Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/13/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
A community college instructor, immigrant, and unabashed socialist has won a seat on the Seattle City Council. Kshama Sawant’s path to success connected a wide scope of followers, cost much less than her opponent’s campaign, and involved a promise to triple the minimum wage.
The bottom line is that we in this country, as well as in others with burgeoning Muslim populations, must start a dialogue, come up with solutions that allow us to move forward together and stop discriminating against each other based on labels. We cannot keep denying groups of people drivers’ licenses or student IDs or public services based on what’s on their heads or in their hearts. We must start talking, to figure out what can be done to balance safety and civil liberties, democracy and religion. Until we do that, we are not truly human beings, just labels.
In the Anthropocene Age of the human, we can see that our actions have caused high impact of global geophysical change and we are now living on a new planet that is different than that of our ancestors. As beings who have come from the elements of the earth, we need to learn to appreciate them before we cause our own destruction.
In the struggle for workplace-related religious freedom, Muslim women have, perhaps unwittingly, blazed a new trail. While on the one hand the hijab makes them a target for unfair practices, it also becomes a beacon for the legal system to rally under. For most judges and juries, the fact that a woman would be fired due to her dress is such an obviously unfair concept that it begs retribution. And although the Abercrombie and Fitch lawsuit is arguably the most popular, it certainly isn’t the only one Muslim women have fought in recent times.
A year after a deportation reprieve became available to undocumented youth, analysts are noticing a trend: Very few Chinese immigrants are applying for it.
It is the mark of a dysfunctional family to insist on secrecy, hide truths, not be willing to discuss problems openly. When it comes to race, the U.S. is a dysfunctional family. We know racism persists, but we won’t speak about it openly, fund organizations to tackle it, or allow our president to refer to it.
Elysium is the latest in a series of American productions that show how the Information Age has become the Age of Appropriation, one in which ideas and stories exist side by side for the borrowing, the taking, and ultimately, the mixing. What it also shows is that after almost a century of imitating the West, the tables are indeed turning and Hollywood is increasingly looking east.
A Dream Detained
(after Langston Hughes)
For the Dream Defenders, occupying the Florida state capitol for Trayvon Martin and racial justice
And the #Dream9 immigrant activists, who were detained at the border and won their freedom
what happens to a dream detained? does it wilt like a rose
in the Arizona sun? does it sink into the ocean
as water fills its lungs? or does it fight to come home,
cross borders and spread hope
until it has won? this is not a weak dream
a beach margarita dream
a suburban house and two car garage dream
this is an American dream
call it Aztlán
call it the hood
call it the walled-off ghetto
of Beverly Hills
we call it home
so bring them home
bring our youth back to us
safe and breathing
with a bag of Skittles and a smile
I have a dream
that one day Martin Luther King
will not be misquoted
by Bill O’Reilly on national TV
fake colorblind fallacies
affirming misplaced actions
tell me, what is so conservative
about killing a young black boy
walking home to watch
the all-star game with his dad?
Pope Francis has been placing a great deal of emphasis on mercy and compassion. Will he also emphasize that Jews and people of other faiths, or no faith, can be just as merciful and compassionate as Christians?
In this three-part video, Rabbi Lerner decries the Zimmerman verdict, while Senior Pastor J. Alfred Smith, Jr. speaks out about up-and-coming filmmaker Ryan Coogler (of Fruitvale Station fame). Pastor Emeritus J. Alfred Smith Sr. outlines a seven-step program to combat racism, and the Allen Temple choir performs a beautiful, gut-wrenching rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”