Black-Japanese singer Judith Hill has wowed the judges on the US television show: The Voice on her first night. I am not a particular fan of these kinds of shows, but I always appreciate a Blackanese artist of success in the public limelight! She is truly a great singer!
Democracy must have democratic values and actions put into it.
Democracy as a form of governance is an experiment. It is a dream, a hope.
Because it is a dream and a hope, it is also something that can be called “unreal.”
In this kind of underlying psycho-social vision of “unreality” and “dream,” it is often thought of as impossible and therefore absent from our actions, words, behaviors, ways of governing, living. It is given up. Then as a form of “goodness,” many people will pretend to be democratic.
Built-into this kind of critique of democracy-as-dream and the effects of such an unconscious assumption, is the lack of awareness of power relations and accountability.
Taking Chick-Fil-A as an example. This Food Chain business in the USA has recently come out openly and is in the news quite a bit around the country, opposing Gay Marriage. In so doing, many people have gone out to either oppose them as a business, or help their business by supporting them in words and/or deeds–such as showing up and buying their food.
In a what I feel is a ridiculous display of American “rights” and individualism, there have been commercials and news segments interviewing people who were praising Chick-Fil-A food and saying that Chick-Fil-A has a right to set up business. Others just say that they have friends who are Gay and who are gay parents and whatever, but that their eating at Chick-Fil-A has nothing to do with their friendships with their gay friends and it’s about how good the food is at Chick.
Hmmmm…..and in addition, there have been a couple of people who brought up “God.” That each individual person has to answer to God and nothing else, and that it is the Gay people’s final judgement before God that matters, and that their support of their own rights opposing Gay Marriage has not deterred their friendship.
And those who view Chick-Fil-A as a business representing hatred against Gays, may be somewhat reactionary from a certain point of view. Many who continue to eat at Chick, and who have gay friends, do not “hate” anyone.
That is the old kind of racism, sexism, homophobia, where hate is outwardly expressed against individuals.
But there is a political injustice and oppression happening, where heterosexually-identified persons, who have social mainstream dominance, who have have at least over a thousand more legal rights in so many ways, and that go unnoticed and unthought by most, are now feeling less dominant, and threatened, or who manage their everyday lives with the knowledge of their own sexual-orientation as superior. It’s unconscious. The “others” are “alternative.”
Don’t get me wrong, I think marriage is a heterosexual institution and is problematic because most people in the world do not want to be constricted to one way of living their sexualities or anything else. However, in this world, heterosexual power is undeniable as political dominance, and maintained through crafted spiritual and religious dominance by heterosexually-identified persons (even though many of them have secret sex with same-sex partners).
Life cannot be undemocratic.
But the world certain has been made that way. It is because of links with history and certain forms of power that gain credence and legitimacy through repetition and discipline (read Michel Foucault).
So the “vandals” write that Chick “tastes like hate.”
This is a natural resistance to the forces of dominance.
However, in the current globalizing system, resistance against further oppression is make criminal. In most cases, the vandalizing persons would be arrested and made to have criminal records, while the industry of socially-empowered anti-democracies, with wealth and power in communities, goes unchecked. In many cases, even if lawmakers agree with the resistors, the resistors will be told to be “better” and do it “legally.” But under our current misguided system in the US, sometimes this is already a losing game. This is how democracy is eroded.
It is a form of ignorance to think that the US is a democratic society. We have some advanced democratic ELEMENTS in the US system, but it, or anything else called “democratic” would have to be much more attentive and honoring of difference (without assimilation and before identity-making and so-called “self-evident” values) and much more attentive to class and identity power relations.
There are many people in the world do not have any strong opinions or values and just like to be where trouble is, to make conflict, enjoying the excitement, and perhaps the violence. People who like to be anti-gay and people who like to be anti-anti.
Then there are the very real issues of how we create suffering for others or ourselves, on and on.
So on many levels, in so many way, there is complex genesis of the histories of we have ignored.
There are major problems here.
On a social justice level, if we are to just understand how politics in market capitalism and majoritarian voting, and other American systemic formations work in our lives, we must understand that helping the financial maintenance of organizations, including fast food restaurants that serve “good food,” also helps that chain’s financial power and their relations and links with forms of power and community. If we are to assume that there are many anti-Gay people and Fundamentalist Christians who are opposed to homosexuality while supposedly, yes supposedly, “loving” their Gay friends, and who are wealthy and/or who have some social power in political, and capitalist circles (banks, stock market, real estate, etc.), then we are supporting those aspects as well, giving those discourses, those thoughts, those values, currency in culture (not only finances). Wealthier people can also control resources in far-reaching ways, more so that those who do not.
So where is this “love?” What is this “love of my gay friends”? What are its contours? What is the underlying meaning of this kind of “love?”
And if it is about some sort of God who demotes certain groups of people, then we must assume that democracy has nothing to do with it.
This is where democracy is going.
Can we, then, apply these questions and critiques and concerns, to almost every issue we have in the world?
Yes.
What of democracy?
We cannot all hold hands and sing a song of peace and love when we know that just two or three hands away, or the hands that we hold, may be of those who deny someone else love, equality, justice.
And these are age-old questions that are seemingly impossible to resolve.
I think the main issue here is not that we don’t know what to do. I think it is that it’s too difficult—that it may cost us our jobs, our friends, our loved ones, our comfortable middle-class lives, or give someone we “hate” some kind of power. We must examine notions of the “human” that we have psychologized and internalized through centuries of Puritan-Catholic-Baptist-Protestant Christian “Church-ianity.”
Institutional conservative Christian cultural forms are with us, whether we are religious or not. It is an aspect of American culture that even Europeans are baffled by. Secular Americans do not often understand that their own thinking may be very much linked with conservative Christian norms in thoughts of love, compassion, sacrifice, hate, right, wrong, good, bad. Getting to heaven may be psychologized into “personal growth” toward unity with a God or Peace or Nirvana.
Becoming a Good person is also quite Christian. In Asian cultures and African cultures and Global South cultures in general, there were other systems that were vastly different. Now there are only remnants, as the engines and juggernaut of alienating, industrializing, individualizing, identity-making, technologizing, homogenizing, assimilating, criminalizing, and militarizing, and sexualizing of all-reality becomes much more along the lines of a coherent “postmodern” sameness —where we can now recognize right and wrong and beauty and ugly along the same lines in every corner of the world, where people-of-color, once colonized and now postcolonial, may now act much like their former oppressors during colonization. This is still ongoing and not finished.
Chick-Fil-A media segments give us a good lesson in how ignorant, isolating, self-righteous, spirituality-based, goodness-based irresponsibility and disconnectedness now operate everywhere, making democracy’s vision cloudier. Others who do not feel this way just leave the situation and go about their merry way, going shopping, eating somewhere else, doing whatever, as anti-democratic systems, often unconscious and un-named, grows and grows.
Later, we wonder why the world has become a certain way, with certain pains, uncertainties, ugliness.
We can now turn to the Christian doctrine of “original sin” which operates quite conveniently for some, to say that “yes, we humans are fundamentally evil, fundamentally stupid, fundamentally sinful.” So even as we try to live “good” as “good people,” on a social level–nothing changes. Individual goodness only serves undemocratic social systems.
Here I have presented a purposefully provocative critique of postmodern malaise and its links with internalized Christianity, using anti-gay business as an example.
There are paths we can take to change things. But it will not be the comfortable path you may have gotten used to and expect in the American Empire, now much like the Roman one that fell.
Although there is no world to “save,” I feel that our lives can account for something more than having breathed, eaten, slept, gone on vacations, had sex, laughed, been jilted by lovers, farted, and watched video games a little, and/or wore nice clothes and saw some interesting things and traveled when we lived, while were name this “being alive.” Do you see that these things are all very colonial, very 16th to 18th century goals? Even as we work to lose weight or to have good jobs or to reach our dreams, keeps us occupied toward making the wealthy wealthier, all the while, democratic values wane and cries to us that it is only a dream.
It’s only a cleverly internalized self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps as Christians would, we need to get this out of us. There is not pure goodness anywhere—that is not my goal.
But we can certainly see clearer and act in more responsible ways after we have seen through the cloudiness of internalized colonization and its subsequent forms of oppression that we may practice, that may thwart democratic values.
On a certain You Tube video I found randomly on that site in my search for videos about Pearl Harbor to see how there were patterns on how information and memory are represented, I found some comments by viewers on a couple of sites, that mirror those of comments on Hiroshima 1945. Some of the people on these sites, commented that the Japanese deserved the Atomic Bomb. This echoes thoughts and sentiments expressed by many people I’ve known from the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and other places where Japanese imperial forces committed atrocities. So as we all must know and understand by now, is that the past is never gone. The past lives in different ways and forms, in the present.Some people are confused……confused about “social justice” and what it is.
I am not seeking to define it. I am seeking to carve some intelligence into the word, term, concept, action.
So much of the US notion of social justice is from within the reality of living in the Empire.
It is a crumbling empire, no less. But it is empire.
When Americans think of people who are “activists,” they think of a whole array of people who seem to be shouting out for things that they feel are morally right, necessary, necessary for their particular concerns and people and political persuasion.
Disconnectedness—it is one of the main effects of extreme individualism. Individualism, is different from empowered individuality. Individualism is somewhat of an ideology, something made superior.
With US concerns for individual freedom, communities suffer. Since most white people and wealthy people in the US, as well as a good portion of the middle class and the homeless, do not think of themselves as being part of any community, it even gets more precarious when working with struggling for a different world. The legal structure and the institutions in the US, provide legal freedoms to some degree, for individuals. For groups, communities, there is very very very little, if any, recourse. Case after case is thrown out in favor of 5000 individuals having to file individual claims to right a wrong done to a whole community. In most cases, these individual cases are drawn out over years. For the economic and social underclass, funds run out and energy is sapped and the three jobs they may have to go to becomes priority. The cases become weaker. Or the powers hire the attorneys that are high-powered and block any power that the underclassed individual may have.
Disconnected individuals (a fair amount of “normal” and not-so-normal people in the US especially–and increasingly in all first-world countries) tend to sabotage works and solidarities and political commitments that could be good for everyone, or at least a larger population of different kinds of people of differing socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, genders and sexual orientations, etc., feeding into division and conflict, violence and rupture. They become “identities” which are separate from other “identities.” So goes the ongoing disconnectedness. But I do think there are those forces that create these isolations need rupturing.
And when we speak of activism, those people wanting their “rights” to privileges, and the right to maintain them, are put on equal footing with those fighting for difference, for survival. Fighting to MAINTAIN PRIVILEGES is NOT social justice. Privilege and how it operates, makes invisible and priority, over those who have and are considered less, must be looked at and actions taken in regards to what is seen and realized, for a “social justice” to actually happen. In other words, as many US Americans seek to access privileges of something that is defined as the “freedom to get, the freedom to be….” social justice is diminished because privileges cannot afford an “other.”
Here, we see the link between what many Americans call “Freedom” and the middle class ideals. As I’ve mentioned before, people often confuse the access to middle-class, European elite (white), masculine and militarized material, emotional and spiritual values, as “freedom.” Then this gets confused with “Liberation.” Going on vacations, to “get away from reality” and “rest”—which are bourgeois leisure ideals made socially dominant as a desire in life by elites during the colonial days between the 17th to 19th centuries, becomes somewhat like the popular confusion about “liberation” these days. Social liberation means, in this scenario, some kinds of escape. And then guess what? Things deemed “in the way” of this escape, is deemed as some word exaggerated and confused with non-liberation. We learn to block anything that stands in the way (or seen as standing in the way) of our disconnected and individualized freedom to escape, as needing to be disappeared, violated, jailed, tortured, maimed, stopped, killed. Psychologically, culturally, intellectually, with the variety of arms and weapons of mind, heart and body that we have learned in the system of continual disconnection and valorized individuality (above solidarity, community, living with difference).
So in these ways of thinking and thrusts of behavior that I have mentioned above, social justice is suffering. It is definitely not dead or gone. It is in pain. It is in pain because fewer and fewer people have the inclination, desire, time, and/or energy, to struggle with self and community enough. Fewer and fewer people have the creative thinking enough to get out of the box that the Empire holds us in. As the social-political forces that we have all internalized, confuse us and run our bodies as “spectacles” —as Guy Debord (December 1931-November 1994, French postmodern philosopher) has pointed to for us, we have a harder time interpreting the difference.
It is made worse by the crash of cultures, values, times and places that are incoherent. Incoherence is NOT THE PROBLEM!! It is our inability to not do violence to incoherence that is the problem!!!! We incorporate, assimilate, violate, manipulate, imprison, sequester, make sick, make knowable–and therefore no longer that thing itself but our own other interpretation of that thing–person–place–time) that we create. Now the world seems smaller and more alike. Less diversity.
Put them away, make them criminals, make it hard on them, annihilate them, torture them, jail them, make them sick, control those people and those communities, feel sentimental about it after they are dead, it makes us good and holy. On and on. Refugees from ourselves—as we see refugees and the stateless, as if all of us were states. It’s a joke. But we have definitely internalized the state. There’s no escape. How about starting with a realistic assessment and then assessing how we may do things differently?
The reactionary definition of “community,” in the eyes of many individualists, is that communities are like herds of cattle and animals, without minds, aimless and not able to think for themselves. This dualistic notion of community has been developed through years and centuries of learning that the communities our ancestors killed or destroyed in order to create the wealthy “global” in favor of an individualism that was able to “capitalize” on making money for itself (not others). And furthermore, when we try to make communities and join them (because we sense our loneliness, disconnectedness and isolation), we (US Americans) tend to get very very uncomfortable with the differences, the conflicts, the games, the political jostling, and general psychological violence that is practiced in groups, no matter how lofty. If we don’t feel those things, it is usually because we have learned to ignore–or perhaps learned to become oblivious because no one is bothering “ME–THE INDIVIDUAL” and this asserts a “satisfaction” in the name of escaping the difficulty of being together with others of differences, and also the higher position of being alone and therefore “trouble-free.” This is an illusion.
Mourning but knowing that there are so so many in this world who understand enough and care enough about this in the world, to begin steps and to empower toward social justice. It is arduous and difficult and tedious, but must be done. Individual heroes will be squashed. Communities of difference, across different backgrounds of histories, etc. must learn to come together without the escape mechanisms we have all learned well. Empowering toward social justice is tedious, arduous, precarious, uncertain, not attainable in a finality, but is a pathway that is immensely more loving than the loneliness of dieing in an old folks’ home somewhere in a desolate urban landscape. Some are working now and we must work together, learn how to. The rest will most likely just wait for those few to do the work while they enjoy the fruits of empire, and maintain global injustice.
This is a hilarious video (I think) regarding our ethnic, racial, national, cultural labels. Bishop CD says: “Am I a Hapa? Am I too old to re-frame myself!” Hilarious!! What’s ‘Hapa?’ Why ‘re-frame?’
The term ‘Hapa‘ is a newly-circulating label for mixed-race Asian-Americans and perhaps, nowadays, including all mixed-race and multi-ethnic Asian identities. It is an old Hawaiian term for mixed-race Hawaiian Asians. However, this term is increasingly becoming popular to note this very diverse group. As most of us understand identity in the present, the old categories have become increasingly irrelevant in many ways, as we delve into the politics of identity and the re-positionings of power toward justice. So as we discover terms that are new that circulate, that touch upon ourselves, we may struggle.
Further commentary follows the video!
Miller say’s “I’m too old to re-frame myself!” Heard that!! But in seriousness, we must and we shall……or we cling to the old words that are no longer useful in some ways. However, I feel that all labels, making us into objects, are tools for some kind of jockeying for power, control. Having ‘no identity’ is also a label and stinks of dominant privilege and disconnectedness. So we must re-frame, if not for ourselves, then for others who necessarily suffer because of the bodies that are marked by territory, social class, nation-state hierarchies, gendered norms, sexual orientation secrets and revelations, words that define but never grasp, yet tear our bodies into pieces. Go on Bishop CD Miller! I’m of your generation too! Continual re-frame!! How many frickin’ times do we have to question how others view us, define us and label us? And then what do we do to ourselves? and to our ancestors? What of them? Who were they? How do they live in us and through us today? However, labels will never define us. Labels, however, if we must use them, must be for social justice in this cruel, cold, fiery world full of secrets and displacements, torture and loneliness, ecstasy and understandings. Well….I’m almost too old…….. Bishop CD Miller says often that she is ‘White, Black and Filippino.” My own father says he is African-American, but we are aware of his Cherokee heritage. My mother’s mother was Austrian-Chinese mixed. Between the three of us, we have been through many continents, cultures. But what has been the label? Is there a need? It depends. As Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and others help us to think into our words and the structures of reality, they also ask us to understand the play of power and justice, disempowerment, ignorance, and the making of objects through labels, through which our world is largely organized.
“From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rain-forest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island.” – from wikipedia
This movie is of the quest of activists to bring accountability and conscience to our world. The plight of ecology and the people of the world who have not severed human relationship to earth and creatures, should not be something sensational but should be seen as something we have chosen or willed to forget, or do not understand as having been ‘forgotten out of us’ –meaning that sometimes our forgetting is not personal, so much as having been a strategy by larger forces, so that we may drive our cars and keep our lights on and party in all-hours of the night without a thought to the violence this attests to.
Our world, a neo-colonialist world, has made natural the exploitation. Of each other, of others, of ourselves. We make the abusive corporatocracy unapproachable in our self-hatred. Our ignorance is a child of self-hatred and ineptness. We shrink and sometimes feel paralyzed and small. That’s what many of the elites who are exploiting our earth and communities want us to do. Are we that obedient? Are the indigenous people just people with colorful clothes that we think are behind us in history? I am certainly not. I have Cherokee heritage. All of us are indigenous. The indigenous communities who still lived as linked with the earth thrived in all of Europe and Asia and the Americas and the Middle East. Those ties have all been systematically severed in one way or another and at different speeds and intensities that usually mirror the amount of modernization that has accumulated. The Irish and Welsh Celts and the Ainu and the indigenous of Okinawa and others continue to battle. Are the indigenous people of the Americas indigenous? All of us come from earth. Why is it that the ‘brown people’ with colorful clothes are left to fend for a life on this planet that doesn’t equal plunder and genocide while the rest of us have ambivalence about all of it? We are humanity, we are earth. Do we ignore our mothers and foremothers and forefathers as a ‘progress,’ as some kind of maturity? Who taught us these things?
Instead of guilt, there needs to be a reckoning. A courageous facing, shifts in behavior, but not a reconstitution of a heavy punishment-as-morality, but a compassionate turn, a vigorous turn to actually care for our ancestors, for our planet. Not just in our own recycling projects and moral superiority in not driving SUVs. I’m talking more about working with those, like the gentlemen, women, children, ladies, lawyers, and all others who are struggling and need our creativity, alliance, knowledge, privileges. Act. And hopefully movies such as this, can inspire, inform, shift you and those you know, with a ruthless love of life and diversity.
For Immediate Release November 5th, 2010 WHAT: Protest at the Indian Consulate: Revoke the Barring of Professor Richard Shapiro, End the Isolation of Kashmiris WHERE: 540 Arguello Boulevard, San Francisco, CA, WHEN: November 8th, 11am-12pm Organized by Students and Friends of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK) Press contact: Amanda McBride, ciisstudentsolidarity@gmail.com, 415.627.7675 On Monday, November 8th, at 11 am, a group of students and community members will be protesting IndiaÕs banning of Richard Shapiro, a US scholar, without any reported legal basis. The protest will take place at the San Francisco Consulate General of India, at 540 Arguello Boulevard. On November 1st, 2010, Professor Shapiro was denied entry by the Immigration Authorities in New Delhi. Professor Shapiro is a US Citizen and Chair, Anthropology Department, at California Institute of Integral Studies. Professor Shapiro traveled to India with his life partner, Professor Angana Chatterji, a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the US. Professor Chatterji, a prominent and frequent visitor to the region, was granted entry to India while Professor Shapiro was prevented from entering the country. Reports indicate that no legal basis was given for the decision to deny his entry. Professor Shapiro was in possession of a valid passport and visa. Given that Professor ShapiroÕs work focuses neither on South Asia nor India, it appears that his right to travel has been restricted in an attempt to further intimidate Professor Chatterji, and to discourage her from continuing her work as Co-Convener of the International People's Tribunal for Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK). Since 2006, Shapiro has regularly traveled to Kashmir, and interacted with various human rights defenders, scholars, and youth to bear witness and to learn from their experiences. He helped form a Jewish-Muslim Friendship Circle. The focus of his scholarship and academic work is not India or Kashmir, but issues of race, class, gender, and alliance building in the United States, and discourses on power and subjectivity. Richard Shapiro had written an op-ed on Kashmir in 2009 and another in September 2010. These were analytical pieces based on articles and newspaper reports, and not on primary research that had been conducted by him. Any scholar can do that. This is a matter of academic freedom, and beyond the control of states and their desire to regulate thinking on the injustices they perpetrate. On November 1, when Professor Shapiro first presented his passport to the Immigration Authorities, he was stamped an entry permit. Then, they started processing Professor Chatterji's passport. She has been stopped regularly since the inception of IPTK in April 2008. As they paused over her passport, the Immigration Officer again asked Richard Shapiro for his passport. Then, he was informed that he may not enter India, and that the ban was indefinite. The Immigration Authorities refused to pay for his return airfare. He was made to leave at 11.50 am that same morning. The Immigration Authorities refused to give any reason, while stating that Professor Shapiro had not been charged with anything. This arbitrary and undemocratic act by the Indian government is an affront to academic freedom, the right of families to be together, and further isolates Kashmiris from international solidarity in their struggle for peace and justice. The barring of an international scholar to Kashmir raises serious questions into the functioning of democratic rights and human rights conditions of Kashmiris. Denying Shapiro entry without due cause impinges upon academic freedom, freedom of movement, and the right to travel with his legal partner and to visit his family in Kolkata. The Indian state has regularly targeted those that have been outspoken on injustices and military governance in Kashmir. The Indian state has targetted Professor Angana Chatterji and her colleagues in Kashmir, Parvez Imroz and Khurram Parvez, for their work defending human rights. Recently, writer Arundhati Roy was a target. When academics, writers, and journalists are banned, such actions speak to the intent of the Indian State in maintaining impunity, and in deliberately isolating Kashmiris from the world and the world from Kashmiris. We call upon the Government of India to: * Revoke the entry ban of Richard Shapiro from India. * Stop obstruction of the IPTK's work. * End barring without due cause. * Support democratic processes, the exchange of ideas. For more information on the IPTK, see www.kashmirprocess.org. For a press note by Scholars at Risk regarding Professor Shapiro, please visit: http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu/Events-News/Article-Detail.php?art_uid=2454 The op-eds by Richard Shapiro: Governing Kashmir (August 2010): http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2010/Aug/29/governing-kashmir-17.asp A Just Peace in Kashmir? (August 2009): http://www.zcommunications.org/a-just-peace-in-kashmir-by-richard-shapiro
Our students in the Social Cultural Anthropology (SCA) at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I received my Masters degree in 2001 and where I continue my PHD studies, has been busy the last few days as we intensify efforts to intervene in solidarity to the people of Kashmir and all those who are democratic in spirit, in a world increasingly divided along lines inherited from our nation-states and communities. Richard Shapiro, who is the department head of the SCA department, was denied entry into India at the airport, where he was to meet his partner Angana Chatterji, who is also one of our faculty at the institute and is co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir.
This situation merits attention for those who want and need more democratic processes in the world, and to acknowledge the way states work in convening monopolies on power, even where there has been no crime committed. How can he be turned away for doing nothing? Why do states have more power than the people they are supposedly serving and protecting? This is the crucial question of our historical present.
The below article from Yahoo News explains:
This coming Monday, November 8, at 11:00 in San Francisco, there will be a protest at the Indian Consulate, protesting this turn-away and the divisions and policies, actions and heritages that prop up these kinds of actions. We must demand accountability to rights granted by our constitutions in democratic states and all states.
Wed, Nov 3 12:18 PM
Yahoo News. India.
A prominent US academic was sent back to America from Delhi airport on Monday, allegedly because his partner is associated with a human rights group in the Kashmir Valley.
According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society (JKCCS), immigration officials at the airport initially put an entry stamp on the passport of Prof Richard Shapiro, but cancelled it after they examined the passport of his partner, Angana Chatterji.
Chatterji is co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, a voluntary organisation investigating alleged human rights abuses in Kashmir. She is professor of social and cultural anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where Shapiro is Chair and associate professor of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthopology.
Chatterji was allowed to enter India, and is now in Srinagar. She said the immigration officials did not give any reason for denying Shapiro entry. No government official could be reached for a comment.
“This Monday, Richard Shapiro had travelled a long way from San Francisco to be with Angana Chatterji, who was travelling to Kashmir for work. When he first presented his passport to the immigration authorities, he was stamped an entry permit. Then they started processing Angana Chatterji’s passport.
She has been stopped regularly since the inception of IPTK in April 2008. As they paused over her passport, the immigration officer again asked Richard Shapiro for his passport,” JKCCS president Parvez Imroz said in a statement.
According to Imroz, Shapiro, a US citizen, has accompanied Chatterji, an Indian citizen and a permanent resident of the US, to India about 30 times since 1997. He does not work on Kashmir, but he has, since 2006, interacted with human rights activists in the Valley. He wrote two analytical pieces in local dailies in 2009 and September 2010, the JKCCS said.
According to Imroz, the immigration officials told Shapiro that the ban on his entry into India was indefinite. “They did not deport him or cancel his visa, but insisted that he return immediately. He was made to leave at 11.50 that same morning,” he said.
Political bodies arguing. States and nations being more important than people currently, increasingly.
Political bodies arguing that institutions and processes are in place in many European nations regarding ‘how to deal with’ the Roma.
The Roma, having to assimilate into the ‘civilized’ European, North American and Japanese colonial systems…..is already a violence, an exclusion, a globally-mandated assumption of obedient minorities having to create themselves into something they are not. It is already a set-up. The fascisms are not acceptable now. But there are residues of fascism in every state, in certain attitudes of many individuals, ourselves possibly. When things go underground, they adapt to the current milieu and operate with new tactics. It is easier to follow an ideology or a fundamental structure in our minds, families and neighborhoods. Many of the scientists and thinkers of fascist governments were paid by the so-called democratic states, to survive and thrive and continue to create in the name of the elites. They are everywhere. The residues show up in people’s attitudes. As I write this, some people have wanted me dead. It is not a surprise. Ethics, love, negotiation, difference, intensity, and struggle, are seen as unwanted. It’s so much easier if everyone just obeyed. It takes lots of obedience to be civilized. It takes lots of obedience to be many things. It is a struggle to think creatively about our issues and what it is we want.
There is little talk of getting programs and institutions together, providing counseling and educational change and other activities, to address the prejudice, racism, violence, brutality, impunity, and aggression of the dominant attitudes and behaviors against the Roma and other minorities. It is a set-up. But there are many who are privately setting up creative ways of resisting the dominant flow of treating minorities like something to do surgery on, to assimilate. The issue is dominance and resistance.
Apparently, much like some of the US Americans I know who are anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim (and whose families were probably anti-Japanese-American during WWII etc.), states have a right to keep the ‘other’ out. Who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’?? The lines are often justifications for our psychological/social violences to be played out. It is that division, that demarcation, where we give permissions of violence. Nations and national systems are that place, an extension or perhaps where it begins through histories of developing from tribalism to ethnic/sexual/gender/racial/religious identity and national identity currently.
Now it all plays out in its failures. Violent nationalism internalized into safe havens and names such as ‘our state’ and ‘our city’ and ‘our people’. Tribalism continues as democracy fades. But democracy isn’t fading for many. It is enacted and seen everyday. There are thousands around the world, millions around the world, right next to us, who understand the difficult struggle for democratic ethics in our lives. We cannot confuse permissions without ethics with democracy. We cannot confuse the boundaries of identities as demarcations of democracy.
The Roma, the Kurds, the Jews, the Armenians, the Dahlit, the Ainu, the Mayans, and millions of other bodies are forced into the isolation called ‘minority’ and are treated like chess pieces and diseases in the national systems now global. We must make our way in the violent world structured by the dominant system and we are supposed to listen to these people and bodies that have somehow assumed precedence. Even as those in governments are for justice, the system requires you to be a strong state, complete with strong militaries and economies and secret hiding places and hidden tactics and lots of money to pay the secret operators to make the state into a certain self-image, leaving certain ideas, cultures, ways-of-thinking and acting, out of the equation of this imagined state. It’s an imaginary of violence, playing out with hollow words such as ‘rights’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in many cases.
There are many people in world government, such as can be seen in this video snapshot of politicians arguing about what to do with the Roma people, who actually care and want peace. However, justice cannot come in states where peace is about obedience to laws, no matter how lofty. Laws, in most powerful states, ignore the brutality of how that state came into being in the first place. Law is not justice. Neither is law about anarchic violence and tearing down of all. Justice is more of an attention to history and creative processes of negotiation through differences. But in positions of privilege, where a person or a body of people ‘decide what to do with others’ is precarious when the rules of law are interpreted in different ways. What is worse, as Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) himself, wrote the first writings on the term ‘genocide’ and watched about a third of the laws he proposed be left out when the genocide laws were implemented by the international body–because those laws that were too threatening to the so-called integrity of the state would make all states culpable and make the global national system criminal itself). The human rights system is a necessary group of policies, laws, and research and documentation bodies, do not get me wrong. But no one can enforce them. There cannot be a human rights police. So human rights are continually broken in the United States, the European Union, Japan and other nations. All one can do is watch arguments or invasions.
What’s even more daunting is that the term ‘genocide’ has been coined as an event, a moment in time with a certain look, an obvious massacre and displacement and hatred. The issue is that genocides rarely happen as an event. Culminations in massacres happen, but the processes of cleansing in states and regions happen over long periods of time, due to intensifications of exclusion-wishing and creating our living spaces in certain ways that do not allow certain differences. Displacements may happen continually for centuries, making a certain group poor. Policies to exclude and keep them poor keep being passed, while institutions are set-up to ‘help’ these minorities. The help keeps that group in their particular circumstances and are designed to construct assimilation. Help is usually a form of surveillance and identity-making. It is created through the dominant’s will, not those who are marginalized. Propaganda can be created over decades, where racism and prejudice can strangle the look of a city or a state or a people into a reality where certain people and communities and areas can only be seen through that lens of the constructed dominant instead of through a different lens. Criminalizating minorities and their actions is a tactic of killing the spirits and locking the men away, leaving vulnerable populations to fend for themselves. Since laws concern the privileged, what does survival look like for the already-vulnerable? Genocide is not an event. The killing of spirits and ideas and lives happen over prolonged periods in all of the ways Raphael Lemkin has stated (in the complete version, not only in the edited version the international body has made public). So genocide may not look like genocide. For change in our world, we must intervene into these smaller structures of cultural killings before an event. In fact, some philosophers have actually spoken to the everydayness of genocide. Our ignoring and going about our lives is an aspect of the killing of another community. Buying or not buying certain things can also play into killing ‘the other.’ We cannot wait for the ‘event’ that we recognize. By then it is usually too late.
These politicians can argue, but whoever has the biggest weapons currently controls whatever happens, regardless of human rights. States have more power than groups of persecuted peoples. States have become more important to maintain, rather than communities. Self-hatred begins to creep in as we think of ways to empower and resist. Making ourselves into ethnic groups, then wanting a state, seems to be a logical conclusion of ways to live, as the stronger states treat those within its boundaries that are not the dominant group, as well as weaker states and non-dominant peoples globally, as things to extract work from (exploit) and displace and make into problems at will. It is ugly. There is no secret. We all know individual people like this in our lives. But when it is larger, we may think they are nice people, but the structures will a certain pattern, a certain way for things to turn out. More and more people are no longer willing to take it, however.
Issues of dominance and dominant attitudes control the so-called ‘Roma issue’ and other minority peoples’ and stateless peoples’ living circumstances, continuing to be ‘cases,’ as can be seen in this video, in the early 21st century. It brings up memories of World War II, fascism, and the current crisis of human, social, ecological systems at crossroads. They don’t fit it. ‘They’ are nomadic, ‘they’ are communal and not individualistic, ‘they’ have ties to life-ways that are contradictory to the dominant globalizing state system. Where does difference come into play? What can be done? Must we/they obey to survive? Where is our creativity?
AI NO KO 