Sunny Clifford: Tou know you come from a nation of oppression when a month has to be dedicated to your heritage.
The False Lure of Third Parties
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Tom Hall: Third parties offer, once every four years, the pretense that their presidential candidates, with no supporting body of local, state or Congressional allies, will make major changes in “the system”. This is balderdash.
The Ghost Dance
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It was said that if the dance was done with extreme precision and adherence to ritual, the oppression would stop. Wild game would return, and a new age would ensue. Sometimes a swirling trance was conjured, but this only increased the oppression.
In a Season of Change: Revolution or Evolution?
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Johnny Sundstrom: Over time, we need a clear and adaptive strategy of Evolution: fundamental, incremental, and long-term change always targeting results and not bogging down in wasteful debates over process.
Microaggressions and Stereotype Threat
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Jessie Daniels: Our prevailing mythology of meritocracy in the U.S. tells us that education is a path to achievement. To do provide that, we expect schools to be free from racism and provide an equal education to all.
U.S. Native Prisoners of War
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Jessie Daniels: My father identified as Native American. In his view, Native Americans had it “much worse” than black Americans and still do. I argue that rather than trying to rank order oppression and which group “had it worse,” it’s important that we see these as connected.
Symbol Madness
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Charles D. Hayes: If any individual or group is going to burn a book, or a flag, or build a structure on their own property that reminds you of something you would rather not think about, the problem does not exist in the desecration or the construction of these items. The problem, plain and simple, is in your own head.
Voices From Haiti: “God, We Have Not Heard You for a Long Time”
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Georgianne Nienaber: Religious fundamentalists have long attempted to make sense of human suffering by twisting the existential argument and blaming suffering upon the victim. How Haitians have managed to avoid incorporation of shame into their collective psyche is truly a wonder.
Replacing International Oppression with International Aid
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Lawrence Wittner: So why should humanitarian aid be extraordinary? Why not make it routine? Long before the earthquake, Haitians were the poorest people in the hemisphere, suffering from widespread hunger, disease, and illiteracy. Could not the United States — the richest nation in the world with a public whose major anxieties (to judge from the vast attention given to weight loss) seem to result from over-eating — manage to share a bit of its affluence by regularly providing food aid to starving Haitians?
Friday Feedback: Martin Luther King Stood Up for What Is Right
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I don’t care if you believe that whites are better than blacks, or if your religion teaches that the Bible says gays are immoral, you don’t have the right to oppress other citizens. You don’t have the right to deny the benefits of civil marriage to the children of gay citizens. Not in this country. That’s what makes Martin Luther King’s work so powerful – he stood up for what was ethically right, and his demands were in alignment with the Constitution of our great nation: Equal rights for all!
Reflections on Racism
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Barack Obama feels able to counsel others – most recently Armenians and Turks – to work through their pasts “in a way that is honest, open and constructive.” Otherwise, he cautions, unresolved history “can be a heavy weight.” And yet Obama decided to leave his own country’s past unresolved by boycotting this week’s international conference [...]
The World Needs Dr. King Now More Than Ever
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On this 80th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I look at the state of human rights in the world I ask myself, “What would Dr. King do?” Look at the situation in the Mideast, particularly the current bloodshed in Gaza. These attacks, a violation of international humanitarian law, can [...]
Deluding Himself at Home and Abroad
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by Charley James – To prove to himself once and for all that everything is going swell in Iraq, George Bush spent one of his last weekends in office sneaking into Baghdad to say, “So long, suckers! Glad we destroyed you!” in front of what he assumed would be a friendly, naïve audience of Iraqi [...]
Essential Questions from Ft. Benning and from Putumayo
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Now that President-elect Obama has pledged to shut down the detention camp at Guantanamo, will the infamous School of the Americas be next? And what about Plan Colombia–that other blot on US honor in the Western Hemisphere? This weekend, November 21-23, thousands of activists gather at the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia, as they do [...]
Racism, Sexism and the Deceptive Social Science of the Far Right
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hroughout the course of the Democratic presidential primaries, many have asked which is the bigger societal problem in the United States: racism or sexism? Although the question itself is absurd–the two are often interrelated, after all, and comparing systems of oppression is typically neither intellectually nor ethically very productive–there is little question that both remain [...]
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