The American Dream

Over the last two years, more friendships have ended than I would have ever imagined.  After thinking about it a lot, I finally wrote to two friends:

trump's election has severely jolted my view of America, and of the 63 million who voted for him. I am sad that our relationship has suffered as a result.
trump's politics of hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and lies are very different from everything that I cherish and dream about.  And, as a brown-skinned and  funny-accented immigrant who looks like an Arab from a shithole, these past two years I have even been worried about my personal safety.

I have always had friendly interactions across the political spectrum, except for the far-right and the far-left.  Two of the three grad school professors I worked with were practically libertarians.  Most of my grad school friends were well left of the political center.  I was always happy in a mixed crowd, and worried if I everybody around me thought and believed alike.

In the life after grad school, there were plenty of people I interacted with who were committed Republicans.  One group asked me to join their board after reading my op-eds, and I did.  Many of our board meetings were at the country club where the board president was a member, and I knew I was out of place there with my proletarian car and my left-of-center politics.  But, we worked together without any hassle.

trump has changed everything.  For worse.

It has been ten days since that email; no reply, which does not surprise me.  After all, how might one possibly argue with evidence that trump's politics is not about hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, lies, and more?

James Baldwin summarized it well for blokes like me who lack the kind of clarity and power of articulation that he had; he wrote:

Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

trump and his 63 million voters have been systematically working against freedom, justice, and democracy.  There is no respect for the "others."  Thus, for a guy who thinks that the cliched "forget and forgive" is all bullshit, terminating friendships naturally follows--with a great deal of sadness!

PS: See you in 2019, after a break from blogging.

There was King ... and there is king!

Two days ago, I referred to the blatantly racist post by a Republican member of the House of Representatives, steve king.  Guess what?  The party expelled him today--he crossed the Rubicon.

Nah, of course not.  He is very much a part of the party.  It is just that he loudly says what most Republicans (elected and otherwise) say in their safe spaces.

The GOP is now the bloody American party of white nationalism!

Today it’s Donald Trump’s party, and there is not much breathing room between King and Trump when it comes to white nationalism.

White nationalism gone mainstream!  Who would have imagined that back in 2009?

This is how the Bannons and Kings view the modern world: The West is threatened by hordes of swarthy outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims, and they are lonely defenders of the white Christian race against this insidious threat. There is no evidence that Trump has given this matter as much thought as they have, but, based on his public pronouncements, he has reached similar conclusions. That helps to explain why the administration is building a border wall, expanding deportations, and trying to keep out citizens of as many Muslim countries as possible. This isn’t about fighting terrorism or crime; it’s about fighting changing demographics. And it’s premised on an unspoken assumption that only white Christians are true Americans; all others are “somebody else.”
This is ugly stuff.

Such ugliness right at the Oval Office has emboldened all the white nationalism all around.  White nationalism posters were found posted at a university campus only a few blocks away from the White House:

Vanguard America, a group whose name appears on the signs, responded to a request for comment with an email: “We hope to raise awareness amongst college students regarding the problems facing the world today, and to advocate for a National Socialist solution to these problems.”

You see how these groups operate in broad daylight and even response to requests for comments?

Of course, churchgoing white Christians who voted for trump whose heart is so pure that he is the very image of Christ himself!

In 1962--yes, 55 years ago--James Baldwin wrote:

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

At the rate at which this country is changing under this president and his party, "may very well be never" seems to be the case.  What a tragedy that 63 million voters have created!

It is not my responsibility! Or, is it?

After watching "I Am Not Your Negro" I told the friend that she has it easier than me--this atrocious history of my adopted country piles on top of the atrocious history from the old country.  Unbearable burdens that will weigh me down until the end.

I have blogged in plenty about racism and slavery.  In 2016 alone, leave alone the earlier ones.  How could I not?  Right from the time Obama won the elections, white Republicans brought racist discourse from their closeted spaces out to the open, and it reached feverish intensity over Obama's final two years.  Since the election in November, "I have a dream" has become "we have nightmares!"

It is all because we are yet to make peace with that second sin--slavery--that followed up on how we practically wiped out the Native Americans.

My favorite public intellectual on these issues, Ta-Nehisi Coates, sums it up succinctly:

We talk about enslavement as if it were a bump in the road. And I tell people: it’s the road. It’s the actual road.

It was at a recent conference at Harvard.  One might think that Harvard is up in Boston, far away from the South and, therefore, it had nothing to do with slavery, right?

Wrong!

The conference, entitled “Universities and Slavery: Bound By History” and sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is the latest in a series of efforts Harvard has taken to confront its ties to slavery. A year in the making, the daylong event featured historians and representatives from several universities, and a keynote address by The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. University President Drew G. Faust announced plans for the conference in March 2016.
In her opening remarks, Faust called slavery “an aspect of Harvard’s past that has been rarely acknowledged and poorly understood.”
“Harvard was directly complicit in slavery from the College’s earliest days in the 17th century,” Faust said. “This history and its legacy have shaped our institution in ways we have yet to fully understand. Today’s conference is intended to help us explore parts of the past that have remained all but invisible.”

This is a significant milestone even within academia.  Remember the posts on Georgetown??  Other universities looking into anything does not gain the attention as when Harvard does.  It is Harvard, dammit.

Caption at the source:
The enslaved Renty, pictured in 1850 and used by a Harvard biologist to support theories about racial difference.

The historical connections between universities and slavery first came to the fore in 2001, when a group of Yale graduate students issued an independent report aimed at puncturing what they saw as the school’s selective celebration of its abolitionist past.
In 2003, Ruth Simmons, then the Brown University president, announced a major effort to research that school’s extensive historical ties to the slave trade. While the move grabbed headlines, “there wasn’t a single peep from another university,” James T. Campbell, the historian who led the Brown effort, recalled during one panel.

Harvard being Harvard, the research into its own past are also being shared on a website.  I will end this will how Harvard's president frames it for all of us:

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore. In more fully acknowledging our history, Harvard must do its part to undermine the legacies of race and slavery that continue to divide our nation.

Everybody else was paying their dues ... for the American Dream

It was heart-breaking for me to watch the archival footage of James Balwdin's comments, and to listen to his words, in the documentary "I am not your Negro," and think that many of those very words are applicable even now.  Word for word.  What a tragedy!

I wonder how many of the 63 million trump voters have watched that documentary.  Perhaps they think, believe, that there is nothing more to talk about race issues.  Perhaps they continue to believe that whites are the superior ones who deserve everything and more.  Or, perhaps the 63 million voters even believe that they are now the real victims of racism!

Baldwin talks about the urgency that he felt to leave Paris and return to America.

On every newspaper kiosk on that wide, tree-shaped boulevard in Paris were photographs of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, N.C. There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl's face as she approached the halls of learning with history jeering at her back. It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.
But it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues. And it was time I went home and paid mine.

I thought about the BB King lyrics when he sings:
Everybody wants to know 
Why I sing the blues 
Yes, I say everybody wanna know 
Why I sing the blues 
Well, I've been around a long time 
I really have paid my dues 

When I first got the blues 
They brought me over on a ship 
Men were standing over me 
And a lot more with a whip 
And everybody wanna know 
Why I sing the blues 
Well, I've been around a long time 
Mm, I've really paid my dues

With trump's election, the social dynamics certainly have shifted, yet again.  Once again, it is all about the whites.  The GOP has become, for all purposes, the party of the whites.  It is a tragedy that completely depresses me.  Overwhelms me.  Drains me of emotions.  And then I wonder how Baldwin and others plodded on, even when people around them we being killed--all because they were fighting for human rights and equality.

Baldwin says:

You know, the question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance which is a price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. It - you don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall because you don't want to know.

The racist whites do not even want to know.   Baldwin wrote back in 1965:

Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.

A grave moment this is--fifty years later.  After all these years of merely intellectualizing,  I fully realize how indebted I am.  I need to pay my dues.  Big time dues!

How do people come to know themselves?

One of the critical questions in Hindu philosophy is an existential question that people of any faith, or infidels like me, also worry about--or should worry about: Who am I?

I am sure that thinkers in cultures all around the world raised that very question.  The ancient Greeks, for instance, inscribed "Know Thyself" (well, not in English but in Greek, of course!) at the Temple of Apollo, and later Socrates declared that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

Source

My summer readings, on top of the different bits that I read and blog about, are essentially my attempts to keep after that question of "who am I?"  Instead of abstract philosophy, which I don't much care for, I ask that question in the contexts in which I find myself, in relation to the situations that surround me, especially because of my conviction that there is nothing after death, and it is all in the here and the now.  Thus, blogging about the Ebola crisis, or the Syrian refugees, or tweeting about the fascist, are all more than merely about Ebola or Syria or fascism--they are explorations into understanding who I am.

In an essay about James Baldwin, the author--Nathaniel Rich--quotes Baldwin:

The difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement. Nothing, I submit, is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know themselves….

Rich follows that with his own observation:

How do people come to know themselves? One way is by reading fiction. The profound act of empathy demanded by a novel, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief and embody a stranger’s skin, prompts reflection and self-questioning. But most people don’t read novels.

The novel does not refer to the likes of Ian Fleming's James Bond series or the old Mills & Boon series or Fifty Shades of Grey ;)  I am reminded of a forum on campus, a little more than a year ago, when one faculty colleague referred to the "great books" approach at St. John's.  Another colleague, who is so convinced about his superiority that he never can even remotely understand how much of  an idiot he is, remarked that it is all relative on what "great books" mean and then went on to list some of the books that he has read, which made many of us gasp and wonder how such an idiot could possibly inhabit the world of higher education.  I suppose he doesn't know himself!  Hmmm ... where was I before this digression? ;)

In that same Baldwin essay, Rich notes:

Baldwin made the racial question personal, reducing a society-wide problem to a matter of one’s private conscience. He was not alone in this approach, but he was alone in bringing a novelist’s sensitivity to bear on it. In Baldwin’s writing racism is, among other things, a failure of empathy.

Indeed.  Racism, hate, or any systematic put down of "those people" is a failure of empathy.  Anybody who has any sense of empathy will not be able to generate the kind of rhetoric that foams from the mouth of the contemporary American fascist leader, and his ardent supporters equally suffer from a lack of empathy.  As this piece notes:

Trump deals in hates that dare not speak their names

This fascist leader:

enhances the force of a whole series of interlocking hates—black hate, Muslim hate, woman hate, and “Mexican” hate.

I would think that the fascist leader's short fingers have never ever touched the "great books" and the novels that compel the reader to reflect on "who am I?"

I wonder what James Baldwin would have said and written about this fascist leader!