Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. Michael Eric Dyson
All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh. Whitney Otto
Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism. Heather McGhee
Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough. Danielle Evans
We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. Thurgood Marshall
Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know? Chris Rock
Later today, I will be speaking on a panel, organized by my friends at LINGAP – Canada intended to give a platform to the voices of people from diverse cultures – in Edmonton and beyond – who suffer violence, injustice and discrimination on a regular basis, much of which is directed at Asian and indigenous communities and which is only now finding a place on the mainstream radar.
I generally decline invitations like this. I have had my “say” on matters of exclusion and discrimination many times over the years and I retain platforms such as this for those of you who still honor me with your reading. But it’s not my turn now, if it ever was. From our policy centers to our urban streets and rural pathways, the line of people waiting for a few moments at the global podium now stretches to the ends of the earth. As people like me are fond of saying, the problem we face is not levels of talent, but of opportunity. It is this latter privilege we still resist sharing, resist declaring, despite what we can amply chronicle about the former.
In the twilight years of my erstwhile “career,” I want to do my full part to link talent to opportunity in all global regions, to ensure that our emerging “global commons” is more than rhetorical, is more than a branding opportunity for groups like Global Action or a business opportunity for large corporate interests. People have a right to voices that matter, voices which influence, voices with impact. They don’t need me speaking for them and they don’t need oversized influencers packaging sound bites from the policy margins to service unrelated interests.
Indeed, the more we try to engage and promote it, the clearer it becomes that the agenda of ensuring inclusiveness remains among the most challenging on our collective plate. Our news feeds are filled to the brim with images of violence against people of Asian and African descent, violence which in many instances is the jarring manifestation of many years of covert discrimination, the ways in which what for a time was left to simmer in privatized settings has been released forcefully into the public domain. We now routinely see evidence of people wearing their xenophobia like a badge of honor, a badge woven deeply into souls rather than merely being pinned to outer garments.
Our personal and cultural bubbles have lost whatever measure of clarity and transparency they once might have had, substituting instead an opaqueness that allows our grievances to multiply like in some oversized petri dish until we are ready to burst out and confront the human objects of our scorn, indeed, the humans whom we have largely objectified and now turned into threatening caricatures of themselves, caricatures about which we feel the need to actually understand little. Indeed that is part of the discriminatory deal, isn’t it, turning complex human beings and their cultures into categories worthy not of respect but of suspicion, knowing just enough about people to “know” that they are essentially unworthy of dignity or respect.
This tendency to objectify and dishonor, certainly prevalent in the US, is not confined to any one political or ideological persuasion. A series of maps published recently chronicles the degree to which people have increasingly segregated their domiciles by political affiliation, choosing to live (and isolate themselves) in areas where most folks are tolerant (if not always accepting) of their political, cultural and religious viewpoints. At one level this approach is understandable, especially for families caught in the current cultural crossfire. Clearly it is not the “job” of children of “First Nations” Asian or African descent to solve the embedded racism and xenophobia that rear their ugly heads in manifold ways and which have resisted the best efforts of some remarkable figures over time to finally end their reign of terror. Nor is it their job to “take one for the team,” to absorb the epithets and bullying, the rejections and outright violence that we adults have not done nearly enough to prevent. From the standpoint of protecting children from the worst of our collective behavior, our thickening demographic bubbles make some sense.
But of course, the bubbles themselves don’t resolve the violence and discrimination, the objectifying and the demeaning. If inclusion is to mean anything more than rhetoric, it cannot be attained if people are not also willing to leave their corners of the ring and engage with others in the center. How do we create safer spaces for people to engage, to invest more in each other, to understand more about the “other” besides the ways in which they allegedly “threaten” our own, entitled ways of being?
Part of the answer clearly embodies a policy dynamic. I was pleased this week that at the UN, alongside excellent events on preserving water resources and the impact of climate disasters on agriculture, alongside as well the gender-focused inclusivity promoted at the Commission on the Status of Women, there were several events that highlighted the growing divides of race, religion and culture that continue to impact international peace and security. During thoughtful discussions that highlighted the toxic effects of racism, xenophobia and discrimination against Jews, Muslims and persons of African and Asian descent, it is becoming more and more apparent that diplomats worldwide are worried – as well they might be – about the many ways we seem to be tearing each other apart, rupturing what remains of human unity in ways that policy can only partially heal.
Among the highlights for me of the week’s discussions were concerns expressed by New Zealand’s Ambassador and others of the extent to which COVID-19 has helped “open fractures” wider and deeper than we have seen in some time. Indonesia warned against our sometimes “empty words” with regard to justice and tolerance. Pakistan noted during the Islamophobia event the importance of rejecting “distortions of our common humanity and their selfish motives.” At that same event, UN Secretary-General Guterres warned about our spreading “epidemic of mistrust and discrimination” mirroring the admonition of Niger’s Ambassador to “build bridges not burn them.” A Rabbi at this week’s event on anti-Semitism was particularly graphic in his warning to the online audience that “those who burn books would also burn human beings.”
But perhaps the finest presentation of the week on this topic was offered by the new US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Her remarks were personal, poignant, and challenging. She described the racism she has lived through as an “ignored cancer,” encouraging those impacted by it to “stare it down,” to do everything in your power not to “internalize” its messaging. She also pointed to a role for policy in efforts to minimize such messaging, noting that “we can’t always change peoples’ hearts, but “we can change the rules.”
Indeed, we must change the rules and then insist that those rules be followed. But as this UN week made clear, as my own experience confirms, we must never abandon the task of changing hearts, the hearts of the racists and anti-Semites, the hearts of those pumping out grievance and affixing them to alleged, objectified threats, and yes, our own hearts as well. Indeed, if we want better policies, policies that incorporate diverse voices and retain the trust of global constituencies, we who have regular access to policy processes must become better people ourselves. The wider public will never fully trust our treaties and resolutions unless they can also trust those who craft them. Opening safe space for other perspectives, other views, is one sure avenue to that trust.
And there is another dimension to this, one which some in the Edmonton community I will later address have taught me well – that the path to a genuine understanding of others across divides of culture, race and faith while long, is also rich. To reach the finish line, we must be willing to get close enough to touch complexity, to replace assumptions with realities, to dwell in the nuances of other lives long enough to understand that our own personal challenges are not so different than theirs, and that we too have ideas, prejudices, assumptions and behaviors that would be better off relinquished than reinforced.
At the same time, we would do well to remember that there are things that you can never know about people unless you have spent time in their homes, to see first hand how people organize their lives and care for their families, to get a sense of their priorities and how they invest their precious hours, to better understand the multiple influences that inspire and guide what they care about more and less.
In my life, I have been multiply blessed by often-remarkable and honorable people from many global regions, people of diverse backgrounds and interests who have opened their homes to me, who have honored me with their hospitality and complexity, who have helped ensure that their joys and burdens become part of the backdrop of my own work in the world. It is a gift I can never repay; indeed it is a gift that enlarges souls, expands minds, and makes hearts beat a little differently, and can do so for many others as it has done for me. As the UN diplomats themselves have attested, we can and must change the rules. But we should also encourage others (and maybe even ourselves) to take a few more risks and engage more deeply those experiences, those stories, those voices that can inspire the changes we are obligated to make in the world and in ourselves.
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