Race and Racism, Russia-Georgia, North vs. South / East Vs. West Europe, Blindnesses of a Potential Hapa President

Ha*pa: 1) Adjective; Noun: Hawaiian word meaning "half". 2) Noun: Slang, abbreviated form of "Hapa Haole" translating literally as "Half White" (Caucasian); someone of mixed race, especially half European and/or half Asian/Pacific Islander. 3) A Na Hoku Hanohano Award winning Hawaiian music band formed in 1983 (see Hapa.com)

(Emphasis original)

"Likewise, I was looking at this picture of Obama's grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I'd bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn't give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do. But the fact is that, in the 60s, you could be disowned for falling in love with a black woman or black man. There is a reason why we have a long history of publicly biracial black people, but not so much of publicly biracial white people.
We often give a pass to racists by noting that they were "of their times." Fair enough, and I know Hawaii was a different beast, but still, today, let us speak of people who were ahead of their times, who were outside of their times. Let us remember that Barack Obama learned the great lessons of life from courageous white people. Let us speak of those who do what normal, right people should always do when faced with a child--commit an act love. Here's to doing the right thing."

"I hope this is in good taste," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, October 21st, 2008, TheAtlantic.com

(Emphasis my own in the following quotes.)

"But you don't hear about this story from the Western media. Indeed, you hear little if anything about the Ossetians, who seem to hardly exist in the West's eyes, even though their grievance is the root cause of this war.
While Russia and America see the conflict in abstract terms about spheres of influence and protecting allies, for Ossetians, who still recall the centuries of massacres Georgians committed against them, it is highly personal. They will still recall the Georgian massacres in the early 1920s, when Georgia was briefly independent, which exterminated up to 8 percent of the Ossetian population. In 1990, when Georgia was again moving towards independence, the ultranationalist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished Ossetia's limited autonomy, leading to another Ossetian rebellion that was only quelled by a peace agreement signed by Georgia, Russia and the Ossetians. Gamsakhurdia was subsequently deposed, and Georgia's ethnic chauvinism was shelved until the rise of current president Mikhail Saakashvili in 2003."

"The War We Don't Know," by Mark Ames, August 18, 2008, TheNation.com

"The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.
The events of the past week will be remembered that way, too."

Putin Makes His Move, by Robert Kagan, August 11th, 2008, WashingtonPost.com

"The specific conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia and Abkhazia has its roots in the following. First, the Southern Ossetes, who until 1990 formed an autonomous region of the Georgian Soviet republic, seek to unite in one state with their co-ethnics in North Ossetia, an autonomous republic of the Russian Soviet republic and now the Russian Federation. There is an historically grounded Ossete fear of violent Georgian nationalism and the experience of Georgian hatred of ethnic minorities under then Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia, which the Ossetes see again under Georgian President, Mikhel Saakashvili."

Washington Risks Nuclear War by Miscalculation, by F William Engdahl, August 11th, 2008, MarketOracle.co.uk

"Lost in all of this is not only the question of why America would risk an apocalypse to help a petty dictator like Saakashvili get control of a region that doesn't want any part of him. But no one's bothering to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they're fighting for their independence in the first place. That's because the Georgians--with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann--have been pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.
A few years ago, I had an Ossetian working as the sales director for my now-defunct newspaper, The eXile. After listening to me rave about how much I always (and still do) like the Georgians, he finally lost it and told me another side to Georgian history, explaining how the Georgians had always mistreated the Ossetians, and how the South Ossetians wanted to reunite with North Ossetia in order to avoid being swallowed up, and how this conflict goes way back, long before the Soviet Union days. It was clear that the Ossetian-Georgian hatred was old and deep, like many ethnic conflicts in this region. Indeed, a number of Caucasian ethnic groups still harbor deep resentment towards Georgia, accusing them of imperialism, chauvinism and arrogance."

"Getting Georgia's War On," by Mark Ames, August 18th, TheNation.com

"But whether the U.S. openly urged Saakashvili to invade, acquiesced to it, or was somewhat surprised by it, the point is that the proxy confrontation between Russia and the U.S. was on, and the two sides began their move toward a dangerous renewal of the Cold War. Without even acknowledging Georgia's brutal invasion of Ossetia and Abkhazia, American leaders - out of knee-jerk anti-Russianism - started bashing the Russian bear for its harsh occupation in Georgia, including CheneyBush, John McCain, and Barack Obama/Joe Biden."

"Violating Someone's 'Sphere of Influence' Can Be Dangerous," by Bernard Weiner, September 2nd, 2008, Truthout.org

"SESNO: So you’re saying the Georgians provoked this?
POWELL: They did. I mean, there was a lot of reasons to have provocations in the area, but the match that started the conflagration was from the Georgian side.
AMANPOUR: And yet…
POWELL: And that’s a given."

"Colin Powell says Georgia provoked Russian crisis," September 22nd, 2008, CrooksAndLiars.com

"I need a sign to let me know you’re here
All of these lines are being crossed over the atmosphere
I need to know that things are gonna look up
Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup
When there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head
When you can feel the world shake from the words that I said

And I’m calling all angels
And I’m calling all you angels
And I won’t give up if you don’t give up
I won’t give up if you don’t give up

I need a sign to let me know you’re here
Cause my tv set just keeps it all from being clear
I want a reason for the way things have to be
I need a hand to help build up some kind of hope inside of me"

From "Calling All Angels", by Train

           I wrote the following during the Russia-Georgia War of August 2008. I put off posting it because of the extreme propaganda push which began after the first few days. At first, the media and the government in America was fairly factual about how it all began. Then following the US government's cue, the rhetoric was escalated to levels I had not seen since the "unbiased" reporting building up the the US-Iraq war of 2003. I did not wish to go through the BS of being labeled Pro-Russian simply by going against the newly reforming talking point, that Russia began the war, or that Georgia was "tricked into it," and of course my favorite which follows, that "it doesn't really matter who started it."

           One of the best quotes attributed to comedian Steven Colbert, that "reality has a well known Liberal bias," could have been said in this case, to apply in that because of decisions made by the White House and State Department being echoed by the US media, reality was beginning to have "a Russian bias." Few things piss me off more than the fact that, though every part of the big three branches of the US government share in the Human Rights and Constitutional fiascos of the past few years, the State Department's has lost most all of its credibility in some respects of being nothing more than a propaganda organ to the rest of the world. The one department meant to be above politics and professional was being run by sound bites and political posturing. Truth to our positions as put out for the rest of the world to see, our versions of events, was becoming irrelevant. What we said was happening or happened was considered more important than what really did. What did we care if it was wrong or if it did not pass the "smell test?"

           I had wanted to write about race, identity, and status for awhile and I saw the war, ongoing at the time, as a good sounding board to work in some relevant points. Though I had read quite a bit about the frozen conflicts, my formal training was rather limited. I had attended two seminars devoted to the Caucuses, North and South, and a third about the frozen conflicts, which was mostly merged with the other two. Still it was enough for me to form an opinion about how Americans might misread the conflicts. It is the hatred we cannot fully appreciate.

           We cannot fully understand how people would fear being attacked in the middle of the night by their own supposed countrymen. Americans understand how other smaller countries can be afraid of and hate Russia or Germany for having been invaded by them, but also still not have any clue that within countries, borders are sometimes hardly representative of a common people, and actually can instigate or cause literally a fight to the death for autonomy or recognition for the literal survival of a people. What is nation building to the outside world is often ethnic cleansing (language, culture, as well as massacres of a people in small doses) to those inside the country that those outside of it will never know about, nor be told about, and on the level of national governments, not particularly care about except for using it to score points for your country on this or that, or for geo-strategic positioning. The latter often means exploiting such divisions (and lucrative profits of weapons sales) as often or more often as trying to heal them.

           After former Secretary of State Collin Powell said the politically "shocking" truth that the blame of the conflict came from the Georgian side, I reconsidered posting this. It makes some good points about race here and there. I was not able to find a good quote, which I wanted to include, on just how insulated Americans were about the nature of the conflict compared to the rest of the world, even though it was accurately reported on here at the time! How quickly a new meme becomes gospel once introduced and what was an accepted or acceptable notion only week or month ago suddenly becomes foreign and suspectedly treasonous.


On 8/15/06...

The idea that all races will put aside their prejudices, their dislikes of each other, drop their ethnic biases and look at each other all as equals, possessing equal rights, be equal to each's own in terms of intelligence or cultural non-superiority, all of this is a fantasy. The only thing that can unite humanity for long to even begin to put a facade of equality or even the mere tolerance of other races and nations differences and right to non-assimilation is necessity for survival. Once it is deemed optional, once one-sided nationalism prevails, that “we” are different, special, and do not have to play by the same rules as others, once racial or religious groups put forward that “we” are the true (the best or ideal) ethnicity or religion for a particular region, it will gain steam and release a new cycle of violence, hatred, and recrimination which will feed on itself. Put simply get along together or die together is becoming humanity's only two choices. While thinking your branch of humanity, whether by race, religion, or by nation, can dominate or survive while others perish, that view when Moore's Law (that computers will double in power and decrease in size every few years) is applied to weapons, will make mass genocides inevitable without accelerated international cooperation, new institutions, and common non-U.S. tainted “world culture” building as fast or faster than technological advancements proceed. Failure to do so, hatred, mass murder, religious intolerance, ethnic based superiority movements, these will dominate all else, whether openly proclaimed or subtly while double-thinkingly proclaiming to fight against it, such as xenophobia in Russian nationalism and race in U.S. politics.

Notes, Part 6, Polsci.com

and then on 8/15/08 (finally, the real post)...

           There is much to be said for what I call, “knowing your blind spots.” No one can know everything, not even everything that might be important to what you want, need, or wish to do. Each one of us has experiences which are limited, almost catered to who we are, who we think we are, or who or want we want to be, or what we wish we were. When I lived in Hawaii for the first time, before I went back to college, I knew I did not know the culture or people here very well. I read about it in books, but I was not a part of it.

           Having some money, I could control my environment a bit. I worked for my own software company so I generally did not have to meet anyone I did not choose to. My world, as many others in America, consisted mainly of what I wished to have happen, plus those interactions one could not avoid; supermarkets, banking, government office interactions. Most people with other more typical jobs I could observe, but could do so somewhat detachedly.

           Unless you have worked at a large variety of jobs, as I more recently have here (temp agency), or are forced by your job to deal with a large cross-section of general public, your view of a society, even your own society, is limited to how others of your profession or social class see it. How those with similar status, wealth, life experiences sees it. You can study other people around you, but it is not the same as being more fully defined by their uniquely different perspective on your common culture. Basically there are as many sub-cultures as there are people, not just types of people. Everyone lives in their own mental world. Its just others who we routinely deal with whose lives and jobs are similar to our own, their life experiences which roughly match our own, they see or live within overlapping similar cultures or mindsets.

           Greater poverty and public transportation mean interacting with groups of people most usually don’t have to. For the most wealthy, unless they have private planes (alas, I never was that wealthy), their “public transportation” gripes are mostly limited to airplanes and airports. Those places have cross sections of the public colliding with each other, whom many can and often do mock about others rudeness, over-talkativeness, and generally uncouth ways. Even the so-called “middle-class”, (what little is left of it anyway) generally avoid public transportation in America, any that they can possibly avoid, and with the exception of airports, most are avoidable.

           One of the high points of seeing New York City for me was to have been able to ride on the city subway. I never got to, and by family who live in New York, it was widely discouraged. It just simply was not done, mainly out of ignorance as millions there do everyday, safely. Yet for those who absolutely don’t have to, (many people really try to avoid it even if they cannot afford to) they are left only with the horror stories on TV newscasts to frame it for them or to say how unsafe it is. Without actually experiencing something, our worlds are what is shown to us on the TV as to what it is, no matter how warped or sensationalized, or politicized, that view is.

           I start this piece on race with another random conversation on a bus overheard. That is what public transportation does. As I put it in the poem “Lexicon" (about language) and the train, or language as a train, “it brings together all and lets them share each others truths and each others cares.” In the close quarters of a bus, like a subway, you briefly overhear snippets of others lives far different than your own that you might never touch upon otherwise.

           It was a phrase no doubt not unique but one which would stick indelibly in my mind when thinking about race. One young woman chattering away to another stated, “You know, if I dye my hair, I can pass for white.” It was not a pleasant thought that such things really still mattered in my country, but they do. There are not-talked-about yet no less real, advantages for "passing for white" even in the most multi-cultural and racially tolerant region of the country, Hawaii. I did not wish to look at the speaker. Such a comment did not offend my world view, but I did not wish to have that followed as it inevitably would, with an appraisal on the veracity of the statement. Not an "I can see that,” nor a, “Girl, who do you think you're kidding?”

           When reading someone writing about race in very strong or starkly honest terms as I intend to here, I usually think as I think most often do, "what is the perspective of the person writing these comments?" In other words, what race or color are they, because knowing that frames or puts in my head how I tend to view my generalizations of their experiences to frame the context to put their observations in. In some instances I can see writers choosing to omit stating what their own race or culture is, and hope that it is irrelevant to what they are saying, but I find it rude not address the elephant in the room of what they are saying, “yes, ok, but what are you?”

           I am white, and have had a typical “white-in-America” set of experiences, generally speaking. My name in America can be taken either as black or white as there have been very prominent real and fictional blacks on television, which makes some or many to consider it a “black” name. The library at my school was named after a famous black civil rights leader of the same last name and similar French-Canadian heritage. My skin color, though lacking in pinkish tones of the English (I am 1/4 English-German, mostly French), is not exactly “olive-skinned” either. As a child, like every child should grow up thinking, I thought that my skin color was the absolute best one to be. It did help that tanning was at the time referred to by Garry Trudea’s “Doonesbury” as an Olympic “sport” and mine turned easily to what the rich and famous pined for, a golden yellow. I say every young child ought to grow up thinking that their skin color is the absolute best, and it is a shame when they are made think otherwise, except when they think, expanding upon that as adults will, that other skin colors are less good than their own.

           So now that I have addressed what some might wonder, given that my name alone is not a very good clue to what perspective or experiences I might personally bring to addressing race or race issues, I will dive right in. From the above one might think I tend to be against racism. That would generally be correct. I was raised well in regards to try think of each person I meet as a unique individual and should not be generalized in terms of skin color, appearance, background, or ethnicity. I owe my parents a tremendous debt in regards to their teaching, and teaching when possible by example in that regard.

           But I know that brings it’s own blindness. It is not how everyone thinks. Also, though it is not often due to any status, people tend to talk “up” to me, similar to how they talk “down” to others whom they disrespect. They don’t say racist, sexist, etc. comments around me so I never have to object to them. I know this is not always how people really think, and not just from what I see on the “God’s eye to brainwashed America’s Mind’s Eye", the great and unquestionable “TEE-VEE.”

           People simply adjust naturally what they say to whom they think they are talking to and what that other person's opinions might be. So that skewers my experiences as they are not what is said to and before others, and I am aware of that blindness in me as well. Many people do try to be race neutral in their thinking like I try to be, though I believe it to be impossible because the experiences you have are different than those of other races in very profound ways. But it is never wrong to try to see from others perspectives or to mentally put yourself into others peoples shoes (ANY others, without exception) as best you can. But many many others do not value this, see it as traitorous to “their people” and quite enjoy their blindness, even if they were to become aware of it as being such, blinded by it.

           What was good for me, as with many others, was that the Internet is a wall to the eye, but a more direct route to the mind. People did not have me there live-and-in-person to adjust their opinions to what they perceived my outlooks to be. Some just assumed I was black, and I was asked to join an association of Black professionals. I was (and am hopefully still) not ugly in appearance (though “Sword of the Slight” I am very proud of which talks of the “unspoken catharsis of the submersion of the unseemly who cannot by numbers defend themselves” and “a great fear hidden safely away, a fear of ugliness or of imperfection in people too immersed in superficiality to know or care deeply of the minds within, and blind to prejudice’s subtlest manifestation.”) The Internet freed people whose appearance in “real life” was less common to put their opinions out there and have them judged solely for what those opinions are, not for who was saying them.

           I long for a humanity that can do that as well, though I know I am most likely forever to be disappointed or come up short in that regard. As I put in some of my notes,

“When humanity can judge the value of words and ideals independently from who said them or who was purported to have said them or said them first, they would stand a chance or best be able to survive. As long as needing a source to judge their worth, they are lost. Ideas values rest not with where they came from or the myths and mythologies created or needed to make people pay attention to them. If people need to be prodded, conned, or sold on the value of truth or what may be truth or good ideas by the presumed personality of who spoke them, they over-estimate the value of given individuals and diminish the value of ideals, forever to degenerate into personality cults.”

           Needless to say, we are not getting there anytime soon. “That’s good, who said that?” “What does it matter if it was Hitler or Stalin or Socrates or George Bush (just kidding) or Jesus or Plato or whoever? A good idea is a good idea. What has authorship or attribution have to do with value?” Not in this world unfortunately, at least not in this lifetime. People talk about the American or Russian recent Presidential elections as devolving into personality cults with no emphasis on issues. ALL CULTURES are to some degree inseparable from personality cults whether religious, monarchical, or academic. Raise the volume on the value of the speaker, diminish the importance or ability to truly discern and judge the value of the message alone.

           The quote I used of Karl Popper at the top of PolSci.com version 7, explains this concept well as well...

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, he wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defense civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper, Princeton University Press

          One of the best things about going back to school the way I did at the time I did, unrepeatable as most things in most people’s lives are, was that I was robbed completely of status. It was not just going to school or moving to another country, culture shock enough as that is. I had experienced culture shock in a more limited sense previously in moving to Hawaii. It was to be robbed of the totems people use to define themselves when dealing with other people. In a way, like dealing with people on the Internet discussions or blogs simply on what you say, not what you look like or do for a living. I simply had now, the moment, that was it. And in a way it was the opposite, just having what I looked liked at that time or could do at that moment.

           Now I need to, or try to, explain “totems” for a moment, not knowing if it is an accepted word or phrase yet. Maybe the Internet term "avatar" is more relatable for most people. It is something you put forward to represent yourself when dealing with others. It can be past or future, your job, your past, what you hope to do with your life, etc.

           These are things you introduce into a conversation to explain yourself to others so they get a sense of who they are dealing with and can relate to you. As I would have put it at the time, I had an inexplicable past and an unlikely at best future. I literally only lived in the now. An older person when speaking with or engaging a younger one would draw upon past experiences, what they had learned from them. A younger person to an older one (I had just turned 40, other college students were mid to late 20’s) would have to define themselves by or with what they wanted to do later after college or with their life more-so than relying on the past as older peoples do in defining their own identities.

           My past was not relatable to my present at that time, nor was my future plans much to speak of either. The surface, to get a degree in politics, study the changes and embryonic supra-national systems in Europe and Russia, the evolution of world politics after the Cold War, all things I had experience in and interest in and was allowed to go overseas to study, was and still is the best explanation of why I was there. (Still hope to get a PhD at some point.) But how that related to my life at the time was abstract at best, and success as well as survival unlikely. In a huge way, I only had the now, and not very much of that at all, so there was a need to deal with the present and understand it more pressing and completely than most ever have to deal with. And I still could observe.

           Having studied Psychology as well as International Relations and political systems, to me what was most interesting where I studied and lived, the former Soviet Union initially (the Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia), what was most interesting was these “totems” or “avatars” in how they dealt with others, the fairly glaring ostentaciousness in flashing or showing great wealth. In my list of initial observations of the people coming out under Communism in which shows of wealth were considered in poor taste, number 5 was…

5) People like to show their status in regards to others through their physical appearance. Clothes, hair, even fingernails can and are used to show on the low end, (that) they are not worthless people or bums, and on the high end, look at me, get out of my way, I spend more on my fingernails or cufflinks than you earn in a week or year. Though this is not always necessarily arrogance, most never see it either as vanity or insecurity, and the economy and social structure not only encourage it, they depend on it.

           That was not meant to be an observation about any particular people, nor solely about those coming out from under Communism, (It was titled "Notes about common themes in Humanity (globally and historically)") but that observation was triggered by the deference and perceived right that others should defer, to their showing of status in their jewelry and fine clothes, when simply observing people at the mall (Akropolis) in Vilnius, Lithuania. They were less like snobs than like little children showing off their new toys of Rolex watches and Guichi shoes and handbags, yet still demanding others almost bow to them. And others did.

           Like, “I work for…” or “I like to…” or “When I was younger I…” or “I hope to one day…”, I saw the superficiality of status as something people “put on” to define themselves to others. But these are either chosen, stolen, or earned. Race and ethnicity are things that can be papered over to some by out-earning them or showering hundred dollar bills for signs or shows of respect, but it cannot be shut out completely or forgotten.

           Many who are in minorities know that game. What respect you cannot get by simply showing up like many or most others, you must earn. You must behave better, earn more money, or spend more, or simply put it on display whenever you go outside, either to be treated as best to being equal as you can (or better, few who have been mistreated or shunned cannot get a kick out of being deferred to themselves or being able to humiliate others for perceived offenses against them), or to be left alone by the police who would otherwise harass you for being part of the underclass, the lesser respected, an undesirable.

           In many parts of Europe, if you are a Roma (gyspy), no amount of show or wealth will truly not have people treat you or view you as an equal. They will simply think you must have stolen it, or are a criminal, or descended from criminals. Money is little consolation with walls around you that you were born with and can never be rid of, yet it is all that is available to some, and they take to it (wealth, displays of wealth) like an addict to a drug because the cure, as the disease, (their ethnic disadvantage, discrimination) is to be found in the greater population’s overall society, and that is out of their reach and beyond their ability to influence.

           Americans' blindness is that democracy promotes equality and that is a huge misunderstanding. Democracy as often as not leads to persecution of minorities because being separate from someone else is how people define themselves. Democracy without emphasis on respecting human rights first, (anti-democratic in that human rights are undebatable and off-limits of the majorities to take away), and without that view literally cemented in stone, the sacrosanctity of human and civil rights literally above all and everything else, they tend to devolve into legitimized segregation and persecution undefineable as such because it is “legal”.

           My interactions with racism in Eastern Europe was limited because as I noted when I began, I am white. Black students or tourists in the Baltic states, East Europe, and Russia, judging from newspapers, have had quite different sets of experiences, at least amongst the rowdiest and poorest of the general populations. Where in America, some worry about “driving while Black,” in many places at night there, “being while Black” is unadvisable.

           But again, that did not affect me. A semi-permanent tan from years in Hawaii took away my inherent, if any, “whiteness” and was considered for a while Hispanic or “from Spain”. This usually was helped by my French name among most who might dislike the Spanish, but the French, not as much. I slowly became aware of a English/Germanic “real white” people (Protestant) differenciating themselves from a “less white” southern European (Catholic) grouping. I only point this out because of what comes after this, and because I am aware that even in the supposedly (to Americans) “colorless” Europe, there are “shades of whiteness” and ethnic views can touch anyone.

           After having been there long enough so that I was pale enough to be less considered likely from Spain, like the comment in Hawaii on the bus about “passing for white” I heard another comment, even somewhat directed at myself within a group of people about how “Europe was really the last place left on Earth for the white people. After all, look at America, in 30 years it will be overrun by the Hispanics.”

           Whatever firewall had kept people from saying such comments in my presence in person and in real time obviously had been breeched. This undoubtedly will sound racist, not so much I hope, but my first impression other than shock, was feeling appreciative of getting an honest appraisal of how that person REALLY felt. (“OK, but now tell me what you REALLY think.” ;-) So this is how the cool kids, I mean the "racially superior" ones talk. My tan must be gone now, or faded enough to be accepted to hearing such things said openly. Oh the feeling of belonging…

           My temperament wants to go sarcastic like that here but realistically, I did feel a privilege to hearing that. Not that it was not offensive, it was, not to mention hardly supported by facts, but if one wants honesty first and foremost, one has to take in what the rest of the world really offers in that regard. Not most people, at least not openly. But honestly. I need a quote from "Generically Human" to explain that without sounding racist myself.

… You are vaguely human, yet are neither male nor female, nor have you any specific skin color, ethnicity, nor body size. You are neither thin nor fat, neither old nor young, ugly nor beautiful.
           Being what I call generically human, but with a sizable bank account, you are free to travel the world and observe all of its peoples and civilizations without biases, save for being human, and following from that, possessing a natural desire to see other humans succeed. And no one anywhere can see you with any biases. Being generic, you magically fit in wherever you go and no one sees you as an outsider.
           Traveling thus, though only conceptually, you can begin to leave your mental baggage behind. There is no us and them in the world for you now, everyone is an us now. You are equally the oppressed and the oppressors, the victims and the aggressors of all conflicts and disputes. You are a member of a country which invades another, and you are a member of that which was invaded, free to go from being one to another at will, to experience everyone's point of view first hand and in the flesh, save for the fact that all others must spend a lifetime in their situations, while you remain free to leave theirs at will. Without preferences or prejudices, without being able to side with one or another, you now experience a point of view no others can reach bound to being themselves only, being a part of a nationality, an ethnicity, and a sex. They cannot change this fully and can only vaguely attempt to put themselves in others shoes, and rarely will ever try.
           Being rich, look at the poor. Now being poor, look at the rich. Know there is nothing can you do to others that will not also be done to you, and those others which you can identify with. You not only can see both sides of an issue, you are the people on both sides and will be both the ones to reap the benefits and those who must suffer the costs. In such an indeterminate state, all else boils down to this, which benefits the further existence and development of humanity as a whole, and which policies, though they inevitably will affect some negatively, are justified on balance because the benefits to others is in greater proportion and effects than the costs. Without concerns over who pays and who receives, one can judge values and worth more clearly.
           Such a state of existence or perspective cannot take place in the real world. Other peoples, nations, ethnicities will always seem to count less emotionally than our own. When one of our own strikes out against another, it does not mean as much to us as when a member of an opponent group, an outsider, strikes within our circles. No one will say if it costs two of our groups lives and saves four of another enemy groups lives, it was a just trade. Obviously this is dependent upon how strongly ones ties and emotional attachments to ones group run, in addition to any extenuating circumstances, yet these narrow pre-determined biases taint our perceptions of all events and conflicts, whether here or around the world. First determine the good guys, who can we more identify with, who is in or matches up closest to our primary group identifications. Then when we know who or what we wish to save or preserve, which groups we want to succeed, interpretations of any events affecting them become grounded in those outlooks. The only times this is not done is when we like or dislike the relevant others equally and do not identify with either groups or their leaders.
           To become one with or see the outlooks of one group, ethnicity, or culture is to believe its excuses, justifications, and reasons behind their own biases and prejudices. One cannot judge ones own group from within or by the peers of their group who are like-minded. They are rarely wrong and are always justified in or exonerated for any wrongs which their groups may commit. And one cannot judge a society, group, or nation by their avowed enemies either, for from their perspectives their enemies are never justified for any wrongs they commit and are presumed guilty of any credible sounding claims or charges. So if seeing through the eyes of both sides in a conflict still cannot obtain fault or blame, tell who is wrong or who is right, how are any conflicts ended short of the all out destruction of one side or the other? If one were to be equal to both sides of the dispute, saw themselves belonging in a sense equally to both the potential victor's and the potential victim's groups, right and wrong, victory and defeat become meaningless. There becomes only what paths are the most destructive and which are less destructive, regardless on which side the greater number of repercussions effect.

           Though academic, this point of view is important. So often do we try to see both sides yet never can we become them.

"Generically Human," Deconstructing the Universe

          I was being given a snapshot of something I knew about but knew that it was in my blind spot. It was not how I saw things, not how people would normally speak in my presence. It also did not make a whole lot of sense. “White” people seemed very good at populating themselves all over the world, particularly places where they were not wanted. Putting on a logical thinking cap, what about Australia or Canada? And weren’t Spanish people “white European’s” too? If so, then their decedents controlled most of South and Central America too, and were the one’s supposedly “taking over” North America. If the Spanish were not “white” then, its hardly like you have got even Europe “left” for the “white people.”

           The “whiteness” of the Spanish, Portuguese, and American Hispanics is usually debatable. The girl on the bus ruminating about “passing for white” was herself a Hispanic. Yet a poll showed 80% of the people who live in Puerto Rico consider themselves white, yet are undoubtedly mostly Hispanic or Portuguese, or so on. For those who try to be supportive, they are white if they want to be considered as such, and can be excused if they want to call themselves something else. God knows White people have hardly been behaving like angels these last few centuries, if ever. But to those like the person I mentioned in Europe who see America tragically “falling” to the “less than white” Hispanics, in Europe or here in America, they evidently do not see them as “their people.”

           Knowing I was now seeing something I knew was in my blind spot but could now look at it, I tried to make sense of it. Logically white people are not under treat of being wiped out, or surrounded and edged out of their last remaining bastion on Earth. But the person seemed so sincere. Not seeing oneself as a racist, only stating what seemed to that person to be an obvious fact. I almost wanted to believe it. Yes, we are endangered. We need to stick together. We need to make more of us. Would you like to go to a hotel to discuss ways of doing exactly that? But I am digressing… ;-)

           So I decided to try to make sense of it as best I could. Speaking later to an instructor, I put it as politely as possible. “You know, some people here are racist but they don’t know it.” It did not seem a foreign concept to him and his reaction and changed demeanor, not to mention his greater whiteness to mine, probably gave him a less subtle experience. “Some of them know it all right,” he responded looking unhappy.

           So why write about this now some might ask? For most in the world today, America’s blindnesses are likely to get them all killed and create suffering of a greater scale than in Iraq which has been whitewashed to the American public. But some blindnesses are good. I grew up not knowing racial hatred or biases and how it fits into the consciousness of many, even silently, one could say most peoples ways of thinking.

           The main library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (I did a semester "abroad" there from my school, UM at Boston) was named after someone with the same last name as me, an African American of the same French-Canadian decent, W.E.B DuBois, his activism was shaped because his ancestors settled as mine did around western Massachusetts, and there he grew up greatly, by his own estimation, untouched by racism until a later age. When he saw how other Blacks were treated in the South, and how they deferred to such treatment, he became committed to changing that. He grew up in a pocket of decency and tolerance in a country hardly known at the time for racial equality or equal rights.

           Barak Obama also grew up less touched by hatred and racism in Hawaii as he would have experienced in much of the country during those years. Everyone is a minority in Hawaii and those of “mixed” racial heritage make up one of the largest or the largest grouping. Having negative ways of thinking kept from you when you are younger can make you grow stronger and more idealistic than if you have to confront the hardships, the terrors, and the hatred and fear which most of the rest of the world considers the “real world.”

           Having studied for some time the breakup of the Soviet Union, the borders made by Stalin purposely to divide and pit ethnic groups against one another, I see the Georgia conflict both with the traditional American blindnesses and with a greater understanding than most Americans have as well.

           Hatred and fear. Most Americans have been lucky enough to grow up without these things. Even those who have known prejudice, mistreatment, taught to lower their dreams or check their ambitions at the door, they do not know what it is like to be anyone in the Caucuses. These are small ethnicities which have kept themselves separate from their neighbors for centuries in numbers smaller than an medium sized city. They mistrust each other and for good reason. Their feuding goes back centuries and even without the sadistic "pit-everyone-against-each-other-with-those-they-hate" borders made by Stalin, even if they had their own states, they would still loath and hate each other.

           The Czech Republic and Slovakia got a peaceful divorce. The Balkans descended into ethnic cleansing and multiple civil wars because they were not allowed to get a peaceful parting of the ways. Now Georgia and its breakaway republics have come to the world's attention. Though I have not studied them as much as the situation in neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan, the problems are similar. The outside world, Great Game maneuvering between Russia and the United States, fighting over resources and national pride. These are all only too true but they are things most Americans could understand if it were showed to us by our press in an all-sides are equal non-propagandistic fashion. (Unfortunately it has not been.)

           What falls into most Americans' blind spots is the fear. They know that Georgians fear being killed in their beds by Russians. American’s understand that fear. In an oversimplified way, our non-thinking media has taken the “Georgians are just like us” point of view to excuse away misdeeds as simply motivated by fear of Russia. What they do not understand is that the Southern Ossetians are just as afraid of the same thing being done to them by Georgians, and not without due reason.

           In preparing to write this for awhile I kept track of American writers and politicians stating, "it does not matter who fired first or who started it." In the world which such thinking like that has created for us in 2008, it probably doesn’t matter. To say we, or anyone is justified in attacking people in their own homes on their own lands sleeping in their own beds in the middle of the night is justifiable because you feel threatened by them or because your intelligence was faulty, or whatever you make up to justify killing people who did nothing to you and were not likely to do anything to you, does a world like that care who fired first?

           If you can be attacked because of what others think about you or your intentions, even if you are innocent, even if you have done nothing, and then have the great powers of the world explain that away as excusable, have writers in the “greatest democracy on Earth” say it does not matter if you did nothing, can be killed, or imprisoned or tortured on “excusable” “misjudgements”. We don’t know that kind of fear unless it has been prepackaged to us as being from TV or movie villains, Arabs, Germans, Russians, even monsters from out of space is more believable than that a government would do that to its own people, and have them and much of the rest of us say "it does not matter why."

           As I have said, it is a complicated issue, too complicated for most Americans to understand being given snippets of truth and having it politicized for points in an American Presidential election. But what many of us cannot fathom is that within Georgia there are people who hate and are hated by the majority Georgians, who fear being killed or forced off their lands because they are a minority, and the protection of the nation, and even that of the world, doesn’t mean a damn when someone feels threatened, even without cause. The truth will often be buried with the dead. The spin is all we will see and be told. How one sides misdeeds were excusable, even understandable, depending on how we want it to be seen.

           The other sides fears even if warranted, even after they have been realized, matter not worth a damn. John McCain said in a grotesque misquote of Kennedy, “We are all Georgians now.” In a lawless and international lawless world where leaders can attack their own citizens and say it does not matter who fired first, and we can force the rest of the world to parrot under that meme under their breath, it does not matter who began it, over and over again in the New York Times and Washington Post. No, in a world where protection is unequal, where attacks based on fear and “pre-emption” are excusable, we are all Southern Ossetians unless we are very very lucky to be in the majority wherever God put us on the Earth.