Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/10/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
This week’s Torah stories remind us of those six Biblical ‘cities of refuge’ -places where anyone could go and seek shelter, protection from bloodshed or vengeance. But in reality there are no places of refuge. The Torah is like a dream. And then we awaken from it – and the nightmare is that there is nowhere safe from death’s sudden arrival, however guilty or innocent one might be.
Young people in Los Angeles held a fast during the fourth week of July to call attention to the welfare of Central American children crossing into the United States. They are asking the Obama administration to take executive action to treat the children as refugees.
A luxury condominium complex in New York City’s Upper West Side plans to contain a door for use by wealthy residents only, and a separate door for lower-income tenants. What we are witnessing is a postmodern version of the high-walled city center of Medieval times protecting the nobility from peasants and marauding bands, and the 20th-century gated communities meant to keep out thieves and bandits. These hermetically-sealed containers, nonetheless, eventually imprison us all.
In Murrieta, California protesters have taken to the streets spewing hateful words and bigotry in protest of the arrival of migrants from Central America. We sometimes speak as if the mere passage of time has elevated us above the bigotry of previous generations. It hasn’t.
After nearly a month living in Jerusalem, Cherie Brown reflects on the acts of brutality and racism she witnessed, which are put in stark contrast by the acts of great kindness she observed from this same group of people on her journey.
Does a civil society require conferring on its members the right to protect themselves from evocations of pain? Or would this lead to a society starved of humor, challenge, and the learning that our pain enables? A reaction to, and personal reflection on the New Yorker’s, Jack Halberstam’s latest piece about “trigger warnings.”
If the Republican Party does not provide leadership and vision to attract an increasingly diverse electorate, and join in legislative coalitions, it will ultimately go the way of the dinosaurs, and al-Maliki’s Prime Ministry, who’s nearly exclusive Shiite-dominated administration created ever-increasing insurgency among the Sunni Muslim and Kurdish minorities.
People turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values, and as the digital age demonstrates a zillion times a second, there are no longer cultural boundaries that cannot be crossed; the choice is to risk sharing what you love or risk seeing it shared despite your refusal.
“Truth” is what the dominant group declares truth to be. “Knowledge” is anything the dominant group defines as “knowledge,” though “knowledge” itself is socially constructed and produced. How many must we humans kill before we realize that there are many ways toward the truth, not one way for everyone when it comes to religion and spirituality?
‘A letter to Bob Bergdahl’ is a beautiful display of support and camaraderie for the man who overcame pain and grief in the face of his son’s capture, and learned that empathy and understanding of one’s so-called ‘enemies’ can be the most effective path to healing.