Racism, Politics and Walking Out

If the UN really wanted this Summit to be a model of what the organisation is all about, that is, bringing the world community together to take a stand against all forms of injustices related to racial discrimination, I cannot understand why the president of Iran was allowed to address the gathering. I must confess that I am ignorant of the politics at work here and how it is decided who should be the speaker(s). However the process by which he came to address the Summit, it is in my view, an unfortunate misjudgement that will do no good to the cause of eliminating racial discrimination. Not that his speech should take away from the good initiatives and recommendations that will come out from the UN Summit.

I have not read the full translated speech of the Iranian President and I am aware of some of the complexities of the politics surrounding Israel/Palestine (more than often used conveniently by one and many while innocent people continue to suffer). Controversy was certainly in the air as was evident from the boycotts and then the walkouts. To suggest that “they [Europe/West] sent migrants from Europe, the United States...in order to establish a racist government in occupied Palestine” is neither tactful nor conducive, especially in the light of President Ahmadinejad’s view on Israel.

He played right into the hands of folks who may be looking for a reason not to engage with their nation’s complicity in racist practices. Talking about racial discrimination is always uncomfortable. And, I wonder when we shall reach the point where we can all stop behaving like bigots, exercise some serious self-critique in order to establish a sound moral platform to confront the real structural issues that perpetuate racial discrimination.

Upon closer scrutiny of the excerpted comments by the Iranian President one can reasonably ask whether the Iranian leader is keen to open his country’s borders to migrants and whether at work here is also an internalised form xenophobia that sees only a particular group of people occupying lands in his part of the world. He could have used his speech to show what policies there are in place against racial discrimination in his own country, practices of tolerance, and how the rest of the world can learn from Iran. Instead, he reflected an intransigent position and contributed to the polarising of conversations on what is already “hot” and “hard” talk. Those of us who are involved in antiracist work on grassroots level will know how this works.

This incident is an unfortunate setback for the cause to eradicate racism. And, it is not that there are no other world leaders who could have come forward to give the necessary leadership and move the Summit on in helpful ways. We could have had Lula of Brazil who is not afraid to open his mouth about the “blue-eyed boys” who have messed up our economies or Evo Morales, the indigenous leader of Bolivia having his say on the struggles in his own country. These are just two examples of voices that would have placed significant perspectives on racial discrimination. I even wonder what difference Obama would have made had he been the speaker!

It is quite easy to nail the blistering rhetoric of the Iranian leader. There is little integrity to it. On the other hand it becomes more difficult to get Israel to do some serious self-interrogation on its treatment of Palestinians. And, for all those decent liberal nations that fly the flag of democracy and boast of their tolerance, the challenge is how to be tolerant in the face of what may be intolerance. That is a real test for our commitment to tolerance and democracy. And at what point are we going to be democratic and just in our response to racial discrimination? The journey ahead is a challenging one and we desperately need visionaries to lead us out of our impasse.

copyright © April 2009

The Poor will always be with us!

I have seen a number of political promises made by politicians to narrow the gap between poor and rich only end up with a wider gulf between rich and poor (within a nation and among nations). As such I have often wondered about the significance of the observation by Jesus (according to the Gospel writers) that “the poor will always be with us”. Will poverty ever become ‘history” or will history continue to impoverish the majority?

From the perspective of today (financial crisis) one cannot be faulted to conclude that for the rich to exist and continue to enjoy lives of abundance – there must be “the poor” to make this happen. Wealth does not just evolve out of nothing. A few own the combined wealth of the rest of the world because the rest are impoverished. What do we make of the strange case of the wealth of rich people who are born in one place, work in another, park their money somewhere in an exotic tax haven and can register their business somewhere else? Do you think their wealth can be generated without the existence of poor people and cheap labour?

Recently, there has been some fascinating research into wealth and money. Of course, people who are poor would have already deduced some of these observations from the hard facts of their real lives. Some studies, for instance, suggest that the desire for money (a luxury of the rich) gets cross-wired with their appetite for food. Not surprisingly, appetite for cash is tied to appetite for food. Now may be a good time to see what is happening to our eating habits! It may be that supermarkets have us all figured out with their fantastic meal deals to beat the credit crunch! Researchers even point out that, should we suddenly suffer loss, there is the possibility of depression and even suicide. The irony is that talk about appetites to a person scrounging for a meal may be an alien feeling. Always it is the poor who are the ones to suffer the most. The poor will always be with us!

The vicious, cyclical and staying nature of poverty has recently been highlighted in an article entitled “I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told” (The Economist April 4^th, 2009). We are told that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities from those of middle-class children. And that this memory reduction is the result of stress that affects the way a poor child develops. Hence “those who have spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items. Those brought up in a middle class family could manage 9.4 and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.” The implication here is that children with stressed lives are poor learners and are less likely to achieve at school. Of course, a movie like Slumdog Millionaire will certainly counter such findings and offer a degree of hope. Notwithstanding, the stress of poor children is the result of a double whammy: impoverished children are not merely located all the way at the bottom of the social and financial heap, they are effectively kept there – locked out through our vicious and “survival of the fittest” economic cycle.

One can only speculate that some of these sentiments may have been what Jesus sensed from the economics of his own Galilean world when he exclaimed that: “the poor will always be with us.” Whatever, they will certainly be with us for a long while as all our visioning of the future, in the light of the disarray of our economic lives, is geared at ensuring that this happens. For jumpstarting the economy and driving down inflation, means ensuring a place for the impoverished – expendable fodder to enable the capitalist engine to chug along. G8, G20 or G96 – the destiny of the poor has been determined, unless…..

image credit: yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9819

© copyright Jagessar April 14^th, 2009