Home of hopeful and land of the bitter

I suppose I should announce my return by expressing a heartfelt and groveling apology to this blog’s two loyal followers and their pet cockatoo for the lack of activity and updates of late. My excuse …? Well, the completion of my latest academic thesis coupled with two extended jaunts to two continents could not have helped. Anyway, to authenticate the excuse, this entry summarizes how I got on in one of those trips.

Visiting the United States, so soon after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, was always going to be an interesting undertaking. Perhaps it is not fair to make any real comparisons, not having been to that country prior to this trip, but there was certainly a palpable sense that this was a nation trying to forget and rid itself of any vestiges of the last administration and welcome the new dispensation that promised hope and change. A tad bit clichéd perhaps, but that is certainly the sense I got from the moment I disembarked at Newark airport en route to Boston. Whoever you talked to (unless of course, they were GOP diehards or from Pluto), there was this sense of unbridled optimism that this was a country ready for something different and hopefully, this time, something positive. Even after considering the prevailing economic and financial gloom all around. Again, with no prior experience to make any accurate comparison, some of my travelling companions who had been to US during the Bush II era, also seemed to think that even the reception from the Homeland Security border agents was certainly a bit more welcoming (albeit still stern) than on previous visits.

Judging by how well the trip turned out, it was certainly a perfect coincidence that my first visit to the US, in February and March 2009, was at the pleasure of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, who sponsored my hosts Boston College to run the Inclusive Politics fellowship programme at its Centre for Irish Programmes.

As for the programme itself, it provided us (14 participants from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) with an insight into the democratic political system as it exists in the United States, especially in relation to expanding participation in that system. Through its extensive and diverse itinerary, the programme explored techniques for making political discourse more responsive to cultural and ethnic minorities and to populations traditionally less likely to take part in the democratic process. In fact, to summarise that preceding mouthful, the trip was certainly well thought and amply supported, providing us with the kind of access to the American political and civic establishment that would normally not be possible to regular tourists.

Some key highlights of the programme included meetings with senior officials in the US State Department (including the Ireland and Europe desks); a meeting with Senator John Kerry’s senior foreign policy advisory team (particularly relevant since Sen. Kerry is currently chairing the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee); meetings with prominent Massachusetts Congresswoman Niki Tsongas (her late husband, former Senator Paul Tsongas, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against Bill Clinton in 1992) and two Massachusetts state legislators who are second generation Americans. Other highlights were the tours of the Capitol Hill complex in Washington DC and of both chambers of the Massachusetts state legislature in Boston and of course all the major monuments that are synonymous with American capital.

We also visited prominent non-profit organisations such as the Irish Immigration Center, the National Organization for Women (NOW), MassVOTE, the Chinese Progressive Association, and Roca which works with the most disenfranchised and disengaged young people (mainly gang members). Also of particular interest, were the meetings with the progressive/liberal think-tanks such as the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Center for American Progress.

I suppose it would have been amiss if all we visited were progressive/liberal/ Democratic leaning organizations, so to balance things somewhat, on the conservative side of the political divide we visited the National Center for Public Policy’s Project 21 and the Family Research Council. Both unfortunately turned out to be grotesque caricatures of the Republican movement. Basically, Project 21 promotes the views of those African-Americans whose ‘entrepreneurial spirit, dedication to family and commitment to individual responsibility has not traditionally been echoed by the nation's civil rights establishment’.

The meeting with the African-American chairman of the Project 21 advisory board turned into study of polemics, which included the outright dismissal of the election of President Barack Obama as a non-event. The gentleman’s party trick throughout the meeting was to pointedly avoid referring to President Barack Obama but rather dismissively as ‘that gentleman now in the White House’. When asked why, the man who prefers not be referred to as an African American (perfectly his right), basically rolled out the right’s anti-Obama grievance list; pro-choice, pro gun control, liberal opportunist who had achieved nothing so on and so forth.

As for the meeting with a senior official of the Family Research Council, some of his stridently homophobic and rather antiquated and outlandish views on divorce were quite startling to say the least. In fact, the meetings with Project 21 and the Family Research Council very much highlighted how bitterly aggrieved the Republicans were of the new political dispensation in Washington DC and how much they could still not countenance the resounding defeats they received from the Democrats in the November ‘08 elections.
Generally, having been largely indifferent about the visiting the US, particularly during Dubya's administration, I must say I enjoyed this inaugural trip which also included spending a couple of afternoons in Harvard and MIT, where I had luncheon in this cozy, quirky, (healthy?) burger joint full of delightfully stereotypical academic types (jacket patches and all) and some pretty rad students. Nirvana!

Of course, seeing my brother after such long while was the cherry on top, but more on that later.

Are we conditioned to be racist?

“Such is our sorry lot in life, us black people,” raged this brother from South of the Limpopo. “At home, even after all these years of Uhuru, why do we still have a situation whereby some kid can saunter into an informal settlement in broad daylight and systematically slaughter our people in cold blood? And, of course, when we come abroad we face racism virtually every day. Is that to be our lot for perpetuity?”

I could not provide the brother with an answer, but the age old quandary he presented led me to cobble together these thoughts about racism.

Rarely prone to bouts of whimsy at any time, I still found myself intrigued about a reality TV show that premiered in America a couple of years ago but came to my attention not so long ago. The reality show, Black - White, had two families - one black and the other white - switching race (with the considerable help of make-up, wigs and prosthetics, of course). The premise of this series was to see how either race experienced life in the other’s skin, so to speak.

At first glance, it seemed rather dubious and certainly struck me as the kind of drivel that one can expect from reality TV. However, the more I considered the ‘gimmick’, the more I wondered whether human beings could indeed react differently and treat ‘others’ as they would prefer to be treated themselves if only they could identify with the others’ circumstances. Would it be enough to transform their preconceived and prejudicial notions about the other race?

Perhaps, but frankly I am not so sure about that, as I reckon that individual prejudices, and some of the more subtler forms of racism they fuel, are largely based on stereotypes and urban falsehoods that may not necessarily be obliterated by education or experience. ‘What subtler forms of racism?’ you may ask. Well, there have been numerous occasions when I have wished I knew why some people reacted the way they did when they came across a black person. Take the classic situation on public transport, where it becomes so obvious that the empty seat next to you is being avoided and remains vacant when there are several standing passengers a few feet away. 

Which takes me back to that American reality show. Some of the interesting observations to come from this programme were from the white-cum-black family, particularly when they encountered prejudice in their otherwise regular and familiar haunts, where previously they would have been totally oblivious to how black people were routinely treated. 

Also interesting was the strengthening of the black-turned-white family’s perceptions of how unfairly treated they were as black people and the realisation that some of the perceived slights were not as straight-forward as they had thought, and had nothing to do with race. Yes, you have heard how some of us habitually invoke the ‘race card’ rather too well when all other avenues fail.

Generally, critics were not impressed and the show (I am not aware if this show has yet been exported to this side of the Atlantic) and it was largely dismissed as lacking in substance. Having watched some segments of the show, I would partly agree. However, as I mentioned at the start, the realisation that there are people out there who are prejudicial and bigoted towards others primarily because of the colour of their skin does leave me perturbed enough to wonder whether such miscreants should be transformed into those very same people that they despise and find out for themselves the hurt they cause. 

Anyway, for a less contrived and certainly more perceptive look at ‘race switching’, a book worth reading is Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, a white American author who in 1959 transformed himself into a black man for six weeks and kept an autobiographical diary (later made into a film) as he traversed America’s Deep South, then a hotbed of intense racism and white supremacism.

The result is an interesting and at times, truly depressing true story of racism but also uplifting accounts highlighting the dignity that the oppressed blacks still managed to maintain during that difficult era. Even though the book is almost 50 years old now, most of what it reveals is still relevant today - the main difference being that the forms of racism and their perpetrators have only become more subtle and sophisticated.

Back to the present, those of you out here in these colder climes will know what I mean when I say that migrants, especially the darker skinned variety are easy scapegoats particularly when some domestic or international calamity strikes and the blame finger does invariably point at Johnny and Jenny Foreigner. As you are aware, we are in the midst of a global financial and economic maelstrom unlike any seen in recent modern times and Ireland, like the rest of the (developed) world has not been spared. However, I was still baffled to find out that some lunatic fringe miscreants are already placing the blame for the current economic malaise squarely on foreigners. What? Oh Yes! Johnny and Jenny F. have been taking out mortgages willy nilly - mortgages they cannot afford and now that they are defaulting on their payments, resulting in the collapse of the banks and hey presto, they are to blame for the global recession.

Certainly, having studied race and ethnicity in recent years, I have come to the conclusion that the way people are conditioned growing up leads them to act in the manner they do. Certainly, one has to ask exactly how much the Skielik killer had experienced of life by the age of 18 for him to fear and hate black people so much that he armed himself and killed four of them, including a toddler. Last week, he was convicted and sentenced to four life terms for the murders.

 Last word to the brother from the South: His chilling prediction is that “once the old man goes, we won’t tolerate this kind of crap in our own land any longer.”

Hope and change - In Zimbabwe?

Hope and change – two words that have shattered the political glass ceiling in the United States and thrust the son of an African father and American mother into the most powerful political office in the world. President-elect Barack Obama's message of hope and change resonated with the electorate so well that he routed his GOP rival John McCain on election day.

Anyway, those of you following this blog would have surely noticed that I have not written about my native Zimbabwe for a while now, not because there has been nothing at all to write about. On the contrary, there has been a lot to occupy this blog since the then much touted agreement between the main protagonists.

However, going to back to the Obama theme, all the hope for change that long suffering Zimbabweans had gleaned from this agreement has surely dissipated due to the now ludicrous stalemate between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai over who takes what cabinet posts. If ever there was an opportune epochal moment, now is the time for Africa to seize the moment engineered by Obama. This is the time to be inspired by a black president of the United States of America and smash to smithereens the grubby shackles of a disparate gang of dictators and politicians who do not represent their long suffering people and put their interests ahead for once, but instead watch interest accumulate their Swiss bank accounts.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai should forego their vested interests and take the finger out and knuckle down to the arduous task at hand that will lead the shattered country on the road to recovery. The long suffering people of Zimbabwe deserve much better. Hope springs eternal and change will come. Soon!

All Hail to the Chief

Financial and economic turmoil at home and abroad, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan (and Pakistan), unstable Iraq, recalcitrant Iran, Palestinian grievances, Darfur genocide, Congolese strife, climate change, steadily increasing Chinese hegemony and the Mugabe nuisance (I wish!). Yes, the Obama administration will be one of the most eventful ever, if not the most challenging of them all. Indeed his first 100 days will probably the most closely watched and followed not just at home but all around the world. What a time it is to be the first black president of the world's sole superpower. Of course, I rather suspect that if he had the cojones and guts to take this arduous path, Barack Obama will probably relish the opportunity to prove himself as a capable and inspiring leader. I reckon if he surrounds himself with the right brains trust, his administration will assuredly tackle the myriad of challenges facing the United States and the rest of the world. Of course, campaign slogans and rhetoric melt way into oblivion when the real task is at hand and many presidents have had to alter course when in the Oval Office. However, no matter how dire the domestic and global outlook maybe, President-elect Obama already has something in his favour - he succeeds the 43rd president George W Bush. Need I write more!

Comhlamh Debates: Media & Development