Equality

Religion and Race

"Equality must not be equated with enforcement of conformity. The demand for equal dignity must not be confused with a demand for general leveling. Equality is not a mechanical concept. It implies the right to be a conformist as well as the right to be different."

from Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. 1966.

....

Thanks to Laura Branca for sending us this reading for the People of Color Talking Circle in Ithaca this week.

The Doctor in the Kitchen

By BRIAN McDERMOTT
Published: April 24, 2009
NYT

DR. DAVID ORES pays $700 a month for an apartment in a low-income housing complex on Avenue B on the Lower East Side, owns two Harleys and has on his left arm a tattoo of a naked woman wearing a pink cowboy hat.

Dr. Ores is also a physician who runs a nonprofit health care cooperative for city restaurant workers that he sees as a model for how national health care could work. The undertaking, which he began last summer, is particularly timely as President Obama contemplates an overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system.

“It’s like a food co-op,” Dr. Ores, 51, said of the project. “Except it’s health care.”

click for complete article.

Conference Explores New Field of Trans Studies

March 9, 2009 - 12:00am
By Alex Berg

On Friday afternoon, there was standing room only in the Goldwin Smith English Lounge as Prof. Masha Raskolnikov, English and feminist, gender, & sexuality studies introduced TransRhetorics, a conference exploring interdisciplinary approaches within the field of Transgender Studies and the rhetorics that represent transgender lives.

“… Trans studies remains a relatively new field, even if many of us can make the argument that transgender people have an ancient history in many if not all of the world’s cultures. The relative newness of transgender studies as an academic field means that we, here, are still figuring out what the field is going to look like and where it’s going to go,” said Raskolnikov, who is also the director of lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender studies program.

for complete article, click.

"dialogue"

My friend sent me an email the other day about the suicide of eleven-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover. She sent the email on the 13th National Day of Silence.

In the article, there is a description of what the school did to intervene in the bullying that Carl Walker-Hoover was experiencing daily:

“...Days prior to Carl Walker-Hoover’s suicide, he confronted a female bully who verbally accosted him. The event served as an apparent catalyst to Walker’s suicide. The school’s response was to have the two students sit beside one another during lunch for the next week to encourage conversation.”

This is why my friend put in the word, in quotes, “dialogue” as the email subject heading.

A lot is said about “dialogue,” but dialogue cannot take place between people who occupy positions of power over other people.

Dialogue can only take place among equals.

Paulo Freire writes it in a way that I feel it:

"Dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming -- between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression... Because dialogue is an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another." (pp. 88 - 89, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

What gets in the way of dialogue: White privilege, classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, fear, power, group think…

Carl was bullied because he was perceived as “gay” by a group of other students.

“Walker said her son had been the victim of bullying since the beginning of the school year, and that she had been calling the school since September, complaining that her son was mercilessly teased. He played football, baseball, and was a boy scout, but a group of classmates called him gay and teased him about the way he dressed. They ridiculed him for going to church with his mother and for volunteering locally.”

Carl's mother named the world her son lived in. She gave these words to the school, but the world she named had no meaning for school officials. The school officials made Carl sit next to a bully for a week to “encourage conversation.” In other words, the school encouraged further dehumanizing aggression against Carl.

What do you think was possible for Carl to say sitting next to the person who hurt him, who assaulted him, wished him harm? How could Carl possibly have benefited by being forced to sit next to the person who pushed him to hang himself?

Don’t make the innocent sit down with the tormentor to "dialogue." The one who will get hurt again and again and again will be the one who "names the world to change it" (Freire, p. 88).

for the full article emailed and quoted here, click.

“OTHER” ENCOUNTERS

It is the first day of the semester and we walk into the classroom of our undergraduate multicultural education courses. We turn to face our classes of predominantly Euro-American students and feel the tensions produced by our tenuous positions as racialized indigenous teacher educators who again are confronting white privilege in our often “well-meaning” and “colorblind” pre-service teachers.’ How many accommodations will we have to make? How much of our soul will we be selling? Whose language will we be using? Furthermore, we ask ourselves: What approaches do we use and for what end? What books must we take out?

As racialized indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere (Troy, a Tuscarora- Saponi and Sofia, of the Quechua-speaking peoples of Ecuador and a Chicana in the Southwest), our intimate classroom struggles suggest a great dissonance we encounter with the field called multicultural education. This field ultimately speaks to students of dominant culture - be they conservative, liberal, or radical. Whether “multicultural” approaches and texts are about theorizing whiteness and oppression, or learning about the “Other” through the “Other,” what we choose is ultimately a cautious negotiation between our anticipation of white mainstream students’ assumptions of the world and a resulting pedagogy that will not leave us stripped of our dignity. This process of accommodation often leaves us, like our ancestors before us, vulnerable to militaristic, albeit verbal, attacks in the process of challenging the pervasive though often illusive power of white privilege.

Troy Richardson and Sofia Villenas in Educational Theory

for complete article click here.

from Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman interviews Wangari Maathai

The Challenge for Africa: Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai on Obama, Climate Change and War

Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan environmentalist, lawmaker and civil society activist, Wangari Maathai. Her latest book, The Challenge for Africa, tackles the broad obstacles to living in peace, justice, environmental and economic security for the one billion people across the continent of Africa.

Listen here.

Same-Sex Marriage in NY?

NYT EDITORIAL: A Mission for Gov. Paterson. April 11, 2009

Gov. David Paterson of New York must follow through with his promise to push Albany to sanction same-sex marriage in New York State.

We Shall Remain

"From the award-winning PBS series AMERICAN EXPERIENCE comes WE SHALL REMAIN, a provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history." PBS webpage.

We Shall Remain will be aired as a five-part series. First episode starts Monday, April 13, 2009. In Central New York: WCNY, Channel 4, 9:00PM - 10:30PM.

WE SHALL REMAIN | Preview | PBS

Australia Backs UN Indigenous Rights Declaration

By ROHAN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer
Fri Apr 3, 3:27 am ET

SYDNEY – Australia endorsed a U.N. declaration on Friday that recognizes indigenous rights, reversing years of opposition and promising a new era in relations between white Australians and the nation's impoverished Aborigines.

Indigenous leaders welcomed the policy switch but said the document's words must be translated into actions to relieve the squalor and poor health that many Aborigines suffer.

"In supporting the declaration, Australia takes another important step toward resetting relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians," Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said at a ceremony in the national capital, Canberra, that was broadcast nationally.

Support for the nonbinding declaration is a largely symbolic step, but it underscores the dramatic shift in the country's Aborigine policy ushered in by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

The U.N. declaration affirms the equality of the world's more than 370 million indigenous peoples and their right to maintain their own institutions, cultures and spiritual traditions. It also establishes standards to combat discrimination and marginalization and eliminate human rights violations against them.

Australia was one of four nations that voted against the declaration when it was adopted by the General Assembly in 2007. The United States, New Zealand and Canada were the other opponents, while 143 countries voted in favor and 11 abstained.

complete article here

Australia to support UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

27 MARCH 2009, 12:06PM

Amnesty International welcomes news that the Australian Government will make good on its election commitment to officially support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Amnesty International has campaigned vigorously for Australia to endorse the Declaration, which sets minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous peoples.

When the Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2007 only four countries opposed it: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA.

click here for article

Jury: University of Colorado wrongly fired prof

Ward Churchill, who was a tenured professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo., left, walks with his lead attorney, David Lane, out of the courtroom Tuesday after a jury ruled that the professor was wrongly fired by school administrators.

click for news

Save the Dates!

Click on the poster to see it larger.