The Pensyltucky Korean’s Korner: “Send them back to Mexico!”
There’s a quote that hangs in the lounge of our office and it reads “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better” ~Abraham Lincoln. I came across this video last night. After watching it, I wonder how can I, someone who thinks very differently and holds a different understanding of the role migrant workers play in America, try to understand this? I think about the people in my life I struggle to “like” or befriend and I shudder at the thought of offering that kind of energy to them. Yet, if my ultimate goal is to bring peace to that relationship, or peace to that part of our world, how can I not offer that energy?
What keeps me from understanding that person more?
What keeps you from understanding that person(s) more?
How could I “steer into that curve?”
How could you “steer into that curve?”
For me, what are the benefits of understanding vs. not understanding?
For you, what are the benefits of understanding vs. not understanding?
We’ve been talking in class about immigration and I was making the point the other day about how immigrants are so often viewed not simply second class people, but just as often as not fully human. I regularly read comments to articles on web sites in which people reference Mexican immigrants by using words such as “scum” and “animals.” It doesn’t take much empathy for any of us to see people who migrate as simply trying to build a better life for themselves, much like the immigrant ancestors of the people making the bigoted comments. And even if we want to “send them all back home,” why words such as “scum”? But people often follow their leaders and here is a story of one leader that doesn’t seem to be setting a very positive example for his constituents and employees. While I don’t know the entire story, and so far be it from me to weigh in on this very heavily as though I do, it does seem as though he’s not really interested in the livelihoods and well-being of the Latinos in his community.
I make a lot of navigational decisions every week about what we should do and not do as a Project. And I make a lot of the same decisions for myself. This has led me to a position where I’m both directing the Project, and I’m on the ground, doing the work of facilitating dialogues. Sometimes I wrestle with being in both positions. Sometimes I think I should just do one or the other. And other times, I think I should be willing to leave behind the work of facilitating for the work of directing. But I read a Chinese parable tonight (on a website called Fast Company–which is ironic when you read the parable) that shines a light on this dilemma: Zhuang Zi was a brilliant philosopher and strategist who lived in ancient China. His abilities were many and several rulers sought his services. One of them, King Wei, sent his courtiers out to Zhuang Zi’s pastoral home to invite him to come to Wei’s court and be the leader’s chief counselor. They found him there fishing by the river bank. Seeing his poor situation, they thought Zhuang Zi would jump at the chance for status and reward. Yet when they made their proposal to him, he said, “Once upon a time there was a sacred turtle, which was happy living his life in the mud. Yet, because he was sacred, the king’s men found him, took him to the royal palace, killed him and used his shell to foresee the future. Now tell me, would that turtle prefer to have given up his life to be honored at the palace, or would he rather be alive and enjoying himself in the mud?” The courtiers responded that, of course, the turtle would be happier in the mud. To which Zhuang Zi replied, “And so you have my answer. Go home and let me be a happy turtle here in the mud.” I guess I have to admit it: I’m happiest on the ground…in the mud.
Why am I sharing this? Because this kind of thinking is larger then me. Because I think the world tempts many of us into positions and experiences and rungs on some ladder that do little to expand us or the world we serve. Instead we mistakenly follow an implicit script about career or success or value–which often has little to do with our real mission or talents. And, of course, this makes us unhappy, ineffective and probably sick. So I’m simply making note of this process and suggesting that each of us beware of the shiny opportunity that may have a hollow center.
Do you have any idea how many times you’ve been lied to and didn’t know it? Really…think about it. How often does your silly, gullible self accept something as true because…well…because you believed the source? And how often have you passed on the lie to others? It’s painful for me to even think about it in my own case.
So I recently received an email from a friend that contained a video of a story that Fox News broadcast a while back. The tag line said that I needed to watch it to understand a terrible injustice brought about by liberals, illegal immigration, and political correctness — not necessarily in that order. It was one of those emails that I receive once or twice per week. Take a look at the video for yourself (it’s only a 36 second clip):
If your first response is to tilt your head to the side and scratch the back of your skull while having a dazed and confused look on your face, then you know exactly how it affected me. The thought that went along with said reaction, however, was “this simply sounds too crazy to be true.”
Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to conduct an investigation to see if I could get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened. I started by reading some of the comments that were being made on YouTube. They were pretty scathing: “Round ‘em up and send ‘em home,” said one patriot. Another brain surgeon in the making chimed in, “This is what happens when we elect a black man as president.” (The politically correct violation that is referenced in the video occurred a couple of years ago, by the way, long before Obama entered our national spotlight.) Clearly, these blockheads were not searching for the real story and so I would not find it there.
So I plugged some combination of words such as “Oregon Mexican firefighter fired” and quickly found what I wanted: a statement from the State of Oregon’s Department of Forestry that explained the matter in considerable detail. It took me all of about 45 seconds to read, but what it revealed was very depressing (given the number of people who watched and believed the original story). I’ll summarize it for you here:
Oregon’s Department of Forestry contracts private fire crews. (Remember conservatives, privatization = cost savings = free market capitalism.) If these companies choose to hire non-English-speaking firefighters for a crew, then they must have bilingual crew leaders because while English is the official language of firefighting in the U.S., crew leaders MUST be able to communicate with their crews for purposes of safety. If a private company hires Mexican firefighters, then English only speaking crew leaders can’t lead that team. If they hire only English-speaking firefighters, then the crew leaders need only have the ability to speak English.
It makes sense that so many people hate liberals and Mexicans and political correctness with stories like this floating around on the WWW. Who wouldn’t be clamoring for the microphone to add to the shouting chorus of red-blooded citizens who want to preserve the United States for the “real Americans” (not to be confused with Native Americans, of course).
So how many times have you been duped by such an email or a rumor? How often do you find yourself saying, “No way. This can’t possibly be true. I have to tell everyone I know so this outrage will stop.” And how often do you follow that up with, “This sounds fishy and so I’d better explore it before I pass it on down the rumor mill.”?
This stuff cuts both ways, mind you, because misinformation enters the public discourse from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. (This story originally aired on Fox News, but left-wing blogs and web sites picked it up and carried it as though it was true, by the way.) My gut inclination tells me that the right is slightly better at putting out misinformation than the left, but only because the left does it in a way that it doesn’t sound like misinformation.
An addendum: One respondent, who is a firefighter, noted the utmost importance of communication while fighting fires and pointed out that non-English speaking firefighters would be problematic on English speaking crews. I absolutely agree and would maintain that Mexicans who do not speak English should NOT be on crews with U.S. firefighters who only speak English. That’s a problem that is pretty easy to solve.
You don’t need to look much further than the recent surge in interest about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to find an example of what I’m talking about when I use the term “Fauxtivism.” As a by-product of the coordinated black out of sites such as Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit, many have taken the battle against censorship to facebook and other social media forums – changing their profile pictures to the ominous “Site Removed” (right) image or by posting/tweeting/sharing about the dangers of the bill and urging each of us to contact our representatives and take a stand for free speech.
The catch is that each of us can safely assume that most of these posts are futile; few individuals will seek to develop a sophisticated and multifaceted understanding of the issue, and even less will take the time to write or call a representative. Thus, ‘Fauxtivism’ is enabled through both ease of access and the desire to present ourselves to others the same way that we see ourselves. Some would go even further and claim that people are out-and-out fakers, and that, rather than spreading awareness, fauxtivism trivializes issues.
While these ideas are easily dismissed as cynical, it is also possible that those few individuals who are willing to take action will discover an issue BECAUSE of fauxtivism – and that, as such, the practice is not inherently futile.
In either case, the underlying premise is not a new one: how others perceive us matters, and how we want to be perceived affects our actions and decisions. We develop a façade for those situations that require it, and change it as necessary. The kicker is that in many situations, how it looks (or seems) is actually more relevant than how it is. From lip syncing under the pretense of live performance, to not actually mixing a live set as a DJ, to one of the most famous and talented musicians in the world playing for pocket change, to plastic surgery, all the way to perceptions and misunderstandings about religion; image and pretense are intensely relevant to each of our lives.
While it is easy to identify and condemn this cultural motif, understanding the importance in distinguishing between how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and what our actions objectively represent is much more difficult. Since we can safely assume that none of us will ever ‘objectively’ understand and view ourselves or our actions, this means that the entirety of our lives is played out in the realms between how we want to be seen by others, and how they see us. To complicate matters; everyone already knows this, and acts accordingly (look no further than your facebook feed).
As always – this leads to some very difficult, and interesting questions: How plausible is it to understand what our actions objectively represent? How can the difference between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us affect our actions? What makes the disconnect important? How might our perceptions of others affect how we are treated by them?
PS: If you want to take action against SOPA – both google and Wikipedia have great resources to help you do so.
I’m curious about what you think of this video and the essential idea that immigrant labor is critical for the functioning of our economic and social system. There’s a lot in this video that calls forth some sort of response.
In elementary school, I remember other kids coming up to me and making a “wahhhhhhh” sound while they imitated their favorite martial artist. In middle school, I remember being teased for my weight and being called “sumo.” On choir tour in Brazil, I remember being followed around by groups of children and adults pointing and yelling Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan! I used to get very embarrassed and angry when people would say things like this to me. To this day, I still feel some twinge in my gut when people ask me “where are you from?” followed by, “no, I mean where are you from?”
What I’ve come to realize as an “adult” is that throughout my life, I’ve been working with boxes and stereotypes. I’ve been getting upset when I feel like I’m being boxed in…when I’m told I’m “different.” Some may find it hard to believe that I would struggle with being labeled as “different.” Some may find it hard to relate to the idea of being “boxed in.” Yet, over the course of a conversation about our relationship, my girlfriend helped me to transcend some of those boxes and use them to relate to other people.
I realized that being boxed in as kung fu master or successful actor is an okay stereotype…an okay box to be placed in. It’s okay for people to think that I might be able to break their leg with my left pointer finger or that I can push them around the room like I’m the worlds strongest man. Yea, I’m okay with people thinking that. It’s through these experiences that I’ve been gifted the opportunity to empathize with others. Others who may be boxed in for similar reasons, yet whose boxes are filled with ideas like “thug, animal, murderer, illegal immigrant, or rapist.” Others, whose boxes may mean they struggle to find a job that pays a livable wage. Boxes that may discourage people from feeling like they are approachable or intelligent, or that they can become something other than people’s entertainment. Or, boxes that prevent or don’t allow for people to understand the concept of a box.
These boxes go beyond race, ethnicity, and “color.” They can also be filled with words like fag, slut, homo, dyke, bro, sorostitute and old. The question I’m left thinking with is; how can I find other ways to flip the box inside out? How can you?
I often wonder what I would look like as a different race. I was able to see that today with the HUMAN RACE MACHINE at the HUB. (The Race machine will be at the HUB all week from 10 AM-5PM, by the central staircase.)
Seeing myself as different races allowed me to feel “race-less” in a way. It was so easy for me to accept my face as Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern. Since I saw my face morphed into a different race, I have been thinking about what being a certain race actually means. The machine didn’t change me as a person, only the physical parts of me changed. The concept of race is man-made and the experiences that come with being a certain race are also very man-made.
For me, it has always been tough to “belong” to a race and a group of people. I am not Indian “enough” because of the person I am, and because of how much of the American culture I have taken in as a part of my identity. Yet, I will never be “American” enough because of the color of my skin. Racially I am Indian, yet I feel like I experience my world in a somewhat white perspective. (And how much is being American synonymous to being white? That’s a whole other topic for a whole other post.) So what does that really mean? Am I white or am I Indian? How does the color of my skin get to define my experience when it is such a small part of my genetic make-up?
As much as I don’t want to believe in the concept of race, it is still very real in the world I live in. We, as a society, are afraid of the physical differences we see in each other and have created this concept of race. We assume that because of these physical differences that define us as a certain race, we are inherently very different from each other. Being different from each other and being afraid of these differences strengthens the concept of race. Fear perpetuates the idea of race and the barriers between people. The fear of these differences keeps us from recognizing that there is no such thing as a race gene. I believe we are afraid of what we do not know and what we feel we cannot experience because we look different.
Fear is: False Evidence Appearing Real. I link that sentence to the idea of race and racial barriers because I believe that as a society, it is very easy to accept false evidence about people and believe it to be real. With race we link all these ideas, judgments, stories, perceptions, and assumptions, and allow these things to be real in our minds. We have to face what we fear and who we fear in order to start the process of wanting to understand more, rather than continuing to accept the false evidence that we have about each other. A way in which we can start to think about ourselves outside the concept of race is to see our faces as different races and allow that to be real for us.
The Race Machine can be a wonderful experience and the start of breaking down the barriers of that fear. To see my face as someone I am afraid of is an out of body experience. To see that I could easily be the person that I fear is the start of losing that fear for me. To face what I fear is the only way I can start to understand the fear and understand how silly the fear is.
Given that the wealth gap between black and white and Hispanic and white households has increased in the past decade and a half, it is no wonder that blacks and Hispanics are less likely to see “progress” in race relations, as the article below discusses. As I mentioned in class the other day, in 1995 white households had on average seven times the wealth of black and Hispanic households but by 2009 that gap had changed to 20:1 for white and black households and 18:1 for white and Hispanic households. That’s quite a significant jump. (I’m not sure what these figures are for other groups, by the way.)
So now we have to ask ourselves whether we’ve made “progress” in the world of race relations — and how we answer that question will largely depend on our vantage point. Most people have no reason to suspect a “wealth gap” and so they are naturally going to think about progress from within the context of the world around them. So check out this article on perceptions of racial inequality. It’s quite informative and should get us thinking about how perceptions of what is real and true are largely shaped by where we stand: “Whites See Racial Progress While Blacks [and Hispanics” See Inequality.”
So I’m curious about how others think about this and what it means for what we assume is happening around us. Maybe life is really much more complex than we imagine and that there are factors and forces shaping our social, economic, and cultural realities that we don’t fully understand.
As I look toward another semester of creating conversations and all of the logistical and pedagogical elements this involves, I can’t help but think about the subtle impression I sometimes encounter that the act of “having conversation” is a softball alternative to the real work of making a difference in the world. As to why I passionately disagree with this, I think David Whyte has the answer when he says, “There is no self that will survive a conversation.” He understands the catalytic nature of the place where worlds come together and collide. So, if you actually participate in a dialogue, if you actually move into the borderland between you and another person by allowing yourself to fully listen, by allowing yourself to express what is really true, then who you were at the start of that exchange may no longer be quite the same by the end. Words have the power to change us–from the inside out or from the outside in. And that is the overlooked power of dialogue. I see it every day. Of course, there are times when the process works with ease, the way water slowly smooths the surface of a rock. Other times it will be more like a hurricane irreparably altering the landscape. You never really know which one you’ll get…and that’s where the risk comes in. Will you really listen with all of yourself or will you only wade up to your ankles and go no further? Will you share your truest belief or will you sugarcoat it? And now that you know what’s at stake, what choice will you make?
