Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/9/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
If you want to cut to the chase in this post, go straight to the section called Talking about Race with Love. That’s where you will find the concrete lessons I have derived, especially about how a group that’s engaged in conversations about privilege without signing on to having them, can do so with love.
In my position of privilege, I can write whatever I want about Ferguson, and I don’t risk losing a job, alienating people who can make my life miserable, or possibly even more imminent physical risks to my body. In this particular case I want to name, explicitly, that this piece is written for a white audience: I am offering one idea about what we, as white people, can do.
Two brothers, Pape and Amidou, were recently attacked and bashed by a mob of their classmates on the playground of their Bronx, New York Intermediate School 318. Throughout the violent attack, classmates taunted the brothers with chants of “You’re Ebola!” The boys, who were born in the U.S. but whose family is Sengalese American, were rushed to a local hospital with severe injuries. The incident reveals the danger of the toxic intersection of Ebola panic and racism.
This past weekend, activists streamed into Ferguson, Missouri, for Ferguson October, a “weekend of resistance” comprising actions and events “to build momentum for a nationwide movement against police violence.”
Corporations can also provide important tools for social change. In the crucial battle to safely manage global climate change, corporations will play the leading role.
For groups such as Hindu Americans, the racial connotations might not seem tangible, but religious discrimination is a very real problem and is linked with racial othering. Often times, Hindu American students have faced challenges in making those connections and building coalitions to fight intolerance.
Hinduism and its principles go far beyond ethnic identities and national borders. In fact, the universality of Hinduism makes it applicable in almost every aspect of our daily lives, particularly when it comes to the equality of all beings and our inherent need to help them.
Amidst this seemingly hopeless situation Sabine Lichtenfels, co-founder of a peace research center called Tamera in Portugal, initiated what she calls a “vision camp” in the West Bank. It had mainly one goal: to create and maintain humaneness, trust, and equal exchange between Israel and Palestine.
Questions about internalized oppression have been the backbone of Warren Blumenfeld research, and even before he came to consciousness of this fact, his research was his therapy, for it had challenged and continually challenges him to change and to grow.
Rather than characterizing immigration and migration issues as humanitarian concerns, the anti-immigration activists connect the narratives representing immigrants and migrants to our borders to the language of disease, crime, drugs, alien and lower forms of culture and life, of invading hoards, of barbarians at the gates who if allowed to enter will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the lesser nations of the Earth.