Last week, I tried to explain as best I could what I felt could be part of a solid, sound, moral, ethical and spiritual basis to rely upon in fighting for social justice. To be a witness rather than a bystander when confronting man’s inhumanity to man. In that essay, Journey to the Core of the Human Spirit, I tried to be as substantive as I could about an aspect of ourselves that is in so many ways intangible and open to misinterpretation.
This essay will be about an even more seemingly intangible phenomenon.
It’s all well and good to have an ethical and spiritual foundation in order to fight for social justice.
But as in all dangerous and difficult quests, once you set out, obstacles appear.
My latest obstacle is not a huge one, but it is extremely irritating!
When I enter and comment in diaries about immigration (yes, over at the Great Orange Satan, but it could be anywhere among Democrats), I have found a new meme floating around. It goes something like this:
“Yeah, and if you don’t agree 100% with them then they call you a racist or a xenophobe!”
There are hundreds of variations on this tired theme. One of the most annoying (though, in retrospect, funny if it weren’t so sad) new variations I encountered was when someone said that calling a person a racist is using the “biggest beat stick” be it secular or religious and thus implying this was akin to both hate speech and, perhaps, causing someone to lose their life in a fiery explosion from hell.
So I have tried to come up with an answer to that meme, to overcome this obstacle to real dialogue.
Here is my response to this meme:
So you think being called a racist is hatemongering, eh? That it is a kind of torture? A human rights abuse? Hmm.
Let’s see …
BEING ACCUSED OF RACISM OR XENOPHOBIA ON A BLOG:
Your ego is hurt.
You may have to ‘splain a few things to your online friends
You do not lose your job.
You do not lose your home.
You do not lose your liberty.
You are not forced to visit that blog again.
You do not lose your health.
You do not lose any of your rights.EFFECTS OF RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA
Torture – your body is broken and your spirit crushed. This includes lynchings, being separated from your infant children, being beaten in detention centers or having dogs set upon you.
You lose your job.
You lose your home.
You are imprisoned and lose your liberty – you cannot leave the scene of what is harming you.
You lose your health. This includes not being allowed to take medications that you need for your health, not being allowed medical care, depression, PTSD.
You lose your rights. This includes not being allowed to call your lawyer or be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
I think there’s a difference here. One of proportionality. The former is not hatespeech. The latter is the result of hatespeech.
This may sound trivial, it’s such a laughable meme to inject into a dialogue on immigration law and policy in America. But I don’t think it is trivial. I think it is a form of deep denial, the desire, as I quoted from Helen Bamber in my previous essay, to be a bystander:
… the world is divided into two types, bystanders who see only what they want, and proper witnesses who observe and record the truth.
I feel these kinds of defensive statements bespeak a real fear, if not terror, of being a “proper witness.” Our egos seek to deny anything that threatens them, and the notion we may be racist or xenophobic and, most of all, ignorant, is something we reflexively avoid, turn away from. It takes an affirmative act of will to resist doing this, to stand and face the truth, even if it is painful, even if we find we do have prejudices and fear- and ignorance-ridden hatreds towards those unlike ourselves.
And I don’t think this obstacle I’ve tried to describe is limited to arguments on immigration, but on every issue you can think of. In order to really solve problems at the root, we first have to look at those problems without preconceptions, have the courage to see the truth.
Obstacles. Meh.
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To the “Christians” you could respond; How would Jesus want you to treat the person from another land? To the athiest: Is it ethical to close our doors to those less fortunate? To the patriots: Where is your family originally from? To the bigots: Don’t waste your breath.
From the youtube description:
The very notion of a black and white race is nonsense but the truth is as antithetical to liberals as it is to conservatives.
Of course there are differences in skin pigmentation. It is idiocy to think one could not tell whether they were in Stockholm or Lagos by looking at the population but what if they were in New Delhi where the population is primarily caucasian?
DNA today can do an excellent job of distinguishing many races and even subdivisions. It is delicately labeled ancestry.
Fascinating is software that can estimate with a reasonable degree of accuracy European nationality by the percentage mix of racial ancestry. Ironic is that Italians are among those that have the purest European ancestry, both the lighter-skinned northern Italians and the darker-skinned southern Italians. It is those in the south who have sometimes been looked down on by the northerners as being “contaminated” by African ancestry.
I once asked an afrocentrist about why the ancient Berber tribe in Africa had such a large number of members with blue eyes. Seemed it was the legacy of those big-headed devil Neanderthals from Europe. [sigh]
Racists are all the same under the skin.
Dr. Tony Frudakis is a biologist who founded a company which deciphers continental ancestry from DNA. More accurately it determines mix of ancestry.
What of Hispanics? Hispanics are a mix of European and Native American ancestry. You take Tony’s wife, a Mexican – well, actually Tony’s company ran into a problem when Tony’s wife was excluded from the category of Hispanic by some rare alleles.
As you might imagine, that problem was quickly rectified.
We will have gone a long way towards Nirvana when we no longer talk about white and black and yellow – who the hell is yellow? – and red – hey, we Irish are the only red race. 🙂
When that happens, what will Lou Dobbs have to talk about?
Best, Terry