware of the Study’s Purpose
Results presented above excluded the 67 participants who reported some awareness of the nature of the study. Additional analyses including these 67 aware physicians demonstrated a two-way interaction between awareness and IAT score on thrombolysis recommendation (P = .001) (Fig. 4). As unaware physicians’ bias on the composite IAT variable increased, their likelihood of recommending thrombolysis to black patients decreased, as described above. In contrast, increase in bias among aware physicians was associated with more thrombolysis for black patients. All P values remained significant after adjusting for covariates and the same general pattern held for all three IATs.
Figure 4 Figure 4
Relation between physicians’ awareness of the study’s purpose and Implicit Association Test (IAT) bias on recommendation for thrombolysis (black patients only). B values are standardized regression coefficients that describe the magnitude (more ...)
Before completing the IAT section of the study, 60.5% of physicians agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Subconscious biases about patients based on their race may affect the way I make decisions about their care without my realizing it.” When shown the same statement after taking the IATs, 71.6% of physicians agreed or strongly agreed with this statement (difference in mean 5-point score = 0.33, P < .001 by paired t test). Meanwhile 74.8% felt that taking IATs is a worthwhile experience for physicians, and 76.1% felt that learning more about unconscious biases could improve their care of patients.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
>COMMENT
REFERENCES
COMMENT
The IAT has been used to study implicit preferences and stereotypes for over a decade. It is a new method in its application to studying health care provider bias as a potential root cause of racial/ethnic disparities in health care. This is the first study to use a sociocognitive measure of bias among physicians, and to correlate this with treatment decisions according to patient race. It also represents the first time that the IAT, first published in 1998,19 has been modified to measure and demonstrate an implicit stereotype specific to medical care (i.e., that black patients are less willing to undergo medical procedures).
Not surprisingly, most physicians did not admit to any racial biases explicitly. However, on the implicit measures of bias (IATs), most nonblack physicians demonstrated some degree of bias favoring whites over blacks. Participants’ scores on the race preference IAT showed a range of implicit race bias similar to previous experiments on nonphysicians.21,26 The new cooperativeness IATs were normally distributed and somewhat correlated with the well-studied race preference IAT, suggesting that they measure different but related components of race bias.
Findings of implicit bias and its effects on clinical decisions may surprise physicians who tend to view their work as both altruistic and evidence-based.27 Implicit race biases are prevalent in the United States in general,26 and as such it should not be surprising that they are prevalent among physicians as well. The neural and cognitive processes underlying these biases are assumed to reflect both evolutionary bases and socially acquired orientations. The content of implicit biases(e.g., that black Americans are less cooperative than white Americans) are assumed to derive from sociocultural learning (e.g., explicit instruction and implicit messages) that accumulate over time. Implicit biases are primarily unconscious and do not imply overt racism. This is supported by the strong dissociation in the average level of expressed, explicit preferences and elicited, implicit ones, as well as the low correlation between explicit and implicit preference observed in this study. Critics of implicit measure of social cognition have asserted that such preferences and beliefs may reflect messages about the state of social groups in the larger culture but cannot be said to reflect an individual’s own preferences. If that were the case, doctors’ own decisions should not have been predicted so clearly by their implicit biases. The fact that they do remind us that implicit biases may affect the behavior even of those individuals who have nothing but the best intentions,24 including those in medical professions.12,13,15 The IAT is but one method for detecting implicit social cognition and it is the first to be put to use in the present study in a medical context. As such, the meaning and significance of implicit biases in health care deserves much greater investigation.
We found no difference in the crude rate of thrombolysis between study participants assigned a black patient versus those assigned a white patient. However, this race equality in treatment occurred in the presence of greater diagnosis of CAD in black than white patients. Equal treatment in the face of unequal diagnosis between the two groups constitutes a disparity.
The result of interest did not depend on demonstrating disparities in treatment. Rather, this study was designed to determine whether physicians’ implicit biases (IAT scores) predicted different patterns of thrombolysis recommendation for black and white patients. We found that implicit bias against blacks (as measured by the race preference IAT) was negatively correlated with likelihood of recommending thrombolysis for black patients and positively correlated with likelihood of recommending thrombolysis for white patients. This finding suggests that unconscious race biases among physicians may influence their decisions about important interventions such as thrombolysis for suspected myocardial infarction. Whereas several studies have pointed to unconscious biases as one potential root cause for racial and ethnic disparities in health care,9–14 this is the first evidence directly supporting this link. We were encouraged to find most resident physicians open to the idea that unconscious biases could affect their clinical decisions, and that learning more about these biases could improve their care of patients. After completing the IATs, residents acknowledged greater vulnerability to unconscious bias than they did at the start, suggesting that the experience heightened their awareness. Also, those physicians who were aware that the study had to do with racial bias, and who had higher levels of implicit prowhite bias, were more likely to recommend thrombolysis to black patients than physicians with low bias—the opposite of the study’s main effect. This suggests that implicit bias can be recognized and modulated to counteract its effect on treatment decisions. These finding support the IAT’s value as an educational tool.
There are several limitations inherent in this study. Response rates were relatively low and the sample size smaller than ideal, making it difficult to detect smaller effects that may exist. Resident physicians, particularly those at large academic health centers in Boston and Atlanta may differ from physicians who typically make thrombolysis decisions, so it remains to be seen if those with greater experience show the same pattern. Nevertheless, our primary findings are based on an experimental manipulation involving randomized assignment of the physician to a black or white patient vignette, which provides confidence in the causal interpretations that are drawn. A second limitation derives from the use of a computerized presentation of a patient, which may, for reasons that may not be obvious, have contributed to an outcome that may not occur in a typical in-person encounter. The result of predictive validity we report may be an overestimation, but equally likely an underestimation of the role of implicit bias in clinical decision making.
Future studies might do well to examine actual patient-physician interactions, introducing such dimensions as communication, rapport, and other nonverbal behaviors that are known to be related to implicit discrimination. It may in fact be the subtleties of interracial interactions that lay the foundation for differential treatment to occur.28 IATs can be developed to provide a broader range of clinically relevant stereotypes, in addition to the tests we used. Studies should continue to obtain detailed measures of participant awareness because this did show impact on treatment decisions in our study.
In conclusion, our findings suggest that physicians, like others, may harbor unconscious preferences and stereotypes that influence clinical decisions. Further study is needed to confirm our findings, and to determine the extent to which unconscious racial biases contribute to health care disparities. Given the potential existence of these biases, new approaches to addressing disparities might include confidential feedback mechanisms to make physicians aware of disparities in their own cohort of patients, securely and privately administered IATs to increase physicians’ awareness of unconscious bias, and targeted education to mitigate its effects on clinical decision making. We cannot and do not suggest that unconscious bias among health professionals is the largest or most important factor leading to disparities in health care. However, the fact that it is, by its very nature, hidden from conscious awareness suggests that it receive explicit attention.
Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Joseph Betancourt at Massachusetts General Hospital and to Ron Walls and Tom Stair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for support and mentorship; to Elizabeth Donahue at Massachusetts General Hospital for assistance preparing the manuscript; and to Elizabeth Mela at Harvard University for help with all stages of this research and manuscript preparation. We are also grateful to Brian Nosek and his team at University of Virginia for developing the web-based study software and implementation. We are especially grateful to those who helped us coordinate data collection at each site: Art Kellerman, Phillip Shayne, Donald Brady, Joshua Larned, and Inginia Genao at Emory University, Carlo Rosen, Nate Shapiro, Eileen Reynolds, and Janet Buccola at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Valerie Stone and Deborah Wexler at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Eric Nadel, Peter Reese, and Joel Katz at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Funding and Support This study was funded by the Esther B. Kahn Fund of the Department of Emergency Medicine of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Green received support from a National Research Service Award, grant no. T32HP11001-15. Dr. Banaji and Dr.Carney received support from the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University and Dr. Banaji received support for the development of the internet-based portion of this study from the National Institute of Mental Health Grant HL-0000013 as well as the Mind Science Foundation. The funding organizations had no role in the design and conduct of the study, including data collection and management, analysis, interpretation of the data, and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.
Conflict Of Interest None disclosed.
Appendix
Clinical case vignette
Mr. Thompson is a 50-year-old man with a history of well-controlled hypertension and smoking, but no other risk factors for CAD, who presents to the emergency department with chest pain. He appears to be in a lot of pain describing it as “sharp, like being stabbed with a knife” and pointing to the midsternum. He has had it about 3 hours, and it has waxed and waned, but is now an 8 out of 10 in intensity. The pain is not exacerbated by movement or deep inspiration. It does not radiate and is not accompanied by shortness of breath, nausea, or diaphoresis. His vital signs, oxygen saturation, and physical exam are normal except for some mild sternal tenderness to palpation. His EKG shows 2 mm horizontal ST elevations in the anterior leads (not J-point elevation), but there is no prior EKG for comparison and there is no time for cardiac enzymes. He did not have access to a cardiac catheterization lab. He has no absolute contraindications to thrombolysis.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
METHODS
RESULTS
COMMENT
>REFERENCES
REFERENCES
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