Tag: prejudice

India is honest

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A friend from Australia, visiting India for the second time, remarked that compared to his own country, India is very honest—honest in the sense that when you’re here, you can have no illusions about the injustice and suffering around you. It’s right in your face: income disparity, discrimination, sexism, poverty, disease. Rich and poor meet on the street, where wealthy men in their big SUVs bully and sometimes run over the poor men on bicycles. The rich and poor interact daily in homes, where the wealthy pay a pittance to impoverished servants who cook, clean, and sometimes even raise the children of the wealthy without ever gaining their respect.  The powerful abuse the weak in every arena of life: men harass and rape women, influential families bribe the cops to get away with land grabbing, murder, and everything in between; police and lawyers alike extort poor families for money with threats of their loved ones being indefinitely imprisoned otherwise. People make no secret of their dislike for dark skin and openly discriminate in marriage, the work place, and the community based on skin color. Restaurants and factories openly use child labor to create everything from furniture to motorcycles to potato curry.All of these power dynamics, and all of the suffering that results from it, are disturbing to watch. People’s arrogance, self-importance, prejudice, and blatant disregard for other human beings is infuriatingly obvious in the most routine daily interactions of Indian life. But my Aussie friend is right that there is something refreshing about at least having it out in the open. In our home countries, the child labor that goes into our home furnishings and wardrobe is hidden away in factories on the other side of the world, far away from the air-conditioned malls and classy stores where we actually buy our stuff. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society has never been higher, but the spheres of the rich and poor are separate enough to keep them from ever interacting with each other: rich people don’t take the bus, poor people don’t go to private school, and poverty is contained in certain neighborhoods whereas wealth is contained in certain other neighborhoods—usually neighborhoods with gates or at least with a buffer zone of several miles of carefully landscaped distance between them and the nearest depressed area.

And so our prejudices remain intact, but we’re too tactful to voice them most of the time.

We hide them, even from ourselves.

Our politics are perfect, utterly correct, when it comes to language.

At least, usually this is how it is. But then a white police officer shoots a black teenager and then even if you don’t consider the event itself to be indicative of any larger problem, it’s impossible to observe the aftermath of the shooting and deny that our country has a race problem. The underlying fear and alienation that’s been there all along bubbles up to the surface: an entire [black] community rises up, refusing to consent any longer to a well-armed authority structure that has never had their interests at heart. The [white] police respond by declaring war on the community, betraying the deep-seated fear they have harbored all along of these people they consider sub-human; voicing aloud the belief that they are “f***ing animals” who have never deserved the full protection of the law anyway.

I find it ironic that so many people whose conservative leanings would generally lead them to denounce big government, expansion of government power, and any infraction of citizen’s rights have automatically sided with a police officer acting as judge, jury, and executioner of an unarmed teenager in a stunning corruption of the legal system as we know it. Furthermore, they continue to side with heavy-handed state violence against ordinary citizens exercising  their democratic right to protest.

I find it depressing that so many people whose Christianity should generally lead them to feel compassion and to side with the oppressed have instead sided with the oppressor, not only pontificating judgmentally and heartlessly about the character of the victim and how his execution was likely deserved (due to a $50 theft), but also condemning the community’s reaction to this unjust situation instead of calling out the injustice for what it is.

I think the reason for these strange reversals of loyalty in both cases is that the deepest loyalty actually lies along fault lines of race rather than religion or politics. If a white teenager had been killed, and if the protests were happening in a wealthy white suburb, then things would be different. Suspicion and judgment would fall on the murderer and not the murder victim. Sympathy would lie with the grieving family and their community rather than with the state apparatus. If the guns and the tear gas and the armored vehicles were pointed at “us” and not at “them”, then we would be quicker to recognize this as the blatant, evil, violent abuse of power that it is. The killer would be awaiting criminal trial instead of enjoying paid administrative leave from work.

When we look at how quickly this one man’s death has escalated into police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful protestors from the safety of an armored vehicle, and protestors responding with rocks and now Molotov cocktails and bullets of their own, we realize that this didn’t start with Michael Brown. It didn’t even start with Trayvon Martin, though the blatant miscarriage of justice in that case certainly reinforced the message that the system—police, courts, public opinion—will automatically operate with a racial bias towards protecting and believing whites over blacks. This is part of a legacy of fear, hatred, and separation that is as old as our country, and it is a disease that will continue to plague our society until we decide to face the beast by exploring the dark fears and prejudices in own hearts, even and especially the ones we are not fully aware of. Healing ourselves and our nation will require admitting the ignorance on which so many of our attitudes and ideas are based, because we have been so busy justifying ourselves and defending our establishment to ever truly listen to and engage with the experience of the Other. As a white woman, I don’t believe that most of us white Americans have ever truly acknowledged the race situation in our country. We are too eager to “move on” with history, to sweep the sins of the past under the rug and encourage everyone to simply pretend that there are not still festering wounds and real-life, still-unfolding consequences of everything that has gone on before.

Many people have angrily pointed out the violence of some of the protestors in Ferguson, implying that perhaps Michael Brown had it coming because he was just as violent, or that this behavior demonstrates how  inherently violent the black community is and how their complaints are therefore invalid. It’s true that if demonstrations had remained entirely peaceful, they could have been an even more powerful witness to injustice by throwing the violence of the police into the sharp relief against the defenseless and brave confrontation of unarmed protestors. I am saddened that a few community members have muddied the waters by turning to violence as their expression of grief and anger, because paradoxically it is they—the powerless ones, the ones who have been wronged—who actually hold the power to transform the situation. The right to extend forgiveness and thus break the cycle of evil is theirs and theirs alone.

But don’t think for a moment that the violent actions of a few individuals invalidate the grief and anger of this entire community against injustice. They—and we—should be furious about the slaying of an unarmed black man for no apparent reason. We should remember that it was the systematized, unchallenged violence and disdain of the mostly-white police department over several decades that provoked the current violence in Ferguson.

To quote Paulo Freire, “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, or unrecognized… It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the ‘rejects of life’… It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate men, but those who denied that humanity… For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call ‘the oppressed’…) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent’, ‘barbaric’, ‘wicked’, or ‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.” –Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 41

As a white American, I have been disturbed by the fear, suspicion, and anger that many other white people have been expressing on social media over the past several days. I am saddened by the knowledge that Michael Brown’s death, which should be a wake-up call for us to address the root issues of violence and alienation in our society, has instead become an occasion for rallying around the people who are like us. We are becoming more closed, more angry, less willing to listen, less willing to admit our own conscious and unconscious role in creating this broken, sinful, segregated society. Laws have been passed and progress has been made towards equality, but we still have a long way to go in this country if we are seeking racial reconciliation. Legal reform won’t take us the rest of the way, because the violence and separation that remains is within our own hearts and minds, and within our continuing isolation from one another. We continue in our unwillingness to suspend judgment long enough to enter into the experience and perspective of the people who aren’t like us. We’re too afraid of their anger (and perhaps too afraid of our own guilt or the awkwardness of dealing with strong, wounded emotions) to even hear them out.

I grew up in an upper-middle class white suburb, so I had very few black people in my life growing up. In college I had a few black friends and even attended a mostly black church for awhile, but with this limited experience I still cannot claim to know the first thing about what it’s like to be black in America. I have also lived for several years in cross-cultural situations in which I am the racial and cultural minority, but the color of my skin has always worked in my favor, commanding instant interest and respect. If I have ever been stereotyped, it has usually been as someone more qualified, educated, or wealthy than I actually am. I don’t know what it’s like for my skin color to work against me; to automatically trigger suspicion, fear, or disrespect.

If your background is at all similar to mine, then you share my ignorance.  It’s time for us to be honest about what we don’t know, to ask others to teach us, and to be willing to shut up and listen when they do.

As limited human beings with particular sets of experience, we all start off being ignorant of what lies beyond our own immediate field of vision. Taking on our society’s subtle assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices as children is entirely natural, unavoidable, and doesn’t make us bad people. Moral decision only comes in when we begin to realize our ignorance. Then we have a choice: either remaining as we are, covering our ears, closing our eyes, or talking over others to claim that we already know; or opening our minds and our hearts to others in the humble admission that we do not know, that there are things about which we are wrong. We have the choice to be willing to learn, and to change.

The more tightly we hold onto the belief that we can already see, the more blind we become.

We don’t trust the poor (and they don’t trust themselves): Further reflections on Freire

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I was happy to see the lively discussion in the comments section after my last blog about literacy, subversion, and Paulo Freire, but realized from several people’s responses that some of what I am trying to communicate has been misunderstood. Some people seemed to think that I am throwing out everything I have previously talked about on this blog (especially Jesus) in order to focus exclusively on education as the answer for all problems faced by humankind. I want to clarify that this is not the case.

I am not saying that learning to read is an end in itself, or the key to human liberation. What I am saying is that learning to read is a means of nurturing critical thought, which is the starting place for human liberation. Many of us in the West have had minimal, if any, contact with illiterate people. Now that I live in a community where the vast majority of people cannot read, I recognize how much I have taken for granted the basic problem-solving and critical thinking skills that my education cultivated in me. Being able to read and write was the beginning of being able to learn about my world, to encounter new ideas, and to develop my sense of self as I expressed and explored my own thoughts, experiences, and opinions. So much of my faith has been mediated to me through the written word. Nearly all of my ideas about the things in the world that I have not seen for myself—economies, food systems, histories of entire societies, foreign countries and the ways that other cultures have interacted with my own—have come from books. It was through the written word that I learned about my body, how to care for it, how to understand what was happening when I got sick or caught an infection, and how to prevent or treat those problems when they occurred. It was through the written word that I learned about nutrition, about child psychology, about democracy. It was through the written word that I became employable. It was largely through the written word that I learned about Jesus.

Now imagine for a moment that you are not able to read your own scriptures. You are not able to read a newspaper. You are not able to look up information on WebMD, or to even read the prescription that a doctor gives you. You are not able to open bank account, to enroll your child in school, or to even write down the address of a friend or an office you want to visit. You rely completely on the local mullah or the rumors going around your neighborhood or the folklore of your grandparents to mediate the world to you.

Imagine how small that world will be; how your ignorance will prevent you from encountering any new ideas, from questioning anything you are told, or from seeking to change any of the destructive or unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Without a means of acquiring any information for yourself, and without the critical thinking skills to investigate the world and to form your own opinions about it, how will you ever know that there is a different way to live than the way that you and all the people you know are living right now? How will you begin to hope for anything?

That is the narrow, constricted world of many of my neighbors. That is why I think it is important for them to learn how to read: not so that I can simply deposit my worldview into their minds like empty containers, but so that I can empower them to think for themselves and have a chance of discovering for themselves the possibility of wholeness in their lives. If they are empowered to think critically and to consider new ideas, then we can dialogue together, learn from each other, and be a community that fosters spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth. Dialogue will be something we engage in together, imagining new possibilities and shaping one another as equals.

It will take time, and I don’t know where that path of dialogue in community will lead, because I will not be the one controlling it. But I know that the path from ignorance to knowledge, from worthlessness to dignity, from blindness to sight—that path is the path to freedom. And it is only from a place of freedom that human beings are able to love. I believe God wants humans to be free agents capable of choosing love, rather than mindless followers who are motivated by ignorance or fear.

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A few nights ago we attended a meeting centered around promoting literacy in India. An expert in the field was gave a lecture about the dismal failure of the education system to teach students how to read simple sentences or to recognize numbers 10-99 after several years of schooling, and then outlined the literacy curriculum she has designed to take Hindi-speaking children and adults from illiteracy to being able to read a newspaper in the space of approximately a month (A. and I have been trialing this curriculum in our slum with encouraging results). As soon as the lecture was over, a microphone was passed around the room and one dignified personage after another began pontificating about the reasons why the poor don’t want to learn, or aren’t learning. Each person was well-dressed and most of them were addressing the group in English, a conspicuous marker of education and status. Most of them were speaking authoritatively about the poor based on limited experience interacting with the people who worked in their homes as servants. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, wood-paneled room drinking chilled water from plastic bottles. Meanwhile, back in our slum (and perhaps the slums in which their servants live) the power was out and everyone was giving up on the idea of being able to sleep in the stuffy darkness with no air movement and temperatures still hovering above 90 degrees.

As is often the case with such meetings, well-intentioned wealthy people had congregated to applaud each others commitment to social causes and to take shots in the dark about to help the poor without consulting any actual poor people at all. Here we were debating the causes of illiteracy and the way forward, but there was not a single illiterate person in our midst, much less someone who could speak from experience about how they personally had managed to become literate in spite of poverty and the barriers it created. To me, this demonstrates a lack of trust in the poor; an assumption that they would have nothing of value to contribute to our discussion.

Of course, we were at this fancy reception, too, enjoying the air-conditioning and lavish food: wealthy foreigners among the wealthy. Yes, A. and I would go home to the sweaty power outage in the slum at the end of the night, and step over the kids from downstairs who fell asleep in front of our doorway trying to take advantage of any chance breeze that might sweep across the roof. We would breathe a sigh of relief in the unscripted familiarity of “home” after so much awkward social mixing. But the point is that we were invited to this elite gathering that our neighbors would have never been included in. We still move easily between the worlds of the downtrodden and the powerful because although we may have committed ourselves to the cause of the oppressed, we are not the oppressed. And like the elite philanthropists at the literacy meeting, I also struggle with a lack of trust of the poor—even though I have committed myself to my neighbors in many other ways. It would be bad form, bad development, to voice it, but sometimes we agree with our neighbors’ assessment of themselves: “You’re right—you may not be able to do this. It would be a lot easier if I just did it for you. Listen to my advice. Adopt my opinion. Listen to my idea. Become more like me.” We talk about empowerment, but deep down we’re afraid that our neighbors are just going to screw it all up. Their thinking is so narrow, their self-esteem is so low, their dreams are so small.

The poor carry with them the “deformities” of having been oppressed. Often their bodies have not fully developed because of malnutrition. Their minds have not fully developed because in addition to lacking food they have lacked opportunities for learning as well. Their sense of self has not fully developed because they have always been told that they are small, unimportant, and incapable. “Just let us do it for you, you can’t do anything to help yourself,” so many people have communicated to them when they’ve come in to “help.” “No need to think about creative solutions, we have the answer for you, because we are the ones who know,” others have insinuated when they come in with their ready-made programs, assuming complete ignorance and passivity on the part of the poor and never stopping to ask for input or participation. Because of all these factors working against them, poor people often do lack the confidence and the skills to help themselves, and they adopt the passive, dependent role assigned to them. Others’ lack of confidence in them inspires a lack of trust in themselves. The poor have been robbed of the very tools they would need to break free of this cycle: critical thinking to re-imagine themselves and their world, and to realization that their unjust situation “is not a closed world from which there is no exit,” but rather “a limiting situation which they can transform.” This can sometimes make our interactions with poor people extremely frustrating.

We who have enjoyed life’s advantages, on the other hand, are able to problem solve and plan ahead and think critically. We’re well-spoken and capable. But we carry with us the “deformities” of our background, too. One of these is our misconception that we are the ones who know… meaning that they are the ones who don’t know; they are lesser and can’t be entrusted with such an important and difficult task as transforming their lives! We need to be disabused of the idea of our superiority and independence so that we can become more fully human ourselves, by acknowledging our interdependence with others and allowing ourselves to be humbled and changed by our fellow human beings in community. If we want to acknowledge our neighbors’ full humanity and their innate human vocation alongside us as “co-creators” in the world, then we must be willing to work patiently alongside each other.

 

Source: New feed

The wind is blowing

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The hot season has begun–which means mangos, afternoon naps, kulfi (a kind of traditional Indian ice cream), and of course, sweltering heat. But we were surprised to learn a few days ago that the hot season in this part of India also involves occasional dust storms. I was home alone when the last one began: the relief of temporary cloud cover and the welcome, unexpected, light rain quickly turned more sinister as the wind picked up speed, thrashing trees around and beginning to lift old tires and plastic tarps off of our neighbors’ roofs. I stood in our doorway and watched as the whole landscape suddenly went red, as though we were on Mars. I shut the door against the sideways stream of rain and grit, but a few minutes later the mud-spitting wind actually lifted off a piece of our roof and carried it away! As soon as I saw daylight expanding overhead, I ran downstairs to take cover in our landlord’s room, thinking that the whole roof might be peeling back. When my husband and my presence of mind returned a couple of minutes later, we went back upstairs to salvage books, guitar, and clothes from getting soaked. I was offended after the storm when we started the work of trying to clean up the mess and a neighbor who came up to survey the damage started laughing–offended, that is, until I looked next door and realized that her roof had been split open, too! Everyone just took the storm in stride, and within a few hours most people had already climbed onto the roofs of their homes and repaired the damage. A couple of the bamboo and plastic shacks in the community would have to be rebuild from the ground up, but even this seemed to be casually accepted. The missing piece of our roof, it turned out, had flown into our neighbors’ courtyard behind us and cracked one of the boards of their wooden bed, and a couple of people had been struck by falling bricks from other houses, but fortunately no one had been killed. People here have learned to live with what they can’t control; they have a no-nonsense way of recovering from almost anything and getting on with life. When the temperature began its rapid ascent, we responded first by buying a matka, a traditional clay water pot which is just porous enough to allow water to slowly leak through and evaporate, keeping the water inside cool. For the first few days, we were dipping refreshingly cold water out of the matka and joking to our neighbors that it was a like a cheap fridge that didn’t even need electricity. Then the weather got a bit hotter and the water in the matka went warm. This week, temperatures have climbed high enough that by midday, our ceiling fan is churning down hot wind from our thin roof, and even with the windows and door open, we can sit in the shade and sweat through our clothes in a matter of minutes. Since temperatures reached 107 degrees fahrenheit a few days ago, we decided to opt for a “desert cooler” and spent yesterday afternoon rearranging our room to accommodate the new appliance: a big, aluminum box with a fan inside and a water pump to wet down panels of dried grass from which water will evaporate and be sucked into the blades to pump out a stream of cool air in whichever direction the cooler is facing. A.’s self-taught electrician skills came in handy for rigging up a way to wire the cooler into our existing electrical board and run wires across the ceiling so that the stream of slightly-damp, cool air blows directly across our bed at night. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to do more over the next couple of months than just laying around in a sweaty daze.

In spite of the mounting heat, there have been a couple of exciting things going on around here lately. The first sign of hope is that our widowed neighbor, whose husband died suddenly a couple of months back, has finally found a job! We had been helping her in a lengthy job search which had been fruitless and discouraging up until now, especially since she and her three young daughters had been struggling to eat even once a day throughout those long weeks. We were encouraged to see other poor neighbors generously sharing food with them even though there was very little to go around, but we also struggled to know our own role in helping without either creating unhealthy dependence or discouraging the rest of the community from being involved. The entire process was a cruel reminder: the poverty of the poor is often what keeps them poor; cyclical, exponential disadvantages piling on top of one another. It was hard to get our neighbor a job because she looked so poor. She looked so poor because she didn’t have a job. Wealthy prospective employers would look at her and say, “She looks too weak to do the work.” But she does harder work than cleaning floors when she’s wandering around the city on foot looking for work! I wanted to say. Or they would say, “You need to dress nicely if you’re going to work here. We like cleanliness.” But the reason that even her best suit is old and has holes in it is because she has been unemployed for two months, and she was living hand-to-mouth before that!

You aren’t very employable when you’re illiterate, slightly disabled, stand less than five-feet tall, and look obviously, desperately poor. But you also aren’t going to get any less malnourished and desperate-looking until you land a job. When I would talk and pray with her about the situation, she would tell me despairingly, “If only I had a job, then I wouldn’t be distressed anymore! Everything would be fine! God could give me a job. God just isn’t listening.”

Finally, one of the myriad connections we had tried to make for her finally came through, and she is now employed at the home of a compassionate middle-class woman who lives just a short distance away from our community and who has even bought a month’s supply of food to last the family until the first pay day.

The second recent development is so new and fragile that I hesitate to even mention it yet. We’ve met a woman who began a couple of weeks ago to create an interactive, and student-led curriculum for teaching literacy to adults and children who are fluent in Hindi but who can’t read–either due to their having never been afforded the opportunity to go to school, or due to their having been subjected to the experience of spending a few years in an Indian government school where teachers were absent more often than students, or where the teachers’ presence facilitated rote memorization and useless examinations without any learning whatsoever. I don’t have time to fully explain the blatant inadequacies of the Indian education system, and the corruption that prevents so many kids from being able to access what exists on paper as their basic right. But against that backdrop, this literacy curriculum is shockingly simple: it teaches the Hindi script phonetically rather than having students begin by memorize the names of each letter of the alphabet, it relies on simple pictures to connect letters with sounds, and it helps learners to immediately begin piecing sounds into words and words into sentences, so that instant gratification gives them confidence and propels them to continue learning. It’s also student-led, which means you barely need a teacher at all. A. and I, along with a couple of other friends, are helping out with the pilot project by trying the curriculum with some of our neighbors, and it’s been exciting to see the enthusiasm of kids and adults alike as they begin timidly and then experience unexpected success in starting to achieve something that has seemed unattainable for them for so long.

The woman behind this program is passionate and ambitious about ridding India of illiteracy, and has plans of using the curriculum on a large-scale. It remains to be seen how all of this will pan out, but for now we’re excited by the possibility of sitting down with even a few individuals in our community to guide them through the process, and then give them the chance to pass on their new-found skill to their kids, friends, relatives, and neighbors in the slum.