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For those of you who are joining us in Belfast for the 2010 International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations, please note that there is more detailed information available for download on the locations page of the conference website here.
We know that you will continue to have questions as the conference draws near. Please feel free to contact us at support@ondiversity.com with any inquiries or concerns that you may have.
We wish you safe and happy travels!
The 2010 International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations is fast approaching. In just a short week and a half, many of you will be joining Common Ground at Queen’s University for a unique exploration of Belfast and an important dialogue on the many facets of diversity throughout history, in present times, and for the future.
An important aspect of this conference is the community building that can happen when such a large and diverse group of people comes together to address such important issues. We hope to foster this community in a number of different ways from talking circles to tours (such as the political tour) to hosting a conference dinner.
The conference dinner is to be highlighted as a time when many of our speakers are able to come together for more intimate conversations over good food and wine. We hope that you will be able to join us for the dinner on 20 July at 19:00 (7:00pm).
The Conference Dinner costs $75 and will be held in the Canada Room at Queen’s University. There will be a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian menu available. The non-vegetarian menu will begin with a Red Pepper Bavarois with a palate cleanser of Champagne Sorbet before the main entree: Supreme of Guinea Fowl with wild mushrooms and rosemary.
The meal will end with Chocolate and Irish Cream Mousse topped with a Vanilla Chantilly, coffee, and tea.
The vegetarian menu will include fresh fruits and vegetables that are in-season and will be cooked in a way to compliment the rest of the meal.
There is still space available for the conference dinner. If you are interested in signing up, please contact us at support@ondiversity.com
From YouTube…
From Faisal al Yafai, in The National
A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs.
“We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off.
Joel Whitney interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Guernica
Islam’s toughest critic on her new book, the Axis of Evil, and the neoconservatives’ moral high ground.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1. In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu’ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.
Here we are, again.
From Wonkette
Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.
by Serena Gordon, in U.S. News Health
Monday, June 7 — When compared to teens of the same age, adolescents raised by lesbian parents are doing just fine socially, psychologically and academically, new research finds.
Not only that, they have fewer social problems, and less aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors than other teens.
The nearly 20-year study has followed 78 teens since their lesbian mothers were planning their pregnancies, and concluded that these children “demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment.” These findings stand in contrast to what some vocal opponents of gay or lesbian parents might have expected.
by A.G. Sulzberger, in The New York Times
Frustrated by what he has characterized as continued obstructionism by the Bloomberg administration, a federal judge on Wednesday appointed as a special master who will oversee the city’s implementation of practices aimed at increasing the number of black and Hispanic firefighters.
The appointment of Mr. Morgenthau, who recently stepped down as district attorney of Manhattan after 35 years in office, can be seen as an effort by the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, to choose someone with the stature and will to tussle with city leaders.
Reviewed by Theodore Dalrymple, in The Globe and Mail
All men are created equal, perhaps, but they do not by any means lead lives of equal interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is still only in her later 30s, has already ensured her place in history and is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world.
Her linguistic abilities alone would be more than enough to satisfy most people: Having learned Somali (her native tongue), English, Amharic, Arabic and Swahili, she learned Dutch sufficiently well in a couple of years to be able to stand for the Dutch parliament. But, of course, it is her public and uncompromising repudiation of Islam for which she is best known.
By Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes
Secularism does not justify eliminating women’s clothing choices.
Having grown up in a traditional Hindu family in India, I understand something about the domestic pressure for public modesty on girls. Jeans came into vogue just when I hit puberty. But for years the only way I could step out of the house in them without risking a minor nuclear explosion by my dad–a fairly urbanized doctor–was if I slipped on a blouse loose enough to smother my front and long enough to conceal my behind. A bathing suit–much less a bikini like the one that the first Muslim Miss USA wore to victory this week–was out of the question. Hence I never learned to swim.
From The Australian
The past 40 years have seen huge changes in the lives and expectations of women all across the world. To the women of the middle classes of the Western world it may well seem that the changes in their situation are the most relevant and the most important, as the proliferating media debate, revise, reformulate and revile feminist ideas. Much of this is mere chatter, which fuels the lifestyle magazines, is dictated by fashion and the endless hunt for novelty, and can safely be ignored.
Feminism was no sooner recognised as a social force than the commercial media were bound to declare that it was over.
By Avi Zenilman, in Vanity Fair Daily
The two finalists at last night’s Miss U.S.A. competition opened up a whole new set of avenues for empty political chatter.
Miss Oklahoma, Morgan Elizabeth Woolard, is for the Arizona immigration law. She really likes “states’ rights,” but she is against racial profiling.
On the other hand, Miss Michigan, Rima Fakih, is a Muslim. She won the whole event. According to Daniel Pipes, a former Giuliani adviser, her victory is a sign of affirmative action—the bad kind of racial profiling?—run amok. (Or maybe it’s a sign that you shouldn’t tout states’ rights once you’ve already won the right to represent your state.)
From Colin Marshall, in 3 Quarks Daily
So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.
Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?
Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It’s quite a while back, so I wasn’t really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that’s much more universal than the story being just a Korean story.
By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times
For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.
“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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By Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker
Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.)
In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”
By Kos, in Daily Kos
No surprise, since Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer faces a tough primary challenge, but still disappointing: she has just announced her intention to sign SB 1070.
The soon-to-be law allows Arizona police to challenge anyone they think might be undocumented, and demand immigration papers.
It also allows residents to sue their municipalities if they believe local cops aren’t doing enough to target and jail undocumented immigrants. You better believe that within a year, virtually every town and county in the state will be getting sued by xenophobic teabaggers.
From Howard W. French, in The National
Just who is Barack Obama?
Fifteen months into his presidency, we may have acquired an intuitive sense of the answer to this question, and yet Obama remains elusive, like a fidgety subject posing for a daguerreotype. He nods and bobs forward and back, in and out of focus, never altogether fixed.
By now we have all been sufficiently exposed to the Obama act to suspect real method. The recent passage of major healthcare reform presents one case in point: early in his term, Obama placed healthcare at the centre of his domestic agenda, and yet he long seemed content to avoid defining his own parameters for the reform, or even, for that matter, establishing a bottom line.
By Tony Judt, in NYR Blog
I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.
I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious.
From Janelle Weaver, in Nature News
Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.
Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.
From Alexis Okeowo, in The Economist
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
The first time I felt deeply uncomfortable being black was when I was a kid. My family had just moved to Alabama, and I was in a car with my father and my brother. A white woman with a harshly lined face and brown frizzy hair yelled out a racial slur as we drove by. Dad immediately put the car in reverse and drove over to her as she pumped gas at a filling station. “What did you say?” he demanded. She glared at him and refused to respond. Shocked into silence, my brother and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive home.
From Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic
Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until–in all honesty–some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and “lucky” enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee’s relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.
From Sarah King Head, in University World News
The university system and its board of regents in the state of Georgia has been sued for failing to fund black colleges and universities to the same degree as the other 34 institutions.
A group called the Legal Defense Coalition for the Preservation of Public Historically Black Colleges and Universities filed the lawsuit on 1 April. It claimed there had been violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment of the American Constitution.
From Susan Douglas, in In These Times
Spring 1997.
This was the Spice Girls moment, and debate: Were these frosted cupcakes really a vehicle for feminism? And how much reversion back to the glory days of prefeminism should girls and women accept—even celebrate—given that we now allegedly had it all? Despite their Wonderbras and bare thighs, the Spice Girls advocated “girl power.” They demanded, in their colossal, intercontinental hit “Wannabe,” that boys treat them with respect or take a hike. Their boldfaced liner notes claimed that “The Future Is Female” and suggested that they and their fans were “Freedom Fighters.” They made Margaret Thatcher an honorary Spice Girl. “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties,” they told the Guardian. “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a ’90s way of saying it.”
From Julie Bindel in Guardian
Iceland’s prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country’s first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996.
Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.
The 2010 Diversity Conference will be held in Belfast, Ireland at Queen’s University from July 19-21. For more information, please visit www.Diversity-Conference.com
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Diversity Conference, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/register/.
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From Thomas Rogers in Salon
In 2000, the Human Genome Project finally answered one of the most fundamental questions about race: What, if anything, is the genetic difference between people of different skin colors — black, white, Hispanic, Asian? The answer: nearly nothing. As it turns out, we all share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code — no matter our race — a fact that, geneticist J. Craig Venter claimed, proves that race is a “social concept, not a scientific one.”
But as Nell Irvin Painter explains in “The History of White People,”
her exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race, it’s a social construct that goes back much further and is much more complicated than many people think. In the book, Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution of the concept of whiteness from ancient Rome — where, she points out, the slaves were largely white — to the 21st century America and explains how, in the era of Obama, our once-narrow concept of whiteness has become at once far broader and less important than ever before.
From Hartosh Singh Bal, Dhirendra K. Jha in Open
On Friday, 18 July 1947, Renuka Ray, who was to go on to become India’s first Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation, got up to speak in the Constituent Assembly:
Mr President, Sir, I rise to support Clause 19 and in particular section (2) of this clause which provides for territorial representation without reservation of seats. We are particularly opposed to the reservation of seats for women…
I think that the psychological factor comes into play when there is reservation of seats for women. When there is reservation of seats for women, the question of their consideration for general seats, however competent they may be, does not usually arise… From the very start of our national awakening in this country, enlightened men have encouraged women to come forward as equal partners in the struggle for freedom and to do service for national regeneration in the different walks of life… So, it is not only the inherent qualities of women, but more particularly I should say the qualities of our men that is responsible for the fact that in our country, there has never been any strife between men and women.
…I should like to support this clause which has done away once and for all with reservation of seats for women, which we consider to be an impediment to our growth and an insult to our very intelligence and capacity.
‘Once and for all’ are strong words. By the end of her life, Ray had changed her mind. The men she had placed so much faith in had ensured that election after election, the proportion of women in Parliament barely made it past 10 per cent. And it was the men she had so much faith in who stood in the way of the Women’s Reservation Bill that made its way through the Rajya Sabha on 9 March 2010.
From Bonnie Angelo in Time
Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her gritty novel Beloved, smolders at the inequities that blacks and women still face:
Q. In your contemporary novels you portray harsh confrontation between black and white. In Tar Baby a character says, ”White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.” It seems hopeless if we can’t bridge the abysses you see between sexes, classes, races.
A. I feel personally sorrowful about black-white relations a lot of the time because black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war, to prevent other kinds of real conflagrations.
If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me — it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, ”I am not that.” So in that sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.
It wasn’t negative to them — it was unifying. When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was ”nigger.” Ask them — I grew up with them. I remember in the fifth grade a smart little boy who had just arrived and didn’t speak any English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that I was black — a nigger. It took him six months; he was told. And that’s the moment when he belonged, that was his entrance. Every immigrant knew he would not come as the very bottom. He had to come above at least one group — and that was us.
From Abbas Milani in The New Republic
Traditional Iranian husbands, the sort found in the highest ranks of the Islamic Republic, sometimes refer to their wives as “the house.” For them, this is not just an expression of their understanding of gender relations. It is viewed as a necessary euphemism, vital protection for a woman’s honor. The mere uttering of her name, after all, might compromise her chastity.
It is telling, therefore, that Mir Hossein Mousavi courted and eventually married Zahra Rahnavard. When they met, in 1969, Rahnavard was already an acclaimed pioneer in the field of Islamic feminism, as well as a sculptor and critic and all-around star of the intellectual scene that throbbed in Tehran at that time. But it was her political theories that vaulted her farthest: Rahnavard proffered the kind of critique of patriarchy percolating in the Western academy at the time. Yet she didn’t join her sisters in the West in launching an all-out assault on tradition. Yes, Islam has misogynistic elements, she argued in her speeches. But those misogynistic elements are not necessarily native to Islam. They only prevail because of the male domination of the faith.
From Tony Judt in NYR Blog
“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”
In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.
From the archive of The Nation, May 29, 1984
The Supreme Court says separate but equal is inherently unequal.
The Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation in American public education was unanimous. If anything, world opinion was even more emphatic. Even the Communist powers, we suspect, must privately have applauded the decision. In Kenya a spokesman for the Luo tribe voiced the growing world-wide sentiment against all forms of racial discrimination when he said “America is right . . . If we are not educated together, we will live in fear of one another. If we are to stay together forever, why should we have separate schools?” Quite apart from this sentiment, the decision was especially welcome at this time since it enabled us and our friends abroad for the first time in some years to be equally and simultaneously enthusiastic about an important announcement from Washington. The decision was a fine antidote to the blight of McCarthyism and kindred fevers.
Transcript from The New York Times, March 18, 2008
The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
From Brook Barnes, in The New York Times
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.
Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.
We are pleased to announce that three wonderful tours have been added to the 2010 Diversity Conference in Belfast, Ireland from 19 July - 21 July! Register soon - space is limited!
Belfast City Hall
Introduction to Belfast:
Beginning from Queen’s University, this tour tells the story of Belfast as it developed around High Street. The story begins in 1611 when James I chartered the settlement and includes visits to such landmarks as Belfast City Hal, St George’s Church, the Albert Memorial Clock, St. Anne Cathedral, Grand Opera House, Crown Liquor Saloon, Ulster Hall and many more!
Belfast Political Tour
Hosted by a former political prisoner from the Republican community, we travel through a main arterial route in west Belfast, visiting many sites that are relevant to the most recent phase of British/Irish conflict. As the tour is delivered by primary sources, it is very much a living history. At the end of the tour we invite you to engage in a complimentary glass of Guinness at a nearby pub.
Belfast City Centre
No visit to Belfast would be complete without a trip around it’s famous and historic pubs. The hospitality of Belfast city and its people is legendary and there’s no better way to enjoy the ‘craic’ and the banter with the locals than over a few drinks. The pub tour features six pubs and we will stop in a couple for a drink.
For more information, please click here.
If you have already registered from the conference but are interested in signing up for the tours, please contact the conference secretariat at support@ondiversity.com . If you have not yet registered for the conference but plan to, you will be able to add any tours during the initial registration process.
by Frederick Douglass, in Infoplease
In the first narrative of my experience in slavery, written nearly forty years ago, and in various writings since, I have given the public what I considered very good reasons for withholding the manner of my escape. In substance these reasons were, first, that such publication at any time during the existence of slavery might be used by the master against the slave, and prevent the future escape of any who might adopt the same means that I did. The second reason was, if possible, still more binding to silence: the publication of details would certainly have put in peril the persons and property of those who assisted. Murder itself was not more sternly and certainly punished in the State of Maryland than that of aiding and abetting the escape of a slave. Many colored men, for no other crime than that of giving aid to a fugitive slave, have, like Charles T. Torrey, perished in prison. The abolition of slavery in my native State and throughout the country, and the lapse of time, render the caution hitherto observed no longer necessary. But even since the abolition of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to exist, there was no reason for telling it. I shall now, however, cease to avail myself of this formula, and, as far as I can, endeavor to satisfy this very natural curiosity. I should, perhaps, have yielded to that feeling sooner, had there been anything very heroic or thrilling in the incidents connected with my escape, for I am sorry to say I have nothing of that sort to tell; and yet the courage that could risk betrayal and the bravery which was ready to encounter death, if need be, in pursuit of freedom, were essential features in the undertaking. My success was due to address rather than courage, to good luck rather than bravery. My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery.
From George Soros in The Guardian
Continued discrimination against Roma in Europe not only violates human dignity, but is a major social problem crippling the development of eastern European countries with large Roma populations. Spain, which has been more successful in dealing with its Roma problem than other countries, can take the lead this month as it assumes the European Union presidency.
Up to 12 million Roma live in Europe today, primarily in the east. Despite the region’s overall economic growth over the past two decades, life for many Roma is worse now than ever. During the communist era, Roma received jobs and housing. But the heavy industries in which many were employed have now closed, and unemployment is widespread. Many Roma live in deplorable conditions unworthy of modern Europe.
These economic hardships are deepened by social tension. The majority population is very hostile towards Roma, and discrimination against them occurs at every level. For example, Roma children are often automatically put into classes for the mentally disabled, simply because they are Roma. Despite court rulings ordering reform, Roma are regularly denied equal access to housing, education, and healthcare, creating a vicious cycle of poverty and marginalisation. Reality and stereotype reinforce each other in a reflexive fashion.
From Thomas Rogers, in Salon
The author of a new book talks about the brain’s hidden impulses, and why you’re more biased than you think:
Of the many viral-video meltdowns pop culture has endured, few are as viscerally disturbing, as painful to watch, as Michael Richards’ racist rant during a 2006 stand-up appearance. As you’ll no doubt remember, the man better known as Kramer lashed out at a heckler in his audience with a shocking string of slurs, including the brutally memorable line, “Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down with a fork up your ass.” The breakdown so outraged the general public that even today, if you Google “Michael Richards,” it auto-completes to “Michael Richards racist.”
Shankar Vedantam, a science writer with the Washington Post, uses the Michael Richards incident in his new book, “The Hidden Brain,” to illustrate the way he believes our unconscious can betray us — and reveal biases we wouldn’t even acknowledge to ourselves. Vedantam uses a wide array of vivid true stories to make his point: The tragic tale of a woman who is brutally beaten in front of dozens of onlookers illustrates how a crowd’s inaction can trick our brain into ignoring pleas for help; two transsexuals who’ve experienced both sides of the gender divide help illuminate how unconscious sexism can change lives.
From The Economist
THE late Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. As a father of six, he might have added something about women’s role in the reproduction of the species. But his aphorism is about as good a one-sentence summary of classical feminism as you can get.
The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of special treatment for “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. “Steak or fish?” asks the waiter. “Steak, of course,” she replies. “And for the vegetables?” “They’ll have steak as well.”) During America’s most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton taunted Barack Obama with an advertisement that implied that he, unlike she, was not up to the challenge of answering the red phone at 3am.
From Nancy Fraser and Marina Liakova in Eurozine
Feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser outlines in interview her concept of “parity of participation”, or the representation of women in institutional structures. The concept, she argues, bridged the traditional leftwing theoretical dichotomy between distribution and recognition and in turn raises the question: who determines who is to be represented? Here Fraser emphasizes the centrality of the politics of interpretation in any dialogue about justice, such as that between western feminism and Islam.Marina Liakova: An important theme in your writing is the concept of justice. You argue that the main problem of justice is recognition and protection of identities from cultural domination. Could you give a brief definition of justice – does it represent only a lack of domination? And taking this further, is the struggle of modern women for recognition successful and what other accents could you pinpoint?
From Ian Buruma, in The Guardian
Minarets are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith.
Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of whom about 13% regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5% of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for a constitutional ban on minarets, allegedly because of worries about “fundamentalism” and the “creeping Islamisation” of Switzerland.
Are the Swiss more bigoted than other Europeans? Probably not. Referendums are a measure of popular gut feelings, rather than considered opinion, and popular gut feelings are rarely liberal. Referendums on this issue in other European countries might well produce startlingly similar results.
To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets – an idea that was promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, but by none of the other political parties – to “Islamophobia” is perhaps to miss the point. To be sure, a long history of mutual Christian-Muslim hostility, and recent cases of radical Islamist violence, have made many people fearful of Islam in a way that they are not of Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the minaret, piercing the sky like a missile, is easily caricatured as a fearsome image.
From Charles Blow, in The New York Times
A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. …”
Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.
Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony. Now that the election’s afterglow has nearly faded, the hysteria of hope is being ground against the hard stone of reality. Things have not gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.
From Daphne Eviatar, in The Washington Independent
Last year, an Arizona housing developer known for building affordable homes for Hispanics filed a complaint against the City of Yuma, which denied his application to build homes for low to moderate income families in a predominately white high-income neighborhood. The developer sued for discrimination under the Fair Housing Act, charging that the decision was racially motivated. But the federal court dismissed the case before the developer could even gather evidence, ruling that the discrimination the developer alleged was not “plausible.”
In the past, merely stating the allegations would have been enough to allow the developer to at least begin gathering information to try to prove his case. But two recent Supreme Court decisions have made bringing discrimination cases far more difficult by demanding not only that the claim clearly meet the requirements of the law, but also that a judge find it “plausible” before allowing the plaintiff to begin collecting evidence. The consequence is that many people who in the past might have won their cases on the merits now won’t even get past the entrance gate.
That’s either a sea change in the way the courts handle lawsuits and particularly civil rights claims, as several witnesses and senators argued on Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject, or it’s merely a clarification of the longstanding procedural requirements, as some Republicans at the hearing argued.
From Cyrus Hall, on 3 Quarks Daily
My temporary home of the last five years, Switzerland, has just voted for one of the most bigoted and undemocratic constitutional reforms in recent memory: the banning of Islamic minarets on Mosques. The vote appears to be quite stunning, with 58% of voters backing the ban. This was after the most recent polls showed the measure being rejected by 53%, a story in itself.
This represents the most direct attack on the European Muslim minority yet. The French “headscarf ban” was at least religion neutral — something I would still argue against (as an Atheist), but I appreciate the attempt at even-handedness. On the other hand, this constitutional amendment targets a small, largely immigrant population (many of whom have no vote), single-handedly banning them from behavior that would be perfectly acceptable were they of any other faith. Outrageous.
From Laila Lalami, in The Nation
At a literary festival in New York City some years ago, I was introduced to a French writer who, almost immediately after we shook hands, asked me where I was from. When the answer was “Morocco,” he put down his drink and stared at me with anthropological curiosity. We spoke about literature, of course, and discovered a common love for the work of the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, but before long the conversation had turned to Moroccan writers, then to Moroccan writers in France, and then, as I expected it eventually would, to Moroccan immigrants in France–at which point the French writer declared, “If they were all like you, there wouldn’t be a problem.”
His tone suggested he was paying me some sort of compliment, though I found it odd that he would want the 1 million Moroccans in his country to be carbon copies of someone he had barely met and whose views on immigration–had he asked about them–he might not have found quite to his liking. It was only later, when I had returned to my hotel room, that it dawned on me that the profile of the unproblematic Moroccan immigrant he might have had in mind was based solely on conspicuous things. Some of these, like skin color, were purely accidental; others, like sartorial choices or dietary practices, were in my opinion inessential, but from his vantage point perhaps they suggested a smaller degree of “Muslimness.”