Best New Baha'i Blog...and More

About a year ago or so I used to engage in a little day dreaming about what it would be like to team up with some of my favorite Baha'i bloggers to create a new blog with a variety of writers taking on the issues of the day. Looks like someone else beat me to it and it's the best new Baha'i blog out there in my opinion. It's called Baha'i Perspectives and features some of the smartest, Baha'i text-based blogging I've seen since I first got into the blog game almost three years ago. Here's a taste of their latest post:

"To discriminate against any race, on the ground of its being socially backward, politically immature, and numerically in a minority, is a flagrant violation of the spirit that animates the Faith of Bahá’u'lláh.

(Shoghi Effendi, Advent of Divine Justice, p. 35)

I recently watched a program conducted by Bill Moyers, a journalist for PBS, during which he interviewed a gentleman named Douglas Blackmon about his new book, Slavery by Another Name. This book concerned the world of post-Emancipation slavery in the South, and more generally, the American attitude towards freed slaves. The book discusses the evolution of forced labour by companies in Texas, Alabama and Georgia, and illustrated accounts of labour camps in which African Americans were held under the pretense of imprisonment.

The majority of these cases overwhelmingly affirm that the practice of falsely accusing blacks of perpetrating crimes in the South was a ruse to create a new brand of slavery, one that was technically legal in the post-Civil War and Reconstruction periods of the United States. It was during this time that former slave owners, in compliance with new anti-slavery laws, that slavery took another name and the southern economy, and even the American economy, continued its addiction to forced labour." (Read the whole thing and check out this hot new blog here)

While you're at it here's some more world class blogging you should check out:

Correlating takes on doubt
Baha'i Faith in Egypt and Iran informs us of a recent U.S. Resolution regarding human rights in Egypt
Baha'i Views features an artist piece about the persecution of Baha'is in Iran
Barnabas celebrates Nobel Prize winners speaking out on behalf of the recently imprisoned leadership of the Iranian Baha'i Community
Luminous Realities shares some helpful information for writers
Baha'i News U.K. features a story about a visit from world famous hoop dancer Kevin Locke
Los Angelista has OD'd on love
Anti-Racist Parent has some advice worth pondering

Enjoy and share any good blogging that you've read lately. Gotta go.

A White Cultural Crisis?

Photo courtesy of Time Magazine

By now I'm sure you've heard of all those pregnant teenage girls at Gloucester Highschool, the debates over whether there was a 'pregnancy pact' or not, whether there needs to be more sex education or condoms tossed around etc. If not here is part of the piece in Time Magazine that contributed to this local news story becoming a national one:

"As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies — more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October, after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

The question of what to do next has divided this fiercely Catholic enclave. Even with national data showing a 3% rise in teen pregnancies in 2006 — the first increase in 15 years — Gloucester isn't sure it wants to provide easier access to birth control. In any case, many residents worry that the problem goes much deeper. The past decade has been difficult for this mostly white, mostly blue-collar city (pop. 30,000). In Gloucester, perched on scenic Cape Ann, the economy has always depended on a strong fishing industry. But in recent years, such jobs have all but disappeared overseas, and with them much of the community's wherewithal. "Families are broken," says school superintendent Christopher Farmer. "Many of our young people are growing up directionless."" (Read all about it here)

As I've mentioned in the past, American moments like this one reveal a troubling double standard regarding race. I've listened to lots of commentary about this weird phenomenon going on in Gloucester but have not heard a single person suggest that any of these girls being white contributed to their behavior. If these were seventeen black teenagers it would be assumed by whites and blacks that their 'blackness' was a significant factor. There would be talking heads on television every night debating the moral degradation of black culture, the pernicious influence of hip-hop music, the crisis of 'baby mamas' and so on. Even when there is some kind of cultural critique, such as the references to Juno or Knocked Up in this case, the critique is color-blind, no mention of the fact that both these movies were about white women (and men for that matter) making pretty dumb decisions. So here's the question, are the pregnancies in Gloucester signs of a white cultural crisis? Should we not burn up considerable airtime, type frantically at our keyboards, convene academic conferences and public hearings all across the country to examine this possibility? If not, why not? Wouldn't that be the just and equitable thing to do?

"Say: Observe equity in your judgment, ye men of understanding heart! He that is unjust in his judgment is destitute of the characteristics that distinguish man's station."
(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 203)

'Conscious' of What?

Photo of The Dawnbreaker Collective doin' they thang

John McWhorter who wrote "Losing the Race", and "Winning the Race" has a new book out called, "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America". Here's part of an excerpt:

By John McWhorter

(Gotham, June 19, 2008)

The Words I Manifest: Is Conscious Rap Different?

And you will find that this perspective is best –-check it out/ These are the words that I manifest.

Gang Starr, "Manifest," No More Mr. Nice Guy

A typical take on rap is that whatever Paul Wall and Busta Rhymes are pulling, there is a whole body of "conscious" rap, also termed "underground," "alternative," "grassroots" or less formally "digging in the crates" rap, that steps away from the gunplay and misogyny and takes on serious issues. This, we might think, is what will spark a revolution.
Because The Roots have a particularly iconic status as conscious rappers, I'll start with them. It's not that I don't like what they do: For starters, they're from my hometown of Philadelphia – I get to hear things like hoagies and Mount Airy mentioned and street names I know from my childhood. And as far as I'm concerned, their lyrics are poetry, pure and simple – they barely even need the beats behind them. The Roots write dense straight-up poetry, such that it's no surprise that, as they say on Things Fall Apart, they have a big fan base among the coffee house set ("coffee house girls and white boys").
However, in terms of what kind of "politics" this poetry puts across, it seems to me that what it ultimately has to tell us is "Sheeee-it!!!!!!" -- and that's not enough. I will make my case with two of the "fiercer" songs from their masterpiece of 2006, Game Theory.

"False Media" seems to be the one everybody finds especially significant. The message? "If I can't work to make it, I'll rob and take it." Because I am "a monster y'all done created." Now, there's no point in droning on that this "glorifies violence." What emcee Black Thought means, what you are meant to glean, is that society is so set against black men that poor ones can barely get jobs, and that it's therefore inevitable and justifiable, that so many of them go "thug." But that's a questionable proposition. Why did so many fewer black men go "thug" after Reconstruction or during the Great Depression?

Nevertheless, Black Thought is tapping a widely-held conviction about poor blacks and employment. Writers like Bakari Kitwana concur with insights like Black Thought's, such that Kitwana includes in his list of items on a hip-hop political agenda "the retention and creation of jobs for working-class Americans." Robin Kelley rhapsodizes over Ice Cube's "A Bird in the Hand" on Death Certificate, where a black man just out of high school keeps being turned down for service jobs and, as Kelley puts it, "It does not take much reflection for him to realize that the drug dealers are the only people in his neighborhood making decent money."

The problem is that the unemployment of poor black men does not correlate meaningfully with availability of jobs. A black man without a diploma who wants a job can get one. I state that not as a moral point, but as an empirical one. Here are some reasons why: The beat from "A Bird in the Hand" is now fading away ... and now gone. Please consider the following:

An influential argument is that the relocation of low-skill factory jobs from city centers to suburbs or abroad created an unemployment crisis for black men. However, Indianapolis' black community saw the same rise in unemployment among black men despite the fact that factories there did not relocate in significant numbers. Meanwhile, New York saw just as many black men drift into chronic unemployment despite the fact that manufacturing jobs were never a major mainstay of black employment in New York. Two academic studies have shown that factory relocation was responsible for at most a third of the unemployment among poor black men.

Poor blacks themselves in surveys do not support the idea that jobs are unavailable to them. In 1987, only 13 percent of unemployed poor blacks surveyed said they were out of work because they couldn't find a job. In 1980, half of the unemployed black teens surveyed in Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston said decently paying work was easy to find; 71 percent said minimum wage work was easy to find. (Read the rest of the excerpt here) You can read a review of the book here and recent pieces from McWhorter about the same subject here and here.

I don't know anything about hip-hop other than some of it I like and some of it I don't. I'd love to hear from those of you who are really knowledgeable about it what you think of McWhorter's views. What his writing got me thinking about though is the whole notion of any music or other artistic expression being 'conscious'. Anyone claiming what they create is 'conscious' needs to answer the question, "conscious of what"? I recommend that one measure of the value of claims to 'consciousness' is the degree to which what one creates reflects a consciousness of the oneness of humankind:

"The bedrock of a strategy that can engage the world's population in assuming responsibility for its collective destiny must be the consciousness of the oneness of humankind. Deceptively simple in popular discourse, the concept that humanity constitutes a single people presents fundamental challenges to the way that most of the institutions of contemporary society carry out their functions. Whether in the form of the adversarial structure of civil government, the advocacy principle informing most of civil law, a glorification of the struggle between classes and other social groups, or the competitive spirit dominating so much of modern life, conflict is accepted as the mainspring of human interaction. It represents yet another expression in social organization of the materialistic interpretation of life that has progressively consolidated itself over the past two centuries.

In a letter addressed to Queen Victoria over a century ago, and employing an analogy that points to the one model holding convincing promise for the organization of a planetary society, Bahá'u'lláh compared the world to the human body. There is, indeed, no other model in phenomenal existence to which we can reasonably look. Human society is composed not of a mass of merely differentiated cells but of associations of individuals, each one of whom is endowed with intelligence and will; nevertheless, the modes of operation that characterize man's biological nature illustrate fundamental principles of existence. Chief among these is that of unity in diversity. Paradoxically, it is precisely the wholeness and complexity of the order constituting the human body -- and the perfect integration into it of the body's cells -- that permit the full realization of the distinctive capacities inherent in each of these component elements. No cell lives apart from the body, whether in contributing to its functioning or in deriving its share from the well-being of the whole. The physical well-being thus achieved finds its purpose in making possible the expression of human consciousness; that is to say, the purpose of biological development transcends the mere existence of the body and its parts.

What is true of the life of the individual has its parallels in human society. The human species is an organic whole, the leading edge of the evolutionary process. That human consciousness necessarily operates through an infinite diversity of individual minds and motivations detracts in no way from its essential unity. Indeed, it is precisely an inhering diversity that distinguishes unity from homogeneity or uniformity. What the peoples of the world are today experiencing, Bahá'u'lláh said, is their collective coming-of-age, and it is through this emerging maturity of the race that the principle of unity in diversity will find full expression. From its earliest beginnings in the consolidation of family life, the process of social organization has successively moved from the simple structures of clan and tribe, through multitudinous forms of urban society, to the eventual emergence of the nation-state, each stage opening up a wealth of new opportunities for the exercise of human capacity."
(Baha'i International Community, 1995 Mar 03, The Prosperity of Humankind)

Artistic endeavors, hip-hop or otherwise, that are animated by such a consciousness will harmonize with the spiritual, intellectual, moral and social needs of a human race approaching maturity. These endeavors will contribute to building human capacity to meet the supreme challenge of our time, the creation of a global civilization based on spiritual principles. The Dawnbreaker Collective and hip-hop artist Badi are two examples that I highly recommend!

'Hate Crime' Generation?

Sticks, broken bottles, feet and fists. According to the column I just read, those were the objects used on a black youth in Marshfield, Massachusetts by a group of white assailants (From the Boston Globe):

"According to the report filed by police, witnesses "saw a large group of approximately 10-12 people including males and females beating a black male . . . The black male tried to run away over the fence but the group caught him on the other side of road and continued to jump on him, kick him, and punch him . . . all while shouting derogatory racial statements."

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz said, "You hear a fact pattern like that, it's outrageous. It's conduct that you hope would be behind all of us. Here it is right in our face again. We will deal with all the people responsible."

The alleged brutality continued even after Robinson was knocked nearly unconscious. Police found several pools of blood, a stick with blood, and a broken beer bottle that had blood "and what appeared to be skin on the edges."

One of those arrested, Jay P. Rains, 19, of Duxbury, used a derogatory racial epithet "at least 25 times" when speaking afterward to police. All seven suspects, whose ages range from 17 to 22, are charged with attempted murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery with intent to intimidate, and civil rights violations. Under Massachusetts law, certain criminal conduct is considered a hate crime when it is motivated by bias against a person's race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or disability." (Read all about it here)

The brutality involved in this assault is chilling, but what is more disturbing are the ages of those involved. That so many of these kinds of acts are being committed by young people does not bode well for the future of our nation or the world. I've heard some people suggest that racist attitudes will follow the old into the grave and we'll be free our such attitudes simply through the passage of time. Apparently not. Whether through neglect or design, too few of our children and youth are being effectively prepared to participate as equals in a global, diverse civilization. This is one reason why efforts such as Anti-Racist Parent and the international grassroots initiative of spiritual and moral education being undertaken by Baha'i communities around the world are so encouraging. These efforts are based on the recognition that new attitudes and behaviors must be taught, minds and souls must be trained if we are to have a better world, a world where incidents like the one in Marshfield exist only in history books.

"Children are the most precious treasure a community can possess, for in them are the promise and guarantee of the future. They bear the seeds of the character of future society which is largely shaped by what the adults constituting the community do or fail to do with respect to children. They are a trust no community can neglect with impunity."
(The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 157, 2000, p. 8)

The Conservation or Elimination of Races?

In the late 1800's the immortal W.E.B. DuBois wrote an essay called "The Conservation of Races". It's a rich piece of writing that I will not even try to summarize, but is worth reading in full when you get the chance. There's a portion where he articulates a question that touches on issues in an article that I just read in the New York Times:

(From the Conservation of Races)

"For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people–the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America– must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan—Negroism, then their destiny is NOT absorption by the white Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint, the Saviour, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo—Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.

It may, however, be objected here that the situation of our race in America renders this attitude impossible; that our sole hope of salvation lies in our being able to lose our race identity in the commingled blood of the nation; and that any other course would merely increase the friction of races which we call race prejudice, and against which we have so long and so earnestly fought.

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross—roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? (italics mine)

In other words, does the solution to the racial dilemma lie in assimilation and color-blind ideology or in the conservation of racial identity and a color-conscious ideology? If I insist on holding onto my racial identity and insist that others recognize it, am I not perpetuating racial divisions in society? If I abandon it and insist that others view me as "raceless" am I also abandoning whatever unique contributions to the betterment of society that my race (in the collective sense) might have to offer?

DuBois of course is talking primarily about the American context. Things get even more complicated when we widen the discussion to a global context (From the New York Times):

"Having always thought it was more racially enlightened than strife-torn America, France finds itself facing the prospect that it has actually fallen behind on that score. Incidents like the ones over the weekend bring to mind the rioting that exploded across France three years ago. Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, the country has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate.

This black consciousness is reflected not just in daily conversation, but also in a dawning culture of books and music by young French blacks like Youssoupha, a cheerful, toothy 28-year-old, who was sent here from Congo by his parents to get an education at 10, raised by an aunt who worked in a school cafeteria in a poor suburb, and told by guidance counselors that he shouldn’t be too ambitious. Instead, he earned a master’s degree from the Sorbonne.

Then, like many well-educated blacks in this country, he hit a brick wall. “I found myself working in fast-food places with people who had the equivalent of a 15-year-old’s level of education,” he recalled.

So he turned to rap, out of frustration as much as anything, finding inspiration in “négritude,” an ideology of black pride conceived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s by Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician from Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became Senegal’s first president. Its philosophy, as Sartre once put it, was a kind of “antiracist racism,” a celebration of shared black heritage.

Négritude and Césaire are back. When Césaire died in April, at 94, his funeral in Fort-de-France, Martinique, was broadcast live on French television. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his rival Ségolène Royal both attended. Just three years ago, Mr. Sarkozy, as head of a center-right party and not yet president, supported a law (repealed after much protest) that compelled French schools to teach the “positive” aspects of colonialism. The next year, Césaire refused to meet with him. Now here was Mr. Sarkozy flying to the former French colony (today one of the country’s overseas departments, meaning he could troll for votes) to pay tribute to the poet laureate of négritude.

That said, as a country France definitely sends out mixed messages. “Négritude is a concept they just don’t want to hear about,” Youssoupha raps in “Render Unto Césaire” on his latest album, “À Chaque Frère” (“To Each Brother”). A regular short feature on French public television, “Citoyens Visibles,” hosted by a young actress, Hafsia Herzi, celebrates French artists with foreign origins.

At the same time, it’s against the rules for the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million." (Read all about it here)

France appears to be a country that has already experimented with implementing the kind of assimilationist/ color-blind ideology that is being loudly advocated by some in the United States as the basis of a post-racial America. It would seem that some in France are beginning to question the wisdom of such an approach. Has it actually worked?

Of course whatever the current stage of social development regarding race in the United States or in other countries, as a Baha'i my focus is on the future, a global civilization based on spiritual principles. Are races "conserved" or eliminated in this future world order? The answer to this question is not obvious to me. As I have argued in the past, there appears to be scriptural support for both a "race-affirming" and "race-transcending" perspective in Baha'i thought. It may be that God loves color, but it is also true that the soul has no race. If so, what are the social implications of recognizing this spiritual truth? Is there a Baha'i theology of race? If so, what are its fundamental elements? What do you think readers?

Giving Props to Pops

A proud father and his little ones, Ghana 2006

Tomorrow will be the first Father's Day where I will "qualify" to receive a card as well as give them out. It will be a sweet day indeed for a guy who has been wanting to be a dad since his teens. I've recently been able to feel my son's "kicking" antics inside my wife, a pretty weird and fun sensation. It makes me smile just thinking about it. Right on time I got a little something in my in-box from the Institute for American Values about religion and fatherhood. It included a recently published column from Brad Wilcox in the Wall Street Journal and a link to a research brief. Here's a bit from the Wall Street Journal piece:

"Religion continues to have a significant influence, even in today's culture, as I explain in a report on faith, fatherhood and marriage published by the Institute for American Values earlier this week. Religious faith is linked to happier marriages, fewer divorces and births outside of marriage, and a more involved style of fatherhood.

Take marital happiness. About 65% of married Americans who attend church regularly are "very happy" in their marriages, compared with 58% of married Americans who rarely or never attend. Note that the marital happiness premium is larger for couples who attend church together. Indeed, wives get a boost in marital happiness from attendance only when they worship with their husbands.

Religious Americans are also less likely to divorce. Specifically, Americans who attend religious services regularly are about 35% less likely to divorce than are their married peers who rarely or never attend services. Once again, couples who attend together are especially unlikely to split.

Religion is also linked to lower rates of nonmarital childbearing. Only 25% of mothers who attended church weekly had a child outside of wedlock, compared with 34% of mothers who attended monthly or less. Moreover, unmarried couples who attend religious services together are significantly less likely to have a child outside of marriage than are couples who don't attend together or don't attend at all.

The report also reveals that religious fathers are more likely to devote time, attention and affection to their children than their secular peers. For example, compared with dads who indicate no religious affiliation, fathers who attend religious services regularly devote at least two more hours per week to youth-related activities, such as coaching soccer or leading a Boy Scout troop. Churchgoing fathers are also significantly more likely to keep tabs on their children, monitoring their activities and friends. Finally, religious fathers are about 65% more likely than unaffiliated fathers to report praising and hugging their school-age children "very often."" (Read the whole piece here) You can also read more about the research this column is based on here.

I've recently rediscovered my passion for the social science of religion and am playing around with the idea of doing my dissertation regarding religion and interracial marriages. We'll see what happens with that. In any case it's nice to see religion as a positive social force receiving validation in a mainstream newspaper. This column underscores for me the spiritual significance of marriage and family life and how religion can serve to empower this vital activity. I want to wish a happy Father's Day to all those dads out there who are demonstrating their love for God through loving and serving their families. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to do so myself.

"I beg Thy forgiveness, O my God, and implore pardon after the manner Thou wishest Thy servants to direct themselves to Thee. I beg of Thee to wash away our sins as befitteth Thy Lordship, and to forgive me, my parents, and those who in Thy estimation have entered the abode of Thy love in a manner which is worthy of Thy transcendent sovereignty and well beseemeth the glory of Thy celestial power.

O my God! Thou hast inspired my soul to offer its supplication to Thee, and but for Thee, I would not call upon Thee. Lauded and glorified art Thou; I yield Thee praise inasmuch as Thou didst reveal Thyself unto me, and I beg Thee to forgive me, since I have fallen short in my duty to know Thee and have failed to walk in the path of Thy love."
- The Bab

(Compilations, Baha'i Prayers, p. 62)

How Powerful Are Apologies?

Our northern neighbors seem to be experiencing their historic moment regarding racial/ethnic justice. Canada has issued an apology for a misguided policy of attempting to "civilize" the children of indigenous peoples (from the Associated Press):

OTTAWA - In a historic speech, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized yesterday to Canada's native peoples for the longtime government policy of forcing their children to attend state-funded schools aimed at assimilating them.

The treatment of children at the schools, where they were often physically and sexually abused, was a sad chapter in the country's history, he said from the House of Commons in an address carried live across Canada.

"Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country," he said, as 11 aboriginal leaders looked on just feet away.

Indians packed into the public galleries and gathered on the lawn of Parliament Hill.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indian children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society.

Hundreds of former students witnessed what native leaders call a pivotal moment for Canada's more than 1 million Indians, who remain the country's poorest and most disadvantaged group. There are more than 80,000 surviving students.

"The government of Canada now recognizes that it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize," Harper said.

"We now recognize that it was wrong to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures and traditions, and that it created a void in many lives and communities and we apologize," Harper said. (Read all about it here) You can also read extracts from the apology here.

This follows similar moves by several state governments in the U.S. regarding the enslavement of Africans.

I've been very skeptical of such social rituals regarding the harm done due to racism and ethnocentrism often thinking that one good policy promoting equity is worth a thousand apologies. But perhaps apologies and policy are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps there is a spiritual and moral power in these actions on the part of governments that is just as important as political or economic power. These apologies could be viewed as a form of truthfulness which Baha'i scripture emphasizes is the "foundation of all human virtues."

"Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues. Without truthfulness, progress and success, in all the worlds of God, are impossible for any soul. When this holy attribute is established in man, all the divine qualities will also be acquired."

What is true for the soul is also true for society. If we are to achieve a global civilization based on spiritual principles, then truthfulness is the foundation of our civic virtues, virtues necessary for "progress and success". Perhaps these apologies are more than just political theater but are actually indicators of a human race advancing on the path of God. I certainly hope so!

Debunking a Mythical "Model" Minority

Once upon a time, there was a great monolithic group of human beings who seemed to have remarkable abilities to achieve against all odds, the smartest in the land. Often they were referred to when castigating other groups of dark hue in the kingdom who did not seem to do so well as this group. People would say "Why can't you be more like them?" and " Look at how well they are doing, they prove to all that everyone in the land can achieve if only they work hard." This tale is probably familiar to most of us, we've grown up with one version or another of this mythical model minority. Like so many tales from that great collection of American racial and ethnic stereotypes, this one also turns out to be just a story. Check it out (from the New York Times):

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.

Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.

The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said. (This is a must read. Read all about it!)

Racial and ethnic stereotypes are a double edged sword, whichever way they cut, positive or negative they can create problems in our society blinding us to truths that could guide intelligent public policy and personal behavior. They can even get people hurt (from the Boston Globe):

"As court guards led away Thu Phan, 18, his mother stared at him intently, dumbfounded by charges that he had instigated the brutal beating of two young teens last summer.

"I don't know what happened to my kid," said the Vietnamese woman, who declined to give her name, after her son's arraignment earlier this month. "They go out and play and then I don't know what happened."

She is not alone. Vietnamese teenagers are more likely to feel disconnected from their parents and are less inclined to open up to them about their problems than other teenagers in the city, according to a 2006 survey of Boston schoolchildren conducted by the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. The survey, known as the Boston Youth Survey, is conducted every other year and focuses on students in Boston's public high schools.

Leaders in Boston's Vietnamese community have asked Harvard to conduct a separate survey solely of Vietnamese teens, to figure out whether the gap between Vietnamese adults and children could lead to the kind of violence exhibited last August in the brutal beating of two Vietnamese-American teens.

Phan and four other Vietnamese teenagers and young men have been indicted for their alleged involvement in the fight, which was captured on videotape and sent a shockwave through the community." (Read all about it)

I have to wonder whether or not the stereotype of Asian men as docile geeks might have kept people from recognizing the problems some of these young Vietnamese Americans were having and their potential for violence (unlike certain other minority youth whose violent tendencies are assumed). If so the model minority myth is a real disservice to these young people and their community. Racial and ethnic stereotypes are "vain imaginings" an obstacle to social and spiritual progress. Perhaps this new report will contribute to breaking the mental chains of the popular myth of the model minority.

"Arise and, armed with the power of faith, shatter to pieces the gods of your vain imaginings, the sowers of dissension amongst you. Cleave unto that which draweth you together and uniteth you."
(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 217)

Does Race Still Matter In America?

Tomorrow I'll be moderating a panel at Green Acre Baha'i School as part of a day long Race Unity Symposium. I'll be blogging about the symposium next week but wanted to give my readers a chance to participate "virtual" in this discussion. The basis of the panel will be a piece from USA Today that was published in February of this year. I'll include the entire piece here for your review:

A son’s wisdom on a post-racial world

By Mohammad Ali Salih

I wasn’t ready for my son’s harsh words when our family went out for dinner last week. We were talking about the elections and, specifically, the competition between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

I asked my son, a twenty-something Democrat and Obama supporter, two questions. “Why do you favor Obama?” With his mother and two sisters listening, he offered the usual arguments about “change,” “unity” and that Obama didn’t vote for the Iraq war. Then I asked: “Are you supporting Obama because he is biracial like you?” His angry response: “I knew you were going to ask about race. ... And I understand that, because of your age (I am in my 60s) and your background (an immigrant from Sudan). But, Dad, you need to wake up to the new thinking about race in America.” He added, “It is not about being racial; it is not about being biracial; it is about being post-racial.”

I twice repeated the question. My wife, a white Southern conservative Republican, intervened: “Don’t you understand what your son has told you? Why do you want him to think the way you think?”

My college daughter agreed with her brother, but the high-schooler didn’t want to talk about race or politics but about Cloverfield and Hannah Montana.

I have always wanted my children to be proud of their mixed race. Since they were young, I’ve read them books about biracials, told them to write “biracial” whenever they filled out forms and paid special attention to the other biracial kids they hung out with.

Before teaching them about their identity, I had to find mine. When I came to Washington, D.C., in 1980, I was ambivalent about the racial divisions. After I became a U.S. citizen 10 years later, though, I started searching for my identity. I didn’t want to be part of the white guilt/black victimization syndrome. It took me 10 more painful years to realize that the color of my skin doesn’t dictate my identity. I found faith in Islam as the core of my identity. That and being an American.

Yet I didn’t think about the contradiction that, although I had “liberated” myself from having race as part of my identity, I wanted my children to belong not only to one race but to two — until my son’s lecture. His message is now clear: not only that race doesn’t matter, but mixed race also doesn’t matter. And the new “post-race” thinking could be equivalent to “no race.”

A country without racial divisions. What a concept.

Mohammad Ali Salih is a correspondent based in Washington, D.C., for major Arabic newspapers and magazines in the Middle East.

Now you get to respond to the same questions that will be addressed to the panelists tomorrow:

Having read the story detailed in this column, please respond to the following questions:

1. If you were speaking with the son from this story how would you respond to his opinions about race? Would you agree or disagree with him. Why?

2. If you were speaking with the father from this story how would you respond to his perspective on race? Would you agree or disagree with him? Why?

3. The father mentions finding Islam as the core of his identity rather than “skin color”. How important is religion/spirituality in addressing issues of race and racism in American society?

I hope you'll join in this conversation by leaving lots of comments and engaging with each other, especially if you haven't commented on this blog before. I look forward to hearing what you all think. I also encourage you to engage in this discussion with other people in your life and share what you learn from those discussions.

Racialism or Racism?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done it again. He requested and was granted an interview with Dr. James Watson, who caused a bit of a dust up when he restated the tiresome view that blacks are less intelligent due to their genes. In an article published in The Root called, "The Science of Racism" Gates shares his reflections on the interview reaching the conclusion that Watson is not a "racist" but a "racialist". Gates states:

"I don't think James Watson is a racist. But I do think that he is a racialist—that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of human beings might, indeed, have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain, that the "gene" is some mythically neutral space and what it purportedly "measures" or "determines" is independent of environmental factors, variables and influences. The difference, the distinction, between being a racist and a racialist is crucial. James Watson is not the garden-variety racist as he has been caricatured by the press and bloggers, the sort epitomized by David Duke and his ilk, and he seemed genuinely chagrined, embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and other racists had claimed him as their champion, as one of their own, because of his remarks as quoted in the London Sunday Times. And, as we might expect, he apologized profusely for those remarks, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and his remarks taken out of context, at best. (I have not been able to determine if the writer who reported the remarks taped them or reconstructed them from notes or memory.)

But I did leave Cold Spring Harbor convinced that Dr. Watson believes that many forms of behavior—such as "Jewish intelligence" (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example)—could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among human beings, although no such connection has been made, and will probably never be made on any firm scientific basis, it seems to me."

The distinction Gates makes between racism (belief in the racial superiority of this group over that group) and racialism (belief that perceived differences between races are biological, in addition to other definitions) made me curious about the concept of "racialism" in Baha'i thought.
The references I located that refer specifically to "racialism" are mostly from the writings of Shoghi Effendi who served as the Head of the Baha'i Faith from 1921-1957, where it is listed as one of various "isms" with which Baha'is specifically and humanity in general would have to contend. In one instance racialism represents one of three "false gods":

"The chief idols in the desecrated temple of mankind are none other than the triple gods of Nationalism, Racialism and Communism, at whose altars governments and peoples, whether democratic or totalitarian, at peace or at war, of the East or of the West, Christian or Islamic, are, in various forms and in different degrees, now worshiping. Their high priests are the politicians and the worldly-wise, the so-called sages of the age; their sacrifice, the flesh and blood of the slaughtered multitudes; their incantations outworn shibboleths and insidious and irreverent formulas; their incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends from the lacerated hearts of the bereaved, the maimed, and the homeless.

The theories and policies, so unsound, so pernicious, which deify the state and exalt the nation above mankind, which seek to subordinate the sister races of the world to one single race, which discriminate between the black and the white, and which tolerate the dominance of one privileged class over all others -- these are the dark, the false, and crooked doctrines for which any man or people who believes in them, or acts upon them, must, sooner or later, incur the wrath and chastisement of God."
(Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come, p. 113)

Whether this selection and others referring to racialism are using it as a synonym for racism or as a distinct concept is unclear. It could be argued however that racialism is the basis of racism and as such is equally problematic in any case. The language used regarding racialism is "strong stuff" as they say, making it clear that it is not simply politically incorrect, but spiritually and morally incorrect placing individuals and societies in conflict with God. This is purely a preliminary and superficial treatment of a complex subject, something I hope to explore more deeply in the future. I'll close with what may prove to be "prophetic" remarks by Professor Gates:

"As I drove away from Cold Harbor, I realized that my conversation with Dr. Watson only confirmed something I already, with great trepidation, have come to believe: That the last great battle over racism will be fought not over access to a lunch counter, or a hotel room, or to the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, in a test tube, under a microscope, in our genome, on the battleground of our DNA. It is here where we, as a society, will rank and interpret our genetic difference."

I hope he's wrong. Time will tell.

Friendship, Family and Fantasy

Yesterday I was working on a little project while my wife watched DVD's of the first season of the ABC show, "Brothers and Sisters". I kept joking with her that the basic plot of every episode involved people yelling at each other and crying. It reminded me of something I'd wanted to blog about for awhile now which were some spiritual themes central to two recent fantasy blockbusters, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, a central theme was the importance of friendship. Massive armies clash on various battlefields, but it is ultimately steadfast friendship embodied primarily by the character of Samwise that ultimately wins the day and saves the world.

"Be ye a refuge to the fearful; bring ye rest and peace to the disturbed; make ye a provision for the destitute; be a treasury of riches for the poor; be a healing medicine for those who suffer pain; be ye doctor and nurse to the ailing; promote ye friendship, and honour, and conciliation, and devotion to God, in this world of non-existence."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 72)

Equally important is the theme of friendship across races symbolized by the bond between Legolas (an elf), Aragorn (a man) and Gimle (a dwarf) who emerge as a virtually unstoppable team, providing a glimpse of a future world of peace and unity.

"If you desire with all your heart, friendship with every race on earth, your thought, spiritual and positive, will spread; it will become the desire of others, growing stronger and stronger, until it reaches the minds of all men."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, p. 29)

If friendship is the heart of "The Lord of the Rings", family is the heart of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." The Pevensie kids from England bring their family baggage with them into the magical world of Narnia, precipitating the betrayal by one of the children of his siblings which places the fate of the whole world in jeopardy. Family unity and reconciliation (with a little help from a certain Lion) defeat the forces of evil and become a strong foundation for a promised kingdom.

"Compare the nations of the world to the members of a family. A family is a nation in miniature. Simply enlarge the circle of the household and you have the nation. Enlarge the circle of nations and you have all humanity. The conditions surrounding the family surround the nation. The happenings in the family are the happenings in the life of the nation. Would it add to the progress and advancement of a family if dissensions should arise among its members, fighting, pillaging each other, jealous and revengeful of injury, seeking selfish advantage? Nay, this would be the cause of the effacement of progress and advancement. So it is in the great family of nations, for nations are but an aggregate of families. Therefore as strife and dissension destroy a family and prevent its progress, so nations are destroyed and advancement hindered."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity, p. 100)

Did you see these films? What, if any, spiritual themes did you see in them?