Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/23/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
At our recent conference I got talking to an older African American man with a kind face and philosophical look. He told me about a memoir he has written, Ticket to Exile. I was highly intrigued by his story and asked him to write something for me to put up here. By Adam David Miller
I hurt. I had said it.
I have to say that I love the comments going on on my last post, about conflict resolution and how to do conflict. The question I would like to ask is this: Were Gandhi and MLK in the conflict resolution business? Yes they were, in the long term. India and Britain, American blacks and whites, could only resolve their conflicts by the establishment of justice. But to get that justice (and the struggle is ongoing), their movements had to bring the conflict, that was being absorbed in pain by the oppressed, to the doors of the oppressors, into their media and their faces.
I’m fascinated by the germination of good deeds. Where do they begin? How do they grow from a mere idea to an actuality? On the 26th of January, I caught up by phone with José Chavez, a custodian in the San Jose, California, Unified School District who’s been instrumental in creating a library for the village school in Limón, Michoacán, Mexico, where he grew up. (I learned of his project through a librarian friend who was soliciting books in Spanish.) Not only did he lead the library project, but he helped (physically) build a concrete plaza and paved areas in the village.
A member of the political party that pushed for the minaret ban announced that he had become a Muslim. Outside of Switzerland, the mainstream media has ignored this. Muslims around the world, however, have picked up on this story, circulating it on blogs and on Facebook. In the process, however, the story has become distorted into a fairly bizarre shape, and so creating some confusion. Meanwhile, at least one anti-Muslim blog has picked up on the story. Looking at the comments it appears that some opponents of Muslim immigration want to dismiss the fact of his conversion all together.
MLK Day is drawing to a close. Have all the tributes and videos shaken us up, radicalized us, and renewed our resistance to the systems of imperialism and racism that Dr. King fought in his day? At its best, MLK Day leads us to hear King’s powerful call for justice resounding in the present moment, to hear him urging us to dismantle our racist judicial/prison system and end the mass incarceration of black men, to oppose U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to take seriously his idea that militarism leads to the “spiritual death” of a nation. At its very worst, the memorialization process reduces King’s legacy by offering a saccharine history lesson that leaves people thinking that King did all the necessary work and racism is over. Jack & Jill Politics has done a particularly smart job of projecting Dr. King into the present rather than freezing him into the past.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. – Dr. King
If Americans permit thought-control, business control, and freedom control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism. – Dr. King
Video interview with Dr. King (apologies for the 30 second ad at the start, it’s worth waiting it out):
We don’t talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enough.
Yesterday I posted some ecofeminist reflections on Avatar. Today I want to take on the racism issue that several Goddess Scholars as well as bloggers here at Tikkun Daily have raised. Originally I thought this movie was carefully crafted to bring the (mostly) white audience into an understanding that indigenous people already have — the importance, even sacredness, of their world ecology. The hero is Jake Sully, a human who becomes a Na’vi, thereby moving from one world to the other. He begins by betraying the people who ultimately become his own, so it’s not like his first actions are laudable — he’s actually an anti-hero in the beginning, not meant to be liked.
It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life. I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for.
In 1950, when Philip Roth graduated from Newark, New Jersey’s Weequaic High School (which he immortalized in Portnoy’s Complaint) and still in 1960 when Tikkun Editor Michael Lerner graduated from the school, Weequaic was known as one of the top schools in America. By 2000 it was one of the most violent schools in the 12th most dangerous city in the country. The movie “Heart of Stone” (which includes a spot with Michael Lerner) tells what happened next:
When Ron Stone took over as principal in 2001, gangs ruled the school. Crime and shootings were commonplace and during his first month on the job he watched students engage in a mass brawl in every hallway. Stone knew his work was cut out for him and devised an unconventional plan to realize his vision of turning the school around.
I’ve really been enjoying the Avatar discussion, both here on Tikkun Daily and on the Goddess Scholars List I belong to. I waited until I’d seen the film to read any of the posts, because I didn’t want to prejudice my reaction to it. The GoddessScholars’ discussion reminded me a lot of a Women and Science Fiction class I taught in the 1980s. In my classes I always had a check-in before we began (despite the fact that they were university courses), because then we had deeper discussions. One of the odd things about the Women and Science Fiction class that semester was that there was a sizable minority (about 7 women out of 24) who were big football fans.