Th, 19 Jun 08
What is my most pervasive thought from today's instruction...
My initial impression from the film clips I saw this evening was great sadness and low
spirits. Especially, from the second one “The House We Live In”, expressing where we are with inequalities in housing, economic opportunity, and accumulation of wealth.
George Clinton, noted musical leader of Parliament/Funkadelic, summed up our metropolitan areas as “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs”. This dovetails nicely with the message of “The House We Live In”. Perhaps I am getting too cynical to be surprised by our US governmental complicity in policies encouraging red-lining urban neighborhoods. Rather than shocking me it offered further confirmation of another evil misdeed done in my name. For when our government acts it does so knowing it has at least tacit approval from US citizens (us!). Me, too!
One aspect of our first film clip, “The Story We Tell”, emphasizes how race as a social construct came to be gradually from the Pilgrims to Jefferson and beyond. Although I was familiar with much of the historical evidence it was helpful to once again see an arc of unity and “race as a unifying force of national identity”. Our treatment of Native-Americans, African slaves, and people of color is the US of A's original sin. Unless white people, including me, admit their gain from perpetual positions of privilege we as a nation will not begin to heal from the evil of racism.
When current observers insist we need to close our borders, build fences/walls, patrol our boundaries, and keep out foreigners what is their underlying agenda? It is clearly, whether they admit it or not, a racist movement. [In talking to a friend who works in community organizing, and deals with race and racists regularly, he cites their protestations of innocence. “Immigration reform” is a buzz phrase too often associated with people wishing to close our borders. To what are they appealing and whom are they counting on to lend support to their cause?] Closing our national frontiers is akin to red-lining sections of US cities. - David -