http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/united-states-aims-to-encourage-change-in-myanmar.html#preview
US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar
The New York Times headline is misleading or at best overly sanguine about US motives.
The Myanmarese PEOPLE, yes PEOPLE, can effect their own Change.
They have already proved they can. They know how to choose their own leaders.
For the US this is an opportunity to appear they are promoting democracy, but in fact trying to gain strategic depth in South Asia, and yes to supposedly contain China.
Let South Asia and South East Asia, neighbors with common borders, negotiate their own creative, sustainable, sovereign nation-state geopolitical solutions.
US, stay out.
The argument I am making is NOT to ask the US govt. to return to an earlier unproductive policy of "isolationism."
However, a policy ff "interventionism" which is what the US has done pretty much across the world for the past 55 years is unwarranted and counterproductive.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=======================================
NYTimes article follows, their copyright
Detecting a Thaw in Myanmar, U.S. Aims to Encourage Change
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOMAS FULLER
Published: October 6, 2011
WASHINGTON — The United States is considering a significant shift in its long-strained relationship with the autocratic government of Myanmar, including relaxing restrictions on financial assistance and taking other steps to encourage what senior American officials describe as startling political changes in the country.
Enlarge This Image
Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency
Myanmar's new government has met with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, center.
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
The American special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, met with government and opposition leaders in Yangon last month.
The thawing, while in its early stages, follows a political transition in Myanmar after deeply flawed elections last year that nonetheless appears to have raised the possibility that the new government will ease its restrictions on basic freedoms and cooperate with the repressed opposition movement led by the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The new president, U Thein Sein, a former general who was part of the military junta that ruled the country for two decades, has in six months in office signaled a sharp break from the highly centralized and erratic policies of the past. Mr. Thein Sein’s government is now rewriting laws on taxes and property ownership, loosening restrictions on the media and even discussing the release of political prisoners.
The apparent shift offers the United States the chance to improve ties with a resource-rich Southeast Asian nation that after many years of semi-isolation counts neighboring China as its main ally. Last week, Myanmar’s new leadership unexpectedly halted work on a $3.6 billion dam strongly backed by China, prompting angry criticism from the Chinese government and the state-owned Chinese company that was building it.
The Obama administration, though skeptical, has responded to this new openness with a series of small diplomatic steps of its own, hoping that a democratic transition in Myanmar could bring stability and greater economic opportunities to the region at a time of increasing American competition with China over influence in Asia.
“We’re going to meet their action with action,” the administration’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, said in an interview. “If they take steps, we will take steps to demonstrate that we are supportive of the path to reform.” Mr. Mitchell spent five days last month in Myanmar, meeting with senior leaders in the government and opposition. That visit was followed by two meetings in New York and Washington last week between senior State Department officials and Myanmar’s new foreign minister, U Wunna Maung Lwin.
Mr. Wunna Maung Lwin, whose travel in the United States is normally sharply restricted, was the first foreign minister from Myanmar invited to the State Department since the military junta took power.
The motivation for the changes has baffled American officials and others, but Myanmar appears eager to end its diplomatic isolation and rebuild a dysfunctional economy that has trapped the country’s population of 55 million people in poverty, which the government acknowledged for the first time in Mr. Thein Sein’s inaugural address in March.
Members of Mr. Thein Sein’s government have since met several times with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from years of house arrest last November and whose name was so demonized by the previous junta that it was typically whispered in public. She, too, has expressed cautious support for what appears to be a political opening.
The government has also for the first time discussed with her and American officials the possibility of releasing hundreds of political prisoners, after years of denying there were any at all. The government has even assembled a list of those it is considering releasing. About 600 people are on it, though opposition leaders and diplomats say that there are nearly 2,000 political prisoners listed in a database compiled by an organization in Thailand. “We told the government we cannot accept their list,” said U Win Tin, a founding member of the National League for Democracy, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. “We gave that message to the government, but we don’t know yet whether they will change their list.”
Even so, the senior administration official said that the mere acknowledgment that Myanmar held political prisoners reflected a significant shift in the new government’s attitude. Signals like that, even if tentative, have begun to win over skeptics who have seen false dawns before in Myanmar.
“It’s very exciting,” said Priscilla A. Clapp, who was the chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Myanmar from 1999 to 2002. “They are moving into a more pluralistic form of government. I wouldn’t call it totally democratic. But things are changing very rapidly.”
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
p 2
(Page 2 of 2)
Ms. Clapp and others warned that the changes, which are exceeding expectations inside Myanmar and abroad, remained a work in progress. “Any transition this dramatic is a recipe for instability,” she said. “Anything can happen. There could be a coup, a counterrevolution.”
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who led the junta for nearly two decades and stepped down in March, remains an uncertain factor in the tumultuous transition. It was under General Than Shwe’s leadership that the government carried out a deadly crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007 and restricted foreign aid in the aftermath of a cyclone that killed more than 100,000 people.
The reasons that General Than Shwe ceded power to the current government have not been fully explained beyond the notion that he was ready for retirement. In leading the drive for reforms, Mr. Thein Sein appears to be siding with a younger generation of military officers who believe that maintaining the junta’s oppressive policies and hermetic attitudes toward the outside world would be a dead-end path for the country.
The decision by Mr. Thein Sein last week to suspend work on the giant hydroelectric dam on the Irrawaddy River was interpreted by many as a sign that the president was moving out from under the shadow of General Than Shwe.
Obama administration officials are now debating additional steps to support the nascent changes and encourage more, including the creation of a truly democratic political system and an end to violence against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. The outreach is being closely coordinated with Congress, with other countries, including members of the European Union, and with Myanmar’s opposition.
“We’re not looking to move I think any faster than anyone else here,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I think we’re all looking to move step by step. We are going to test. There is no single point where we are absolutely certain that reform is going to be sustained and irreversible.”
Myanmar faces American sanctions first imposed in 1997 and expanded as recently as 2008. One hundred senior officials or businesses remain on the Department of the Treasury’s list banning any commercial trade. Lifting those sanctions would require new legislation in Congress. That is unlikely to happen unless Myanmar convinces its critics that its transformation is fundamental.
In the meantime, though, the administration is considering waiving some restrictions on trade and financial assistance and lifting prohibitions on assistance by global financial institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An I.M.F. team is scheduled to visit this month for consultations on modernizing the country’s exchange rate system and lifting restrictions on international transactions.
Assistance like that is needed to overhaul what for years was a Soviet-style planned economy, where the military ran factories producing soap and bicycles. Ancient-looking cars still ride on potholed roads, and some buildings look as if their last coat of paint was applied during the days when Myanmar was a British colony, known as Burma.
Many in Myanmar remain unconvinced that genuine democracy has arrived.
“All these Western countries are hearing about some changes and they are very happy and keen,” said Mr. Win Tin of the opposition party. “I think that’s wrong. They should listen very carefully and wait to see whether what this government calls change is real and genuine.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed that caution. She recently noted what she called “welcome gestures” but raised a series of issues. “We have serious questions and concerns across a wide range of issues — from Burma’s treatment of ethnic minorities and more than 2,000 prisoners to its relations with North Korea,” she said, using Myanmar’s colonial name, which is official American policy.
She added that the day before she spoke, a 21-year-old journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Myanmar.
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
===================================================================================
Showing posts with label Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2011
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Creative Commons Copyright
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog by Professor Chithra Karunakaran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Constructing the Ethical Self in Civil Society
Story Comments
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2009/03/05/news/local
Chithra Karunakaran wrote on Mar 28, 2009 2:32 PM:
" Lori Phanachone is one courageous education reformer. We could use her as Education Secretary.
I'm wondering if she had to change her Laotian name to something 'easy' that her monolingual, language-deprived white American teachers could pronounce. I was once asked by a Black school superintendent who was trying to get a date with me, if he could "call me Chichi or something simple like that." Yeah right.
As an immigrant woman of color who for 11 years has taught crosscultural psychology courses to diverse students at a public univ. in New York, the ELDA makes no sense in Lori's case. She could have easily been allowed to sign a waiver because of her scholarly accomplishments and her GPA.
However, common sense and fair assessments are in short supply in the profitmaking testing industry and in the education bureaucracy.
Lori, Don't let anyone tell you who you are and what you can be. That assistant principal is a cynical bigoted bureaucrat who should be dismissed for his double whammy racist putdown of Rosa Parks and you!
(You can Google my Theory of Systemic Whiteness). "
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
Souix City Journal copyrighted article below:
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2009/03/05/news/local/754d93a7a005ccb3862575700009cc99.txt?
Student rejects 'demeaning' test, is suspended
High achiever faces possible expulsion
By Russ Oechslin, Journal correspondent | Posted: Thursday, March 05, 2009
STORM LAKE, Iowa -- Lori Phanachone is a member of the National Honor Society, has a 3.9 grade point average and ranks seventh in the senior class of about 119 at Storm Lake High School.
But school officials have told her she is considered to be illiterate based on her refusal to satisfactorily complete the English Language Development Assessment, a test she says is demeaning and racist.
On Wednesday, Phanachone finished serving three days of in-school suspension for what school administrators say is insubordination. She faces another three days for continuing her silent protest with a second refusal to take the test. According to a written statement presented to her Wednesday, Phanachone said, she could be suspended again and then expelled for a fourth refusal.
"Mr. Ruleaux (assistant principal Beau Ruleaux) told me I was 'no Rosa Parks' -- that I should give up because I would not succeed in my protest," Phanachone said.
Senior Kristi Davis is one of several students who believe Phanachone is being treated unfairly and that her punishment is too harsh.
Davis called Phanachone "a really smart, very talented person. She has a passion for everything she does."
"Lori has never gotten into trouble or done anything bad," Davis said. "She's always been successful at anything she has done. But she sees this test as incredibly racist.
"Many minority kids don't want to take it. But Lori is the first to actually do something about it."
Scholarships threatened
The school district's curriculum coordinator, Lori Porsche, said taking the test is mandatory because Phanachone indicated on her school registration that English was not the first language spoken in her home. Her parents are Laotian and still speak little English.
Phanachone, who was born in California and lived in upstate New York before moving to Storm Lake with her family in 2006, said she has never been enrolled in any English Language Learning or English as a Second Language program.
"Someone told me I should have put English as my first language when I registered for school," Phanachone said. "But I refused. I will not deny who I am. And I will not disrespect my culture or my mother."
Until she was ordered to serve in-school suspension last week, Phanachone said, she had A's in speech, accounting, chemistry and English composition. Her poorest grade, a B-plus, was in pre-calculus. But she said she fears what might happen to her grades as a result of her suspensions and time out of the classroom.
Porsche declined to discuss Phanachone's academic record but did not dispute her achievement claims, which fellow students confirmed.
Phanachone said school administrators have told her her college scholarships -- $86,000 at Buena Vista University and more at Iowa State University, if that is her choice -- would disappear. "That's a lot of money. I worked for that. Nothing has been handed to me. I earned it."
"But I want to fight this because this is what I believe," she added. "It's wrong, not just for me but for all minority students. The test is demeaning."
Disagreement over test
Phanachone took the English Language Development Assessment test as a sophomore and admits she probably did poorly on the junior-year retake to check her progress because she marked the same answer for each of the multiple-choice questions in protest. "I filled in all C's because I wanted them to look at something beyond the test."
When she turned in the exam several hours ahead of the other students last year, she was forced to wait in solitary confinement for more than three hours before being excused.
The 155-question test takes four hours to complete.
"I waited all the next week to see if they were going to punish me, and they didn't. I don't think they knew what to do with me because they never had anyone refuse to take the test," she said.
However, she was told to take the test again this year. Porsche said the test is given without regard to a student's GPA or class rank.
"We have chosen to say that if you do not have a proficient score on this test that we need to reassess to make sure you are proficient in English," Porsche said.
Administrators in other Iowa school districts, and in the area education agencies that provide the tests, disagree over whether the test is mandatory as Porsche maintains.
Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency-8 Title III consultant Kathy Brenny, who has an office in Storm Lake, explained that students are identified as English language learners or English as a Second Language students when they enroll. But she said, "If they are proficient, then we don't have to give the test."
Tom Green of the Northwest Area Education Agency in Sioux City said there is federal policy in place to determine who takes the test. Phanachone's case "is an interesting question," he said and suggested, "A kid with a 3.9 GPA shouldn't be in an (English language learners) program."
In Davenport, where 300 to 400 of the public school system's 15,000 students are enrolled in English as a Second Language programs, Dawn Anderson-Rascher, director of assessment equity and record services, said that based on what she understood of the situation, Phanachone wouldn't meet the criteria for taking the test.
Support from classmates
Katie Shevel, who said she has a 4.0 grade point average, said the school would have been justified in imposing "maybe a detention or Saturday school. But to take away everything that she's ever worked for, when this test isn't in the high school curriculum -- to be threatening her with not being able to graduate -- it seems like too much."
"I think it is ridiculous for the administration to punish her the way they have," added Stephanie Emery, who shares classes with Phanachone.
"She has every right to protest taking the test, because in Storm Lake race isn't an issue. And that test singles out race. ... The only reason she didn't write English down as her first language was that she is proud of her heritage."
At this point, Phanachone said she is confused and stressed.
Because the Storm Lake Board of Education has called a special meeting on another matter for 7:30 a.m. today, Phanachone said she expects to be there, with legal representation, just in case her situation is brought up.
Some students plan to support her by staging a daylong protest outside the school Friday. But several of Phanachone's friends have tried to downplay the idea because Phanachone wants her protest to be more restrained.
"We want to be very mature about this," Davis said.
At a glance
The issue: Lori Phanachone, an honor student at Storm Lake High School, has had to serve in-school suspension and been threatened with expulsion and loss of college scholarships for refusing to take an English proficiency test.
What's happened so far: Phanachone has served three days of in-school suspension and is beginning a second round.
What's next: Phanachone and an attorney plan to appear at a school board meeting this morning in case her situation comes up. Some students want to stage an all-day protest Friday, but Phanachone and her friends want to make a more restrained statement.
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2009/03/05/news/local
Chithra Karunakaran wrote on Mar 28, 2009 2:32 PM:
" Lori Phanachone is one courageous education reformer. We could use her as Education Secretary.
I'm wondering if she had to change her Laotian name to something 'easy' that her monolingual, language-deprived white American teachers could pronounce. I was once asked by a Black school superintendent who was trying to get a date with me, if he could "call me Chichi or something simple like that." Yeah right.
As an immigrant woman of color who for 11 years has taught crosscultural psychology courses to diverse students at a public univ. in New York, the ELDA makes no sense in Lori's case. She could have easily been allowed to sign a waiver because of her scholarly accomplishments and her GPA.
However, common sense and fair assessments are in short supply in the profitmaking testing industry and in the education bureaucracy.
Lori, Don't let anyone tell you who you are and what you can be. That assistant principal is a cynical bigoted bureaucrat who should be dismissed for his double whammy racist putdown of Rosa Parks and you!
(You can Google my Theory of Systemic Whiteness). "
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
Souix City Journal copyrighted article below:
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2009/03/05/news/local/754d93a7a005ccb3862575700009cc99.txt?
Student rejects 'demeaning' test, is suspended
High achiever faces possible expulsion
By Russ Oechslin, Journal correspondent | Posted: Thursday, March 05, 2009
STORM LAKE, Iowa -- Lori Phanachone is a member of the National Honor Society, has a 3.9 grade point average and ranks seventh in the senior class of about 119 at Storm Lake High School.
But school officials have told her she is considered to be illiterate based on her refusal to satisfactorily complete the English Language Development Assessment, a test she says is demeaning and racist.
On Wednesday, Phanachone finished serving three days of in-school suspension for what school administrators say is insubordination. She faces another three days for continuing her silent protest with a second refusal to take the test. According to a written statement presented to her Wednesday, Phanachone said, she could be suspended again and then expelled for a fourth refusal.
"Mr. Ruleaux (assistant principal Beau Ruleaux) told me I was 'no Rosa Parks' -- that I should give up because I would not succeed in my protest," Phanachone said.
Senior Kristi Davis is one of several students who believe Phanachone is being treated unfairly and that her punishment is too harsh.
Davis called Phanachone "a really smart, very talented person. She has a passion for everything she does."
"Lori has never gotten into trouble or done anything bad," Davis said. "She's always been successful at anything she has done. But she sees this test as incredibly racist.
"Many minority kids don't want to take it. But Lori is the first to actually do something about it."
Scholarships threatened
The school district's curriculum coordinator, Lori Porsche, said taking the test is mandatory because Phanachone indicated on her school registration that English was not the first language spoken in her home. Her parents are Laotian and still speak little English.
Phanachone, who was born in California and lived in upstate New York before moving to Storm Lake with her family in 2006, said she has never been enrolled in any English Language Learning or English as a Second Language program.
"Someone told me I should have put English as my first language when I registered for school," Phanachone said. "But I refused. I will not deny who I am. And I will not disrespect my culture or my mother."
Until she was ordered to serve in-school suspension last week, Phanachone said, she had A's in speech, accounting, chemistry and English composition. Her poorest grade, a B-plus, was in pre-calculus. But she said she fears what might happen to her grades as a result of her suspensions and time out of the classroom.
Porsche declined to discuss Phanachone's academic record but did not dispute her achievement claims, which fellow students confirmed.
Phanachone said school administrators have told her her college scholarships -- $86,000 at Buena Vista University and more at Iowa State University, if that is her choice -- would disappear. "That's a lot of money. I worked for that. Nothing has been handed to me. I earned it."
"But I want to fight this because this is what I believe," she added. "It's wrong, not just for me but for all minority students. The test is demeaning."
Disagreement over test
Phanachone took the English Language Development Assessment test as a sophomore and admits she probably did poorly on the junior-year retake to check her progress because she marked the same answer for each of the multiple-choice questions in protest. "I filled in all C's because I wanted them to look at something beyond the test."
When she turned in the exam several hours ahead of the other students last year, she was forced to wait in solitary confinement for more than three hours before being excused.
The 155-question test takes four hours to complete.
"I waited all the next week to see if they were going to punish me, and they didn't. I don't think they knew what to do with me because they never had anyone refuse to take the test," she said.
However, she was told to take the test again this year. Porsche said the test is given without regard to a student's GPA or class rank.
"We have chosen to say that if you do not have a proficient score on this test that we need to reassess to make sure you are proficient in English," Porsche said.
Administrators in other Iowa school districts, and in the area education agencies that provide the tests, disagree over whether the test is mandatory as Porsche maintains.
Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency-8 Title III consultant Kathy Brenny, who has an office in Storm Lake, explained that students are identified as English language learners or English as a Second Language students when they enroll. But she said, "If they are proficient, then we don't have to give the test."
Tom Green of the Northwest Area Education Agency in Sioux City said there is federal policy in place to determine who takes the test. Phanachone's case "is an interesting question," he said and suggested, "A kid with a 3.9 GPA shouldn't be in an (English language learners) program."
In Davenport, where 300 to 400 of the public school system's 15,000 students are enrolled in English as a Second Language programs, Dawn Anderson-Rascher, director of assessment equity and record services, said that based on what she understood of the situation, Phanachone wouldn't meet the criteria for taking the test.
Support from classmates
Katie Shevel, who said she has a 4.0 grade point average, said the school would have been justified in imposing "maybe a detention or Saturday school. But to take away everything that she's ever worked for, when this test isn't in the high school curriculum -- to be threatening her with not being able to graduate -- it seems like too much."
"I think it is ridiculous for the administration to punish her the way they have," added Stephanie Emery, who shares classes with Phanachone.
"She has every right to protest taking the test, because in Storm Lake race isn't an issue. And that test singles out race. ... The only reason she didn't write English down as her first language was that she is proud of her heritage."
At this point, Phanachone said she is confused and stressed.
Because the Storm Lake Board of Education has called a special meeting on another matter for 7:30 a.m. today, Phanachone said she expects to be there, with legal representation, just in case her situation is brought up.
Some students plan to support her by staging a daylong protest outside the school Friday. But several of Phanachone's friends have tried to downplay the idea because Phanachone wants her protest to be more restrained.
"We want to be very mature about this," Davis said.
At a glance
The issue: Lori Phanachone, an honor student at Storm Lake High School, has had to serve in-school suspension and been threatened with expulsion and loss of college scholarships for refusing to take an English proficiency test.
What's happened so far: Phanachone has served three days of in-school suspension and is beginning a second round.
What's next: Phanachone and an attorney plan to appear at a school board meeting this morning in case her situation comes up. Some students want to stage an all-day protest Friday, but Phanachone and her friends want to make a more restrained statement.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
A United State of Palestine for All the People?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/washington/05diplo.html
Clinton Meets West Bank Palestinian Leaders
By MARK LANDLER
Published: March 4, 2009
New York Times copyright
------------------
My comment #3.
March 04, 2009 8:15 am
Link
March 4th, 2009 6:31 am
Loved that pic of Clinton and Peres. It will speak to people everywhere. Can Hamas top that?
Secretary Clinton spoke candidly but she tried to drive a wedge (classic neo-imperial divide and rule strategy) between other states in the region and Palestinians, by claiming “They feel that Iran tries to undermine their regimes,”.
The US cannot be a honest broker because it has satellized Israel to advance the US's own interests in the region. Unethical failed strategy, that has failed for 60 years.
There are human, humane concerns that urgently need to be addressed:
We know no people without a land of their ancestors. So Jews cannot be denied a historic homeland.
But at the same time, We know no people who do not SHARE land, try and live with each other, share each others' culture, though in this case both Palestinian and Israeli political leaders (and their US handlers?) may unfortunately have narrowly defined, personally ambitious, self-serving goals that go against the Greater Collective Good of Israelis and Palestinians. However ordinary folks there, like you and me, have the capacity to get along.
Therefore the United State of Palestine (it has a nice ring!) can and must become a reality during our lifetime.
The Arc of Justice bends slowly but it bends towards a United State of Palestine, with Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims and numerous other religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities sharing a modern multiethnic, multireligious, sovereign democratic nation-state.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Clinton Meets West Bank Palestinian Leaders
By MARK LANDLER
Published: March 4, 2009
New York Times copyright
------------------
My comment #3.
March 04, 2009 8:15 am
Link
March 4th, 2009 6:31 am
Loved that pic of Clinton and Peres. It will speak to people everywhere. Can Hamas top that?
Secretary Clinton spoke candidly but she tried to drive a wedge (classic neo-imperial divide and rule strategy) between other states in the region and Palestinians, by claiming “They feel that Iran tries to undermine their regimes,”.
The US cannot be a honest broker because it has satellized Israel to advance the US's own interests in the region. Unethical failed strategy, that has failed for 60 years.
There are human, humane concerns that urgently need to be addressed:
We know no people without a land of their ancestors. So Jews cannot be denied a historic homeland.
But at the same time, We know no people who do not SHARE land, try and live with each other, share each others' culture, though in this case both Palestinian and Israeli political leaders (and their US handlers?) may unfortunately have narrowly defined, personally ambitious, self-serving goals that go against the Greater Collective Good of Israelis and Palestinians. However ordinary folks there, like you and me, have the capacity to get along.
Therefore the United State of Palestine (it has a nice ring!) can and must become a reality during our lifetime.
The Arc of Justice bends slowly but it bends towards a United State of Palestine, with Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims and numerous other religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities sharing a modern multiethnic, multireligious, sovereign democratic nation-state.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Obama's New Cold War
Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter
By PETER BAKER
Published: March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html?hp
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html#postComment
New York Times copyright
----------------------
The core problem with US foreign policy for the past 60 years is its exceptionalist, triumphalist,supremacist, dictatorial and interfering posture, matched by a 60-year accumulation of actions of unparalleled state-sponsored violence marked by invasion, occupation, militarization, nuclearization, destabilization, satellization.
That foreign policy posture and actions in the West Asia and Central Asia regions has a counterproductive Israel subtext, as well as affirms that the US continues to maintain its confrontational Cold War stance in a post-Cold War, multipolar era of sovereign-state intra andinter-regional alliances that do not necessarily include the US, or Russia for that matter.
Obama's "secret" (what happened to transparency?) reportedly hand-delivered letter to Russia's President Medvedev, three weeks ago, attempts to dictate and micromanage geopolitics in West Asia and Central Asia, which the last time I looked is not where the US is located. The sovereign nation-state stakeholders in these regions have every right to safeguard their perceived local interests without the US menacing nation-states that are located there.
Q. Why shouldn't Russia help Iran nuclearize? Iran and Russia are strategic neighbors, the US is not. Did the US nuclearize Israel?
Q. Why shouldn't Iran develop nuclear power for both military and civilian purposes? The US, Israel and Russia are all nuclear. The last two are regional neighbors, the US is not.
In the adjoining South Asia region, Pakistan and India are nuclear. What would motivate Iran NOT to nuclearize and Russia NOT to help Iran do so?
Obama's shopworn Star Wars bargaining chip of a National Missile Defense Shield (NMD) suspension wont wash with Iran, especially since the US helped Israel develop its Arrow missile system which has been successfully tested repeatedly by the US and Israel acting in combination. Is it possible, therefore, both Iran and Russia might feel their respective national security interests are threatened by such unilateral and unprovoked militarization in their backyard?
Obama's foreign policy in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia is likely to be no different than that of his white male predecessors.
Superpower foreign policy ideology trumps race.
At the same time, supremacist ideology in U.S. foreign policy has its roots in white male dominance (developed and enforced during three centuries of slavery and genocide of indigenous people in the US, by white males), in which all 'others' are racialized and rendered inferior. Obama is embedded in that Whiteness system and rewarded by it.
Change We Can Believe In? A new and ethical direction for US foreign policy where strategic interests are sincerely attempted to be aligned with ethical concerns ?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
See Theory of Systemic Whiteness and related articles
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
By PETER BAKER
Published: March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html?hp
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html#postComment
New York Times copyright
----------------------
The core problem with US foreign policy for the past 60 years is its exceptionalist, triumphalist,supremacist, dictatorial and interfering posture, matched by a 60-year accumulation of actions of unparalleled state-sponsored violence marked by invasion, occupation, militarization, nuclearization, destabilization, satellization.
That foreign policy posture and actions in the West Asia and Central Asia regions has a counterproductive Israel subtext, as well as affirms that the US continues to maintain its confrontational Cold War stance in a post-Cold War, multipolar era of sovereign-state intra andinter-regional alliances that do not necessarily include the US, or Russia for that matter.
Obama's "secret" (what happened to transparency?) reportedly hand-delivered letter to Russia's President Medvedev, three weeks ago, attempts to dictate and micromanage geopolitics in West Asia and Central Asia, which the last time I looked is not where the US is located. The sovereign nation-state stakeholders in these regions have every right to safeguard their perceived local interests without the US menacing nation-states that are located there.
Q. Why shouldn't Russia help Iran nuclearize? Iran and Russia are strategic neighbors, the US is not. Did the US nuclearize Israel?
Q. Why shouldn't Iran develop nuclear power for both military and civilian purposes? The US, Israel and Russia are all nuclear. The last two are regional neighbors, the US is not.
In the adjoining South Asia region, Pakistan and India are nuclear. What would motivate Iran NOT to nuclearize and Russia NOT to help Iran do so?
Obama's shopworn Star Wars bargaining chip of a National Missile Defense Shield (NMD) suspension wont wash with Iran, especially since the US helped Israel develop its Arrow missile system which has been successfully tested repeatedly by the US and Israel acting in combination. Is it possible, therefore, both Iran and Russia might feel their respective national security interests are threatened by such unilateral and unprovoked militarization in their backyard?
Obama's foreign policy in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia is likely to be no different than that of his white male predecessors.
Superpower foreign policy ideology trumps race.
At the same time, supremacist ideology in U.S. foreign policy has its roots in white male dominance (developed and enforced during three centuries of slavery and genocide of indigenous people in the US, by white males), in which all 'others' are racialized and rendered inferior. Obama is embedded in that Whiteness system and rewarded by it.
Change We Can Believe In? A new and ethical direction for US foreign policy where strategic interests are sincerely attempted to be aligned with ethical concerns ?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
See Theory of Systemic Whiteness and related articles
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Science, Religion & the Making of the Ethical Self in the Nation
A version of My NYT Comment #32
February 28, 2009 9:24 am Link
The flawed 2008 Pew survey(NYT article link below ) referred to in this article should have collected and presented data on the educational level of the respondents in this survey.
Jews, Hindus and Buddhists in the U.S. almost certainly attain higher levels of education, are well to do, make the connection between education and economic attainment, consequently they are less likely to subscribe to ideas, religious or otherwise, about magical personas, like angels and demons (referred to in the Pew survey questionnaire), operating in the world. Contrast that with the responses of Jehovah’s Witnesses, probably the least educated and not surprisingly poorest among all surveyed.
A piece of essential reading would be the late great Stephen Jay Gould’s article on religion and science as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
As a child I learned an important distinction from my famous geologist father. One can certainly be simultaneously religious and scientific. In fact it is important to combine exploration of the natural and social world, while still retaining a sense of awe about the still unexplained mysteries of our universe. Religion insists on Faith and Belief, in contrast, Science relies on Evidence and Proof. Religion and Science DON’T overlap, therefore don’t confuse the two. They are not equivalent because they cannot be compared. Don’t apply the rules of one to the other. At the same time, Don’t denigrate the one or the other.
Critical thinking, scientific reasoning and logical development of ideas are the core skills taught in colleges. These skills are essential for developing a knowledgeable participatory citizenry and a competent workforce. Both are essential for the working of democracy in the modern pluralist nation-state.
Such skills are essential for growing an ethical democracy, a project tentative at best in the US,India and many other democratic spaces, that was severely impeded by that magical thinking team of Cheney-Bush and their “Axis of Evil ” pseudo-Christian doctrine.
The dynamic construction of the striving-to-be Ethical Self acting with striving-to-be ethical others, in the modern pluralist nation-state, is central to the ongoing necessarily flawed project of Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
—-----------------------------
New York Times copyright
February 28, 2009, 12:01 am
Bobby Jindal, the Exorcist
By Charles M. Blow
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/bobby-jindal-the-exorcist-pro-or-con/
---------------------------------------
WSJ copyright
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html
Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence
Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.
[GOD_cov2] Nippon Television Network
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do
But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.
But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.
View Full Image
GOD_jump2
WSJ Illustration
GOD_jump2
GOD_jump2
Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.
Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.
In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.
There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.
Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?
Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.
But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.
—Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious affairs. The latest, "The Case for God," will be published by Knopf later this month.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do
Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.
Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.
[GOD_cov1] Bettmann/CORBIS
Charles Darwin
What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!
The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.
Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.
View Full Image
GOD_jump1
WSJ Illustration
GOD_jump1
GOD_jump1
What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.
To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.
Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."
Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
—Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale," "The God Delusion." His latest book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will be published by Free Press on Sept. 22.
February 28, 2009 9:24 am Link
The flawed 2008 Pew survey(NYT article link below ) referred to in this article should have collected and presented data on the educational level of the respondents in this survey.
Jews, Hindus and Buddhists in the U.S. almost certainly attain higher levels of education, are well to do, make the connection between education and economic attainment, consequently they are less likely to subscribe to ideas, religious or otherwise, about magical personas, like angels and demons (referred to in the Pew survey questionnaire), operating in the world. Contrast that with the responses of Jehovah’s Witnesses, probably the least educated and not surprisingly poorest among all surveyed.
A piece of essential reading would be the late great Stephen Jay Gould’s article on religion and science as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
As a child I learned an important distinction from my famous geologist father. One can certainly be simultaneously religious and scientific. In fact it is important to combine exploration of the natural and social world, while still retaining a sense of awe about the still unexplained mysteries of our universe. Religion insists on Faith and Belief, in contrast, Science relies on Evidence and Proof. Religion and Science DON’T overlap, therefore don’t confuse the two. They are not equivalent because they cannot be compared. Don’t apply the rules of one to the other. At the same time, Don’t denigrate the one or the other.
Critical thinking, scientific reasoning and logical development of ideas are the core skills taught in colleges. These skills are essential for developing a knowledgeable participatory citizenry and a competent workforce. Both are essential for the working of democracy in the modern pluralist nation-state.
Such skills are essential for growing an ethical democracy, a project tentative at best in the US,India and many other democratic spaces, that was severely impeded by that magical thinking team of Cheney-Bush and their “Axis of Evil ” pseudo-Christian doctrine.
The dynamic construction of the striving-to-be Ethical Self acting with striving-to-be ethical others, in the modern pluralist nation-state, is central to the ongoing necessarily flawed project of Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
—-----------------------------
New York Times copyright
February 28, 2009, 12:01 am
Bobby Jindal, the Exorcist
By Charles M. Blow
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/bobby-jindal-the-exorcist-pro-or-con/
---------------------------------------
WSJ copyright
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html
Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence
Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.
[GOD_cov2] Nippon Television Network
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do
But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.
But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.
View Full Image
GOD_jump2
WSJ Illustration
GOD_jump2
GOD_jump2
Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.
Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.
In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.
There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.
Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?
Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.
But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.
—Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious affairs. The latest, "The Case for God," will be published by Knopf later this month.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do
Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.
Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.
[GOD_cov1] Bettmann/CORBIS
Charles Darwin
What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!
The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.
Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.
View Full Image
GOD_jump1
WSJ Illustration
GOD_jump1
GOD_jump1
What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.
To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.
Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."
Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
—Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale," "The God Delusion." His latest book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will be published by Free Press on Sept. 22.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Ethical Populism vs. Corporate Serial Criminality
February 8th, 2009 10:48 am
Comment #612
Populist ETHICAL rage is the best thing that could have happened to America.
Corporate serial criminality has sickened the majority of ordinary earn-your-livelihood americans (yes, lower case a, please) like me.
We are now focused on the universal human right to the pursuit of happiness through fairness, equality, social and economic justice.
ETHICAL POPULISM, in contrast to the rah-rah military adventurism and market unregulation of the 8 years-too-long W regime, will hopefully play a major role in keeping this new President ethical and accountable.
Obama doesn't have the expertise or the experience, he's been a team player all his life, to do it all by himself. Democracy is NOT a one-man show. Obama fumbled, he "screwed up" and the american people expressed their outrage at the unpalatable prospect of business as usual.
ETHICAL POPULISM. I celebrate its tentative return.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
-------------------
Slumdogs Unite! By Frank Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/opinion/08rich.html
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/02/08/opinion/08rich.html?s=1&pg=25
New York Times copyright
====================================================================================
Comment #612
Populist ETHICAL rage is the best thing that could have happened to America.
Corporate serial criminality has sickened the majority of ordinary earn-your-livelihood americans (yes, lower case a, please) like me.
We are now focused on the universal human right to the pursuit of happiness through fairness, equality, social and economic justice.
ETHICAL POPULISM, in contrast to the rah-rah military adventurism and market unregulation of the 8 years-too-long W regime, will hopefully play a major role in keeping this new President ethical and accountable.
Obama doesn't have the expertise or the experience, he's been a team player all his life, to do it all by himself. Democracy is NOT a one-man show. Obama fumbled, he "screwed up" and the american people expressed their outrage at the unpalatable prospect of business as usual.
ETHICAL POPULISM. I celebrate its tentative return.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
-------------------
Slumdogs Unite! By Frank Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/opinion/08rich.html
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/02/08/opinion/08rich.html?s=1&pg=25
New York Times copyright
====================================================================================
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Change We Can Believe In? Or More of the Same?
Dowd is performing a public service, (long abandoned by the U.S. mainstream media during the W regime), by relentlessly holding Obama accountable from Day I. Can he walk the talk? "Change we can believe in" is rapidly but yet predictably, turning into disbelief, as Obama defended then feebly disavowed Daschle. The more they promise change .......
No doubt about it, ordinary folks and responsiblyindependent- minded, progressive columnists will have to shoulder the 4-year long responsibility of holding this new President (who doesn't have one ounce of prior executive experience and only meager legislative experience)to his lofty but eminently doable campaign promises.
Yes We can. Yes he must!
I voted Brand Obama over Brand McCain, with a healthy dose of skepticism, fully appreciating that civil society activism, not the elected leader alone, is key to the arduous but rewarding construction of ethical democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
-------
Comment #68, February 04, 2008 8:04 a.m.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/opinion/04dowd.html
New York Times copyright
==================================================================================
No doubt about it, ordinary folks and responsiblyindependent- minded, progressive columnists will have to shoulder the 4-year long responsibility of holding this new President (who doesn't have one ounce of prior executive experience and only meager legislative experience)to his lofty but eminently doable campaign promises.
Yes We can. Yes he must!
I voted Brand Obama over Brand McCain, with a healthy dose of skepticism, fully appreciating that civil society activism, not the elected leader alone, is key to the arduous but rewarding construction of ethical democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
-------
Comment #68, February 04, 2008 8:04 a.m.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/opinion/04dowd.html
New York Times copyright
==================================================================================
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The importance of Unbelievers in Ethical Democracy
Obama's inclusive reference to unbelievers and the response from various constituent groups in US society
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Corporate Greed & Ethical Democracy
My Blog is on the road in South Asia following the Satyam debacle. More on this later
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Fearless Journalism & Progress Towards Ethical Democracy
Lasantha Wicramatunga is dead. The chief editor of The Sunday Leader of Sri Lanka was shot executioner style by hooded gunmen in broad daylight on his way to work.
His death is a grevious loss to Sri Lankan democracy as tries to find through flawed practice, an ethical path to intractable problems of separatism and terrorism.
Wickramatunga's voice would have been invaluable today and every day because of its ethical fire. Now it has been brutally silenced. The greatest losers are ALL the people of Sri Lanka, whether Buddhist, Tamil, Christian, Muslim, tribal, whoever and whatever.
It is also South Asia's loss as we struggle to build democracies that are ethically defensible.
South Asia's democracies have to learn slowly and painfully to go the extra mile to allow and encourage the unfettered flow of information, opinion and expression in our civil societies. Let us who make up the civil societies of these fragile democracies, reflect sombrely on the loss of Lasantha Wicramatunga. And the valuable practical lessons we can learn and implement as members of civil society from his life and his needless mindless sacrifice.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
His death is a grevious loss to Sri Lankan democracy as tries to find through flawed practice, an ethical path to intractable problems of separatism and terrorism.
Wickramatunga's voice would have been invaluable today and every day because of its ethical fire. Now it has been brutally silenced. The greatest losers are ALL the people of Sri Lanka, whether Buddhist, Tamil, Christian, Muslim, tribal, whoever and whatever.
It is also South Asia's loss as we struggle to build democracies that are ethically defensible.
South Asia's democracies have to learn slowly and painfully to go the extra mile to allow and encourage the unfettered flow of information, opinion and expression in our civil societies. Let us who make up the civil societies of these fragile democracies, reflect sombrely on the loss of Lasantha Wicramatunga. And the valuable practical lessons we can learn and implement as members of civil society from his life and his needless mindless sacrifice.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Unpacking U.S. Hegemony via Mumbai Terror 11/26/08
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
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, October 12, 2008
The Murder of Marcelo Lucero: Diversity, Equity and the Challenge for Ethical Democracy
The Murder of Marcelo Lucero. How could this happen?
Q. If a sovereign nation-state has long articulated a code of racialized, supremacist Whiteness, is the murder of Marcelo Lucero, incomprehensible and inexplicable OR possible and predictable?
See "Theory of Systemic Whiteness" in this Blog (or Google it)
It is important to read something of the history of Suffolk County where Marcelo Lucero an Ecuadoran immigrant lived before he was murdered by Suffolk County teen and high school athlete Jeffrey Conroy and his pals. What kind of place is Suffolk County? What is its history, demography? Suffolk County is 86% White. (Note: racial categories are self-ascribed and this self-ascription is mandated by the US Census Bureau which has racialized the census from its inception. Even this fact is part of the structural, systemic, ideological content of Whiteness. Whiteness is first and foremost a system of unearned,unequal, unshared, dominant POWER.
Finally it is important to focus on WHITENESS rather than racism. To call someone a racist is to impugn their individual behavior rather than to place that individual's behavior within the context of "White supremacism". That individual can and must be held responsible and accountable for his/her actions, but those actions are explainable with the larger societal context.
But again "white supremacism" is attributed
dismissively to belong to a few 'ignorant' individuals or even small radical fringe groups like the KKK, neo-Nazi and punk groups. By imputing white supremacist ideas to only a few misguided and violent individuals, the real POWER of structural systemic and ideological Whiteness is made invisible and its dominant power is further strengthened.
In contrast to the term "racism" or even "white supremacism" the term "WHITENESS" focuses on a power construct of structural, systemic and ideological supremacist racialization, by which so-called OTHER(s) like Lucero are permitted to be constructed as despicable,somehow less than HUMAN, which is a central organizing strategic principle of the US racialized history of slavery of Africans and genocide of indigenous peoples, as well as directly related to contemporary experience.
Q. Are Palestinians and Iraqis the new "others" along with Latinos in the contemporary American racial experience?
An essential raw data source for the demographics of Suffolk County would be:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet (For Suffolk County). You might even want to compare census factfinder data for Nassau County. Both these counties together make up Long Island.
It is also important to analyze press reports on the murder. In particular the comments of Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive are important in providing political context for the murder.
Most important read the comments of Lucero's brother, Hispanic civic leaders, ACLU officials, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
We cannot come to grips with the murder of Marcelo Lucero unless we examine the
Systemic, structural and ideological constructions of Whiteness that were central in to murder of Marcelo Lucero. The demonized construction of the racialized OTHER is central to the affirmation of Whiteness.
Both the murder and the search for justice are part of the American Experience.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
======================================================================================
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
link to New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/nyregion/14immigrant.html?emc=eta1
New York Times article
Title:
A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
image
Caren Cajamarca, 9, of Patchogue, N.Y., at a memorial near the site of the fatal stabbing of Marcelo Lucero last Saturday night. Prosecutors call it a hate crime.
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 13, 2008
PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — It was an occasional diversion among a certain crowd at Patchogue-Medford High School, students said: Drink a few beers, then go looking for people to mug, whether for money or just for kicks.
Skip to next paragraph
Joselo Lucero, brother of the victim, Marcelo Lucero, said Marcelo had warned him to stay safe.
Friends of Jeffrey Conroy, a star athlete at the school, say he was known to do it, too. And last Saturday night, after drinking in a park in the Long Island hamlet of Medford, Mr. Conroy, 17, and six other teenagers declared that they were going to attack “a Mexican” and headed to the more ethnically diverse village of Patchogue to hunt, according to friends and the authorities.
They found their target in Marcelo Lucero, a serious-minded, 37-year-old immigrant from a poor village in Ecuador who had lived in the United States for 16 years, mostly in Patchogue, and worked in a dry cleaning store, sending savings home to support his mother, a cancer survivor.
After the boys surrounded, taunted and punched Mr. Lucero, the authorities say, Mr. Conroy plunged a knife into his victim’s chest, fatally wounding him.
The attack has horrified and puzzled many in this comfortable Suffolk County village of 11,700. Prosecutors have labeled it a hate crime and County Executive Steve Levy called the defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, “white supremacists.” And some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County.
Interviews with business owners, students, government officials and immigrants in the area suggest that illegal immigration has been a wellspring for anger and tension in the neighborhood, with day laborers drawing the greatest fire. Indeed, a number of people — adults and students alike — drew sharp distinctions between assimilated immigrants, who they said should be welcomed as friends and neighbors, and newly arrived illegal immigrants, who they said do not belong.
“No disrespect here, but I’m a firm believer that if you want to come to this country, you should have a job waiting for you,” said the co-owner of the Medford Shooting Range, who gave only his first name, Charlie, and is known by the nickname Charlie Range.
He said he was offended by the behavior of some day laborers — throwing trash in the street, urinating in the bushes, hooting at passing women — and complained that illegal immigrants were crowding rental apartments and swelling the ranks of criminal gangs.
“How do you stop the illegal alien influx?” he wondered aloud. “How do you stop the rain?”
Thousands of immigrants from Latin America have flowed into Long Island in the past two decades, attracted by employment opportunities, particularly in the construction industry, which until recently was booming. Patchogue’s Latino population has risen sharply during this time, village officials say, with Ecuadoreans now being the single largest Latino group.
According to the 2000 census, Latinos were 24 percent of Patchogue’s population, up from 14 percent in 1990, and government officials say the percentage has continued to grow. In just the past five years, the Latino student population of the Patchogue-Medford School District has risen to 24 percent from about 4 percent, said Michael H. Mostow, the district’s superintendent.
Anti-immigrant hostility has led to several highly publicized attacks in recent years in Suffolk County, including the near-death beating of two Mexican day laborers in 2001 and the burning of a Mexican family’s house in 2003, both in the nearby town of Farmingville.
Immigrant advocates have accused some local politicians, particularly Mr. Levy, of helping to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment by promoting tough policies against illegal immigration. But Mr. Levy said this week that the attack on Mr. Lucero “wasn’t a question of any county policy or legislation; it was a question of bad people doing horrific things.”
For all the parsing of motives and rationales in the case, many Latino immigrants here describe Suffolk County as a place where daily life can be a struggle for acceptance in a predominantly white population, particularly in this time of economic crisis. Rocio Ponce, a Brentwood resident and real-estate agent from Ecuador, said that many residents had developed a hatred against recent Latino immigrants “because they think they’re coming to take their jobs.”
* 1
* 2
Next Page »
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 15, 2008
An article on Friday about fear and anger in Patchogue, N.Y., after the stabbing death of an Ecuadorean immigrant in what prosecutors have called a hate crime, referred incorrectly to Jeffrey Conroy, 17, a high school athlete who has been arrested in the case. He has not been offered a lacrosse scholarship to the University of Maryland, as several of his classmates reported. (His lawyer, William J. Keahon, said on Friday that Mr. Conroy had been offered athletic scholarships to other colleges.)
More Articles in New York Region » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2008, on page A25 of the New York edition.
Need to know more? 50% off home delivery of The Times.
Past Coverage
* THE ISLAND; Salvadorans, Building Their Own Cultural Bridge (May 4, 2008)
* As Primary Nears, Voters Critique Field (February 3, 2008)
* Lawmaker on L.I. Wants Worker Status Verified (February 1, 2008)
* Filipino Nurses, Healers in Trouble (January 27, 2008)
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A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Published: November 13, 2008
(Page 2 of 2)
Latinos say the attack against Mr. Lucero, if not his murder, was foretold. Some report being threatened and physically harassed in the streets, with bottles thrown at them and their car windows smashed during the night. Anti-immigrant epithets and racially motivated bullying are common in the hallways of the schools, children say.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
James Carbone/Newsday
Jeffrey Conroy, front, 17, and other suspects in Mr. Lucero’s killing.
“They tell us to go get a green card, ‘Go back to your community!’ ” said Pamela Guncay, 14, an Ecuadorean-American born in the United States.
Many Latinos, particularly those who are here illegally, say they would never report such incidents because they do not trust the police and fear deportation.
“We’re here to work, we’re not here to do any damage,” pleaded César Angamarca, 45, who rents a room in a small house where Mr. Lucero lived. “We’re working honorably.”
Friends of Mr. Conroy and the other suspects insisted that the defendants were not racist and said they were shocked that a frivolous escapade by bored, drunken teenagers had quickly turned tragic. They pointed out that one of the defendants, José Pacheco, 17, is the son of an African-American mother and a Puerto Rican father, and that Mr. Conroy counted Latino and black classmates among his closest buddies.
“They were good kids,” said Sean Ruga, 19, who graduated from the high school in 2006 and remained friends with the defendants. “It’s not something I could see them capable of doing.”
Mr. Pacheco’s uncle, Jerry Dumas, said his nephew was with the group because he was looking for a ride home and would not have knowingly joined an attack against a Latino, especially considering his ethnic heritage. He also said that Mr. Pacheco’s parents had themselves been apparent victims of violent racism: When they moved into the Patchogue area in the early 1990s, Mr. Dumas said, their house was burned down twice.
Mr. Conroy was the best known of the defendants and, according to prosecutors, the leader of the group. He was on the school’s lacrosse and wrestling teams, according to his friends, and his lawyer, William J. Keahon, said he had received “a number” of offers of college athletic scholarships.
Jeffrey Francis, 18, who is black, said Mr. Conroy befriended him soon after he transferred into the school this fall. They were on the wrestling team together, he said.
Acquaintances of the defendants said it was not unusual for groups of students from the high school to go out looking for people to mug. “It was just for fun, or for money,” said Taylor Fallica, 15, a student at the high school who said he was a friend of Mr. Conroy and the other defendants.
A friend who said he had been hanging out with the seven defendants in the park that night said there had not been much in the way of a plan before the group set out.
“We were just chilling, having a few beers,” said the friend, who requested anonymity because he had also been interviewed by the police and feared making contradictory statements.
Toward midnight, he recalled, “they said they were going to go jump a Mexican,” and they left.
Mr. Lucero had come to the United States to help support his family in Gualaceo, Ecuador, said his brother, Joselo, 34, in an interview this week in Patchogue, where he lives. Their father had died when they were young and Marcelo assumed the role of father figure in the family, Joselo said.
Marcelo Lucero was a hard worker and had little social life, according to his brother and a resident in a house where he rented a room. When Joselo joined Marcelo in Patchogue in the mid-1990s, the older brother frequently counseled him on how to take care of himself and be safe.
“He was a like a protector,” Joselo recalled. “He told me: ‘You have to be a man here. There’s no mom here anymore.’ ”
As the mob descended, Mr. Lucero’s friend managed to escape and contact the police, who rounded up the suspects minutes later.
Mr. Conroy was charged with first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and first-degree gang assault; the others were charged with first-degree gang assault. They were arraigned on Monday and the case was sent to a grand jury, which began reviewing evidence on Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.
Joselo Lucero said his priorities were now to get his brother’s body back to Ecuador for burial and to ensure that justice was served. But he said he felt no bitterness or vengefulness toward his brother’s attackers.
“I don’t really feel hate,” he said.
“I feel sorry for the families, in some way, because they have to be responsible for their kids.”
Since Mr. Lucero’s death, local officials have almost universally played down any suggestion that ethnic and racial tension had been prevalent in the community. Nonetheless, local, county and state officials have responded to the killing with various plans, including the introduction of sensitivity task forces, outreach programs in the Latino community and community forums.
“It is imperative that we bridge the divide,” Patchogue’s mayor, Paul V. Pontieri Jr., said on Thursday, “and realize that the things we have in common far outnumber those that divide us.”
END of New York Times article A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
===================================================================================
KarunaKaran, Chithra Theory of Systemic Whiteness
=====================================================================================
Reading List
Ababio-Clottey, Aeesha, and Marianne Williamson. Beyond Fear: Twelve Spiritual Keys to Racial Healing. HJ Kramer, 1999.
Armour, Jody David. Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism : The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Bailey, Alison, and Jacquelyn Zita. "The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body." Hypatia 22.2 (2007): vii-xv.
Bash, Harry H. " If I'm So White, Why Ain't I Right? Some Methodological Misgivings on Taking Identity Ascriptions at Face-Value." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 675-97.
Bell, Derrick A. Faces at the Bottom of the Well : The Permanence of Racism. New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1992.
Berard, Tim J. "The Neglected Social Psychology of Institutional Racism." Sociology Compass 2.2 (2008): 734-64.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
Brown, Michael K. Whitewashing Race : The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Butterworth, Michael L. "Race In "The Race": Mark Mcgwire, Sammy Sosa, and Heroic Constructions of Whiteness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 228-44.
Dei, George J. Sefa. "Critical Perspectives in Antiracism: An Introduction." The Candaian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33.3 (1996): 247-68.
Dwyer, Owen J., and John Paul Jones III. "White Socio-Spatial Epistemology." Social & Cultural Geography 1.2 (2000): 209-22.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1st ed. New York Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008.
Gillborn, David. "Rethinking White Supremacy." Etnicities 6.3 (2006): 318-40.
Griffin, Anya T. "Racism, Stress, and Health in African American Females: The Impact of Stress Experienced from Perceived Racism on Cardiovascular Reactivity in African American Adolescent and Adult Females." Dissertation. Fielding Graduate University, 2005.
Guess, Teresa J. "The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 649-73.
Hartmann, Douglass. "Rush Limbaugh, Donovan Mcnabb, and a Little Social Concern: Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 45-60.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hoelscher, Steven. "Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South." Annals of Association of American Geographers 93.3 (2003): 657-86.
Holloway, Sarah L. "Burning Issues: Whiteness, Rurality and the Politics of Difference." Geoforum 38.1 (2007): 7-20.
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks : Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. Color of Violence : The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2006.
Leary, Dr. Joy Degruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005.
Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. "Framing Whiteness: Working through the Tensions in Introducing Whiteness to Educators." Race Ethnicity and Education 3.3 (2000): 271-92.
Lewis, Amanda E. ""What Group?" Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era Of "Color-Blindness"." Sociological Theory 22.4 (2004): 623-46.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Rev. and expanded ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching : Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Memmi, Albert. Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mills, Charles. "White Ignorance." Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. vols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 13-38.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, N.Y. ; London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States : From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ortega, Mariana. "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color." Hypatia 21.3 (2006): 56-74.
Prividera, Laura, and John W. Howard III. "Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Warrior Hero: Perpetuating the Strategic Rhetoric of Us Nationalism and the Marginalization of Women." Women and Language 29.2 (2006): 29-37.
Pulido, Laura. "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in South California." Annals of the Association of American Geography 90.1 (2000): 12-40.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2003.
Said, Edward W., Moustafa Bayoumi, and Andrew Rubin. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Saxton, A. "Whiteness and Reconciliation: A Discursive Analysis." Australian Psychologist 39.1 (2004): 14-23.
Shearer, Tobin Miller. Enter the River : Healing Steps from White Privilege toward Racial Reconciliation. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994.
Simpson, Jennifer Lyn. "The Color-Blind Double Blind: Whiteness and the (Im)Possibility of Dialogue." Communication Theory 18 (2008): 139-59.
Staurowsky, Ellen J. "“You Know,We Are All Indian” Exploring White Power and Privilege in Reactions to the Ncaa Native American Mascot Policy." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 61-76.
Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Sullivan, Shannon, and ebrary Inc. Revealing Whiteness the Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Tochluk, Shelly. Witnessing Whiteness : First Steps toward an Antiracist Practice and Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2008.
Trepagnier, Barbara. Silent Racism : How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness." Annals of Association of American Geographers 96.3 (2006): 641-59.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness." Environment and Planning A 40.5 (2008): 1132-150.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid : The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Welcome, H. Alexander. ""White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences." Journal of African American Studies 8.1 (2004): 59-73.
Williams, David R., and Ruth Williams-Morris. "Racism and Mental Health: The African American Experience." Ethnicity & Health 5.3/4 (2000): 243-68.
Wise, Tim J. White Like Me : Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Rev. and updated ed. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
Yancy, George. What White Looks Like : African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.
October 12, 2008 12:27 PM
Q. If a sovereign nation-state has long articulated a code of racialized, supremacist Whiteness, is the murder of Marcelo Lucero, incomprehensible and inexplicable OR possible and predictable?
See "Theory of Systemic Whiteness" in this Blog (or Google it)
It is important to read something of the history of Suffolk County where Marcelo Lucero an Ecuadoran immigrant lived before he was murdered by Suffolk County teen and high school athlete Jeffrey Conroy and his pals. What kind of place is Suffolk County? What is its history, demography? Suffolk County is 86% White. (Note: racial categories are self-ascribed and this self-ascription is mandated by the US Census Bureau which has racialized the census from its inception. Even this fact is part of the structural, systemic, ideological content of Whiteness. Whiteness is first and foremost a system of unearned,unequal, unshared, dominant POWER.
Finally it is important to focus on WHITENESS rather than racism. To call someone a racist is to impugn their individual behavior rather than to place that individual's behavior within the context of "White supremacism". That individual can and must be held responsible and accountable for his/her actions, but those actions are explainable with the larger societal context.
But again "white supremacism" is attributed
dismissively to belong to a few 'ignorant' individuals or even small radical fringe groups like the KKK, neo-Nazi and punk groups. By imputing white supremacist ideas to only a few misguided and violent individuals, the real POWER of structural systemic and ideological Whiteness is made invisible and its dominant power is further strengthened.
In contrast to the term "racism" or even "white supremacism" the term "WHITENESS" focuses on a power construct of structural, systemic and ideological supremacist racialization, by which so-called OTHER(s) like Lucero are permitted to be constructed as despicable,somehow less than HUMAN, which is a central organizing strategic principle of the US racialized history of slavery of Africans and genocide of indigenous peoples, as well as directly related to contemporary experience.
Q. Are Palestinians and Iraqis the new "others" along with Latinos in the contemporary American racial experience?
An essential raw data source for the demographics of Suffolk County would be:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet (For Suffolk County). You might even want to compare census factfinder data for Nassau County. Both these counties together make up Long Island.
It is also important to analyze press reports on the murder. In particular the comments of Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive are important in providing political context for the murder.
Most important read the comments of Lucero's brother, Hispanic civic leaders, ACLU officials, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
We cannot come to grips with the murder of Marcelo Lucero unless we examine the
Systemic, structural and ideological constructions of Whiteness that were central in to murder of Marcelo Lucero. The demonized construction of the racialized OTHER is central to the affirmation of Whiteness.
Both the murder and the search for justice are part of the American Experience.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
======================================================================================
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
link to New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/nyregion/14immigrant.html?emc=eta1
New York Times article
Title:
A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
image
Caren Cajamarca, 9, of Patchogue, N.Y., at a memorial near the site of the fatal stabbing of Marcelo Lucero last Saturday night. Prosecutors call it a hate crime.
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 13, 2008
PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — It was an occasional diversion among a certain crowd at Patchogue-Medford High School, students said: Drink a few beers, then go looking for people to mug, whether for money or just for kicks.
Skip to next paragraph
Joselo Lucero, brother of the victim, Marcelo Lucero, said Marcelo had warned him to stay safe.
Friends of Jeffrey Conroy, a star athlete at the school, say he was known to do it, too. And last Saturday night, after drinking in a park in the Long Island hamlet of Medford, Mr. Conroy, 17, and six other teenagers declared that they were going to attack “a Mexican” and headed to the more ethnically diverse village of Patchogue to hunt, according to friends and the authorities.
They found their target in Marcelo Lucero, a serious-minded, 37-year-old immigrant from a poor village in Ecuador who had lived in the United States for 16 years, mostly in Patchogue, and worked in a dry cleaning store, sending savings home to support his mother, a cancer survivor.
After the boys surrounded, taunted and punched Mr. Lucero, the authorities say, Mr. Conroy plunged a knife into his victim’s chest, fatally wounding him.
The attack has horrified and puzzled many in this comfortable Suffolk County village of 11,700. Prosecutors have labeled it a hate crime and County Executive Steve Levy called the defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, “white supremacists.” And some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County.
Interviews with business owners, students, government officials and immigrants in the area suggest that illegal immigration has been a wellspring for anger and tension in the neighborhood, with day laborers drawing the greatest fire. Indeed, a number of people — adults and students alike — drew sharp distinctions between assimilated immigrants, who they said should be welcomed as friends and neighbors, and newly arrived illegal immigrants, who they said do not belong.
“No disrespect here, but I’m a firm believer that if you want to come to this country, you should have a job waiting for you,” said the co-owner of the Medford Shooting Range, who gave only his first name, Charlie, and is known by the nickname Charlie Range.
He said he was offended by the behavior of some day laborers — throwing trash in the street, urinating in the bushes, hooting at passing women — and complained that illegal immigrants were crowding rental apartments and swelling the ranks of criminal gangs.
“How do you stop the illegal alien influx?” he wondered aloud. “How do you stop the rain?”
Thousands of immigrants from Latin America have flowed into Long Island in the past two decades, attracted by employment opportunities, particularly in the construction industry, which until recently was booming. Patchogue’s Latino population has risen sharply during this time, village officials say, with Ecuadoreans now being the single largest Latino group.
According to the 2000 census, Latinos were 24 percent of Patchogue’s population, up from 14 percent in 1990, and government officials say the percentage has continued to grow. In just the past five years, the Latino student population of the Patchogue-Medford School District has risen to 24 percent from about 4 percent, said Michael H. Mostow, the district’s superintendent.
Anti-immigrant hostility has led to several highly publicized attacks in recent years in Suffolk County, including the near-death beating of two Mexican day laborers in 2001 and the burning of a Mexican family’s house in 2003, both in the nearby town of Farmingville.
Immigrant advocates have accused some local politicians, particularly Mr. Levy, of helping to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment by promoting tough policies against illegal immigration. But Mr. Levy said this week that the attack on Mr. Lucero “wasn’t a question of any county policy or legislation; it was a question of bad people doing horrific things.”
For all the parsing of motives and rationales in the case, many Latino immigrants here describe Suffolk County as a place where daily life can be a struggle for acceptance in a predominantly white population, particularly in this time of economic crisis. Rocio Ponce, a Brentwood resident and real-estate agent from Ecuador, said that many residents had developed a hatred against recent Latino immigrants “because they think they’re coming to take their jobs.”
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Next Page »
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 15, 2008
An article on Friday about fear and anger in Patchogue, N.Y., after the stabbing death of an Ecuadorean immigrant in what prosecutors have called a hate crime, referred incorrectly to Jeffrey Conroy, 17, a high school athlete who has been arrested in the case. He has not been offered a lacrosse scholarship to the University of Maryland, as several of his classmates reported. (His lawyer, William J. Keahon, said on Friday that Mr. Conroy had been offered athletic scholarships to other colleges.)
More Articles in New York Region » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2008, on page A25 of the New York edition.
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Past Coverage
* THE ISLAND; Salvadorans, Building Their Own Cultural Bridge (May 4, 2008)
* As Primary Nears, Voters Critique Field (February 3, 2008)
* Lawmaker on L.I. Wants Worker Status Verified (February 1, 2008)
* Filipino Nurses, Healers in Trouble (January 27, 2008)
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A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Published: November 13, 2008
(Page 2 of 2)
Latinos say the attack against Mr. Lucero, if not his murder, was foretold. Some report being threatened and physically harassed in the streets, with bottles thrown at them and their car windows smashed during the night. Anti-immigrant epithets and racially motivated bullying are common in the hallways of the schools, children say.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
James Carbone/Newsday
Jeffrey Conroy, front, 17, and other suspects in Mr. Lucero’s killing.
“They tell us to go get a green card, ‘Go back to your community!’ ” said Pamela Guncay, 14, an Ecuadorean-American born in the United States.
Many Latinos, particularly those who are here illegally, say they would never report such incidents because they do not trust the police and fear deportation.
“We’re here to work, we’re not here to do any damage,” pleaded César Angamarca, 45, who rents a room in a small house where Mr. Lucero lived. “We’re working honorably.”
Friends of Mr. Conroy and the other suspects insisted that the defendants were not racist and said they were shocked that a frivolous escapade by bored, drunken teenagers had quickly turned tragic. They pointed out that one of the defendants, José Pacheco, 17, is the son of an African-American mother and a Puerto Rican father, and that Mr. Conroy counted Latino and black classmates among his closest buddies.
“They were good kids,” said Sean Ruga, 19, who graduated from the high school in 2006 and remained friends with the defendants. “It’s not something I could see them capable of doing.”
Mr. Pacheco’s uncle, Jerry Dumas, said his nephew was with the group because he was looking for a ride home and would not have knowingly joined an attack against a Latino, especially considering his ethnic heritage. He also said that Mr. Pacheco’s parents had themselves been apparent victims of violent racism: When they moved into the Patchogue area in the early 1990s, Mr. Dumas said, their house was burned down twice.
Mr. Conroy was the best known of the defendants and, according to prosecutors, the leader of the group. He was on the school’s lacrosse and wrestling teams, according to his friends, and his lawyer, William J. Keahon, said he had received “a number” of offers of college athletic scholarships.
Jeffrey Francis, 18, who is black, said Mr. Conroy befriended him soon after he transferred into the school this fall. They were on the wrestling team together, he said.
Acquaintances of the defendants said it was not unusual for groups of students from the high school to go out looking for people to mug. “It was just for fun, or for money,” said Taylor Fallica, 15, a student at the high school who said he was a friend of Mr. Conroy and the other defendants.
A friend who said he had been hanging out with the seven defendants in the park that night said there had not been much in the way of a plan before the group set out.
“We were just chilling, having a few beers,” said the friend, who requested anonymity because he had also been interviewed by the police and feared making contradictory statements.
Toward midnight, he recalled, “they said they were going to go jump a Mexican,” and they left.
Mr. Lucero had come to the United States to help support his family in Gualaceo, Ecuador, said his brother, Joselo, 34, in an interview this week in Patchogue, where he lives. Their father had died when they were young and Marcelo assumed the role of father figure in the family, Joselo said.
Marcelo Lucero was a hard worker and had little social life, according to his brother and a resident in a house where he rented a room. When Joselo joined Marcelo in Patchogue in the mid-1990s, the older brother frequently counseled him on how to take care of himself and be safe.
“He was a like a protector,” Joselo recalled. “He told me: ‘You have to be a man here. There’s no mom here anymore.’ ”
As the mob descended, Mr. Lucero’s friend managed to escape and contact the police, who rounded up the suspects minutes later.
Mr. Conroy was charged with first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and first-degree gang assault; the others were charged with first-degree gang assault. They were arraigned on Monday and the case was sent to a grand jury, which began reviewing evidence on Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.
Joselo Lucero said his priorities were now to get his brother’s body back to Ecuador for burial and to ensure that justice was served. But he said he felt no bitterness or vengefulness toward his brother’s attackers.
“I don’t really feel hate,” he said.
“I feel sorry for the families, in some way, because they have to be responsible for their kids.”
Since Mr. Lucero’s death, local officials have almost universally played down any suggestion that ethnic and racial tension had been prevalent in the community. Nonetheless, local, county and state officials have responded to the killing with various plans, including the introduction of sensitivity task forces, outreach programs in the Latino community and community forums.
“It is imperative that we bridge the divide,” Patchogue’s mayor, Paul V. Pontieri Jr., said on Thursday, “and realize that the things we have in common far outnumber those that divide us.”
END of New York Times article A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
===================================================================================
KarunaKaran, Chithra Theory of Systemic Whiteness
=====================================================================================
Reading List
Ababio-Clottey, Aeesha, and Marianne Williamson. Beyond Fear: Twelve Spiritual Keys to Racial Healing. HJ Kramer, 1999.
Armour, Jody David. Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism : The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Bailey, Alison, and Jacquelyn Zita. "The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body." Hypatia 22.2 (2007): vii-xv.
Bash, Harry H. " If I'm So White, Why Ain't I Right? Some Methodological Misgivings on Taking Identity Ascriptions at Face-Value." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 675-97.
Bell, Derrick A. Faces at the Bottom of the Well : The Permanence of Racism. New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1992.
Berard, Tim J. "The Neglected Social Psychology of Institutional Racism." Sociology Compass 2.2 (2008): 734-64.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
Brown, Michael K. Whitewashing Race : The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Butterworth, Michael L. "Race In "The Race": Mark Mcgwire, Sammy Sosa, and Heroic Constructions of Whiteness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 228-44.
Dei, George J. Sefa. "Critical Perspectives in Antiracism: An Introduction." The Candaian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33.3 (1996): 247-68.
Dwyer, Owen J., and John Paul Jones III. "White Socio-Spatial Epistemology." Social & Cultural Geography 1.2 (2000): 209-22.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1st ed. New York Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008.
Gillborn, David. "Rethinking White Supremacy." Etnicities 6.3 (2006): 318-40.
Griffin, Anya T. "Racism, Stress, and Health in African American Females: The Impact of Stress Experienced from Perceived Racism on Cardiovascular Reactivity in African American Adolescent and Adult Females." Dissertation. Fielding Graduate University, 2005.
Guess, Teresa J. "The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 649-73.
Hartmann, Douglass. "Rush Limbaugh, Donovan Mcnabb, and a Little Social Concern: Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 45-60.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hoelscher, Steven. "Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South." Annals of Association of American Geographers 93.3 (2003): 657-86.
Holloway, Sarah L. "Burning Issues: Whiteness, Rurality and the Politics of Difference." Geoforum 38.1 (2007): 7-20.
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks : Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. Color of Violence : The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2006.
Leary, Dr. Joy Degruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005.
Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. "Framing Whiteness: Working through the Tensions in Introducing Whiteness to Educators." Race Ethnicity and Education 3.3 (2000): 271-92.
Lewis, Amanda E. ""What Group?" Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era Of "Color-Blindness"." Sociological Theory 22.4 (2004): 623-46.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Rev. and expanded ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching : Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Memmi, Albert. Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mills, Charles. "White Ignorance." Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. vols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 13-38.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, N.Y. ; London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States : From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ortega, Mariana. "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color." Hypatia 21.3 (2006): 56-74.
Prividera, Laura, and John W. Howard III. "Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Warrior Hero: Perpetuating the Strategic Rhetoric of Us Nationalism and the Marginalization of Women." Women and Language 29.2 (2006): 29-37.
Pulido, Laura. "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in South California." Annals of the Association of American Geography 90.1 (2000): 12-40.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2003.
Said, Edward W., Moustafa Bayoumi, and Andrew Rubin. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Saxton, A. "Whiteness and Reconciliation: A Discursive Analysis." Australian Psychologist 39.1 (2004): 14-23.
Shearer, Tobin Miller. Enter the River : Healing Steps from White Privilege toward Racial Reconciliation. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994.
Simpson, Jennifer Lyn. "The Color-Blind Double Blind: Whiteness and the (Im)Possibility of Dialogue." Communication Theory 18 (2008): 139-59.
Staurowsky, Ellen J. "“You Know,We Are All Indian” Exploring White Power and Privilege in Reactions to the Ncaa Native American Mascot Policy." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 61-76.
Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Sullivan, Shannon, and ebrary Inc. Revealing Whiteness the Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Tochluk, Shelly. Witnessing Whiteness : First Steps toward an Antiracist Practice and Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2008.
Trepagnier, Barbara. Silent Racism : How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness." Annals of Association of American Geographers 96.3 (2006): 641-59.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness." Environment and Planning A 40.5 (2008): 1132-150.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid : The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Welcome, H. Alexander. ""White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences." Journal of African American Studies 8.1 (2004): 59-73.
Williams, David R., and Ruth Williams-Morris. "Racism and Mental Health: The African American Experience." Ethnicity & Health 5.3/4 (2000): 243-68.
Wise, Tim J. White Like Me : Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Rev. and updated ed. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
Yancy, George. What White Looks Like : African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.
October 12, 2008 12:27 PM
Sunday, October 5, 2008
How Did U.S. Individualism Become U.S. Exceptionalism?
Individualism is the core value of the U.S. nation state.
At what point did U.S. Individualism become U.S. Exceptionalism?
I'm in the process of researching this question mainly for my own understanding of what it takes for a sovereign nation-state to develop Ethical Democracy.
Why?
Because lessons from the U.S. history of democratic nation-statehood can be important cautionary lessons, as other nation-states, particularly in the Global South develop more complex democratic institutions and democratic civil society.
Our Global South nation-states can attempt to avoid the destructive trajectory of U.S style militarist predatory market fundamentalism masquerading as democracy.
At what point did U.S. Individualism become U.S. Exceptionalism?
I'm in the process of researching this question mainly for my own understanding of what it takes for a sovereign nation-state to develop Ethical Democracy.
Why?
Because lessons from the U.S. history of democratic nation-statehood can be important cautionary lessons, as other nation-states, particularly in the Global South develop more complex democratic institutions and democratic civil society.
Our Global South nation-states can attempt to avoid the destructive trajectory of U.S style militarist predatory market fundamentalism masquerading as democracy.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Ethical Voters can EDUCATE a Progressive candidate like Obama
After I posted this last week, I began to read Obama's Dreams from My Father.
It is a complex, highly nuanced, authentic sounding account.Will the US electorate be smart enough to elect him?
Will the media with its lack of nuanced reporting and editorializing defeat him?
Chithra Karunakaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical democracy and an ethical candidacy are the need of the hour.
We need ethical debate.It’s important that Barack Obama continue to speak as he did about educational inequities for Blacks and other ‘minority majorities’ of color (when we stand together we are a majority). It’s important that Obama continue to mention Jena because it has become a national symbol of continuing racial hatred/bias/prejudice by a whole new generation of whites against blacks.
The mis-education and dis-information fed to the shop-until-they-drop American public by their white-controlled media ( see Bill Moyers of PBS, on the FCC) and their government as well as some of the current candidates will no doubt continue unabated.
But candidates like Obama can speak authentically about racism and inequity even if they might have been generationally too young to directly take leadership in the civil rights struggles of the 60’s.
Maybe Obama should have said “Everybody has got a WHITE sheep in the family.” when he referred to that white supremacist and neo-imperialist Dick Cheney. That would have got the attention of his supporters and the media.
It would have reversed the stereotype and jogged people’s thinking.
People get the government they deserve. It is up to progressive voters to educate progressive candidates like Obama so that he will continue to address/offer solutions on issues of economic justice, civil rights, healthcare, housing and education, foreign policy (with the US as an ethically responsible player not a predatory one).
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— Posted by Chithra KarunaKaran
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
Saturday, November 3, 2007
No. India should NOT have special privileges in UN membership
India should be given 'augmented' voice in UN: Hillary Clinton
PTI
Thursday, November 01, 2007 19:51 IST | Post your comment |  | Email Article |  | Print Article |  | Share |  | RSS Feeds | TEXT A A A |
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WASHINGTON: India, which has 'special significance' as an emerging power, should be given a bigger voice in regional and international institutions like the UN, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for the upcoming US Presidential election has said.
"....India has a special significance both as an emerging power and as the world's most populous democracy. As co-chair of the Senate India Caucus, I recognize the tremendous opportunity presented by India's rise and the need to give the country an augmented voice in regional and international institutions, such as the UN," Clinton, who according to polls is leading in the race to become the next US President, said.
The former first lady also said terrorists are increasingly finding safe havens in Pakistan, its staunch ally in the war on terror, and called for "redoubling" of efforts in the South Asian country.
"Terrorists are increasingly finding safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan," Clinton wrote in an Essay in the respected Foreign Affairs Magazine.
She also said America's relationship with China will be 'the most important bilateral relationship' in the world.
"The US and China have vastly different values and political systems, yet even though we disagree profoundly on issues ranging from trade to human rights, religious freedom, labor practices, and Tibet, there is much that the US and China can and must accomplish together," Clinton said.
The Democratic senator slammed the Bush administration for 'squandering the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends'.
After 9/11, Clinton said the world rallied behind the US and 'we had a historic opportunity to build a broad global coalition to combat terror, increase the impact of our diplomacy, and create a world with more partners and fewer adversaries'.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.Blogspot.com
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Ethical/Progressive Voters can EDUCATE a Progressive candidate like Obama
November 3rd,
2007
9:41 am