Monthly Archives: August 2013

Can the Human Race Save Itself from Self-destruction?

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment, Social Injustice

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Earth taken by Russian weather satellitePlanet Earth – Image taken by a Russian weather satellite
Source: Live Science Online

We all belong to the human race or human species: Homo sapiens. Black, brown, white or yellow, we are bound together as one on Planet Earth. Traveling at 67,000 mph or 18.6 mps around the Sun, our Spaceship Earth is a beautiful, tiny, fragile planet with a paper-thin atmosphere. The few privileged individuals who have seen Earth from outer space share an awareness of our home planet as a living, breathing organism. (See the video, Overview).

We are all part of this organism. There is no separateness, only what we have created in our skewed conception of who we are and our place in the world. Growing inequality in the world’s richest, most powerful nation and across our planet is a signal of distress. If we want to survive, we have to start thinking and acting as one species.

Our global human population has grown beyond levels that can be supported by our planet. Natural disasters, famine, and disease have not contained this growth. According to scientists monitoring our global footprint, our demand for renewable ecological resources and the services they provide is now equivalent to that of more than 1.5 Earths. In financial terms, we are spending more than we earn. Mother Earth is under stress.

We are releasing more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere than the Earth’s forests and oceans can absorb, with devastating results for our oceans and climate. (See NASA’s key indicators of global climate change.) To make matters worse, our forests are shrinking, other vital species (like the honey bee) are dying out, and overfishing has caused the collapse of large-fish populations. These and other developments also affect our economies, our jobs, our livelihood, our neighborhoods, and our families.

On the planet we call home, everything is interconnected and interdependent. We disregard this fact at our peril.

Climatic changes are already underway and progress faster than previous projected rates. In numerous areas across our planet, grass root movements, such as 350.org, are working to bring about change. If we are to survive as a species, we all have to work together in changing the way we relate with each other and with our planet.

In Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Coelho, an internationally renowned Brazilian author, the Greek Copt says to a young man who asks what the future holds:

We were all told from childhood that what we wanted was impossible. As we accumulate years, we also accumulate the sand of prejudice, fears, and guilt.

Free yourself from that. Not tomorrow, not tonight, but now.

UPDATE 26 AUGUST 2013:

For readers interested in learning more about the forces leading us to self-destruction and the way in which racism is used to prevent dissent, I recommend that you read the article, “Crisis of Humanity: Global Capitalism Breeds 21st Century Facism” by William I. Robinson, published today in Truthout.

 

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Racial Profiling in the United States

18 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Human Behavior, Relationships, Social Injustice, United States

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Stop Racial Profiling - Demonstrators in New York City - June 2012Demonstrators in New York City – USA – June 2012
Source: news.yahoo.com

 

In 2008, for the first time in US history, an African American made it to the top post in the White House. Last year, thirty nine percent of white voters helped him to continue serving as our president for another four years. Considering the opposition he still faces in getting needed legislation passed in Congress, we need to do much more to narrow our racial divide.

Racial profiling persists in towns and cities across our nation. The stand-your-ground law – applied in some form in over thirty states, including California where I live – puts the lives of black and brown-skinned people at risk. In New York, the excessive use of the stop-and-frisk police tactic, targeting blacks and Latinos, is under attack.

I fear for my young adult sons. One of them, a service provider in home-remodeling who owns a white pickup truck with rack for his equipment, is often targeted by local police for traffic and parking violations. One night some months ago, the police stopped him in their search for a hit-and-run driver of a white SUV. While he sat subdued on the sidewalk, it took them almost an hour to learn that the vehicle they were looking for did not have a rack.

African Americans and Latinos fill our prisons. Although they made up approximately 25 percent of the US population, they represented 58 percent of all prisoners. African Americans alone accounted for 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated Americans (2008 statistics, NAACP).

Racism also exists between African Americans and Latinos. At the retail store in West Los Angeles where I worked, the divide between the majority black and Latino workers became evident during lunch breaks. Each group clustered together in separate fixed areas in the company’s lunch room. Joining the Latino team members was a challenge for me since they conversed in Spanish among themselves. At the time, the only two white team members occupied the middle table in the room. Working together as one, yet separate.

The apartment complex where I live reflects some of the racial/ethnic diversity characteristic of Los Angeles. My neighbors include African Americans, Indians, Japanese, Korean, Latinos, and Whites. Their children play together. My sons and I have never experienced any form of racism.

Racial profiling continues to plague us. I am not without guilt. Growing up in Guyana, I learned to fear black men in hoodies, like the one used by Trayvon Martin, and big built, tattooed white men who rode large motorcycles. Although these racial stereotypes were not common in my world, they were frequently portrayed in British and American movies featured in our cinemas.

Our culture is filled with racial/ethnic stereotyping. I suppose it serves a purpose in helping us to cope with our cultural diversity. Subliminal racial/ethnic messages, whether intentional or not, bombard us daily through innumerable forms of media.

I am guilty of racial profiling. I need to change.

 

The Myth of Brazil’s Racial Democracy

11 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Brazil, Human Behavior, Social Injustice

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Brazilian WomenSource: American Renaissance (www.amren.com)

In Ceará, Northeast Brazil, I blended in among the brown-skinned mestiços on the streets and buses. People of mixed ethnicity – African, European, and indigenous Amerindian – made up 61.9 percent of the population (ipece.ce.gov.br). Yet the faces smiling at me from billboards around the capital were mostly white. Accounting for 32 percent of the population, whites occupied top posts in the government, commercial banks, businesses, and professional services.

According to Brazil’s Census 2010, whites accounted for 47.5 percent of the total population. Blacks and mestiços make up 50.9 percent. Whites dominated Brazil national TV. In the 1990s when my sons were kids, Xou da Xuxa: Rainha das Baixinhas (Queen of the Little Ones) was the most popular children’s program. The hosts of popular TV night shows were also white. Whites played the major roles in the much-watched Brazilian telenovelas. Blacks and mestiços portrayed the villains, the underdogs, the domestic servants, the seductresses, and prostitutes.

Top Moda also favored whites, as is still evident in Brazil’s world-renowned Fashion Rio.

Whenever I raised the issue of racism in Brazil with friends and work colleagues, I always received the same response: “We don’t have racism in Brazil.”

Was I wrong? Why then were blacks and mestiços the overwhelming majority of people using public transport?

Brazil Census 2010 by color/race, education, and employment reveal that whites held 73.3 percent of college degrees compared to 20.8 percent of mixed ethnicity, and 3.8 percent blacks. The number of self-employed professionals also showed great disparity: 52.5 percent whites to 38.9 percent of mixed ethnicity, and 6.9 percent blacks. The divide was even greater when you consider the number of employers or business owners: 75.9 percent whites to 19.2 percent of mixed ethnicity, and 2.5 percent blacks.

With the enactment of the Affirmative Action Law for Universities in 2012, the Brazilian government is working to reduce this racial social disparity. Leaders of the African community favor this move, but several prominent Brazilians believe that this will lead to racism. (See links to videos and other articles on the Guyanese Online Blog.)

While I worked for white Brazilian business owners who welcomed me and my sons into their homes, and who helped me to grow as an international trade professional, I also faced what I considered racial discrimination. A white boss once put me in my place when I asked for a raise, based on increased job responsibilities.

“You people are never satisfied. You always want more,” he told me.

He could only be referring to the color of my skin. Or was it my lower social status?

Like all upscale apartment buildings in Fortaleza, the ten-story building where my sons and I lived had two elevators: one for residents, the other for domestic servants and external service providers. My income-level had earned us a place among Brazil’s white and growing brown-skinned middle class, granting us the privilege to share the elevator provided for residents, of a white majority.

We became part of the myth of Brazil’s racial democracy.

While the Sun is Trapped ~ Poem by Mahadai Das

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Oklahoma-Tornado-May-20-2013The Oklahoma Tornado – United States – May 2013
Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Every month, on the Poetry Corner of my writer’s website, I feature a poem by an American, Brazilian or Guyanese poet. In August 2013, I feature the poem “While the Sun is Trapped” by Guyana-born poet, Mahadai Das (1954-2003).

My Haiku poem “Vengeance of Heaven,” about the consequences of our dependency on fossil fuels, was inspired by the following lines in Mahadai’s poem:

The vengeance of heaven waits armed
in the shadows.

I fell in love with Mahadai’s poetry on reading her collection A Leaf in His Ear, published by Peepal Tree Press in 2010. Following independence, we shared the same hopes and dreams for our native land, Guyana. In “Looking over the Broad Breast of the Land I Saw a Dream,” she wrote:

And I saw the harvest beckoning the reapers,
Children laughing in the sun,
Girls strewing their dreams with flowers;

“On Events that Occurred at Kimbia,” she expressed her deception of working and living among individuals still shackled to false beliefs:

What if people, with their hands stuck from their ears
And tongues laughing outside their mouths,
Would jeer away the threat of superstitious domination?

Her poem “Chile is Who Yuh Fooling,” written in Guyanese Creole, is reminiscent of our fragile existence in difficult economic times, when we bravely attempt to fool others that all is well in our lives:

But, chile, if yuh see yuh family nex Christmas
Yuk lucky, yuh know.
Nex year yuh go start mine chicken yuhself
Dem dam chicken getting too dear
An none a yuh pickney na eat yet.
Wah yuh go do if yuh husband na get wuk nex week
An de fowl-lady come fuh she money?

In “Silent My Heart,” I share her pain at the loss of the man she loved:

Hush, my heart.
You knew him when he walked
against the cold wind, coatless,
lost, like a small-town boy with
faraway eyes in a big impersonal city.

She will care for him.

For Guyana still torn apart by racial/ethnic politics, her poem “While the Sun is Trapped” gives us hope that the injustices we face at the hands of tyrants and greedy men will be avenged when…

The sun comes up in a coup
for the golden day.

See more poems in her collection, A Leaf in His Ears.

Mahadai Das, poetess of our people, you left us too soon.

Divide & Rule: Racism in Guyana

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Guyana, Human Behavior, Social Injustice

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High Court with Statue of Queen Victoria - Georgetown - GuyanaThe High Court with Statue of Queen Victoria – Georgetown – Guyana

Rude citizen! think you I do not know
that love is stammered, hate is shouted out
in every human city in this world?
Men murder men, as men must murder men,
to build their shining governments of the damned.
From the poem “After One Year” by Martin Carter (1927-1997)

 

I entered this world during a period of upheaval: the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the United States as a world power. As the British and American governments jostled to protect their interests, they fractured my small world. The British sought to secure their economic gains. The Americans feared having another communist nation in their backyard.

The British exploited the weakness within our first political party that had united the two major ethnic groups, totaling 81.6 percent of the population: East Indians (50.8 percent) and blacks (30.8 percent), based on 1966 estimates. After eleven-plus years of racial violence, the British granted Guyana its independence on May 26, 1966.

When the black socialist government came to power, our nation was racially divided at its core. Well practiced in the art of divide and rule, the British had won the battle for the soul of our nation. After forty-seven years of our triumphal rise to self-rule, we remain a fractured nation. Our ethnocentric politics mimic the British strategy of divide and rule. We replaced the white ruling class with a black ruling class (1966-1992), and later with an East Indian ruling class (1992 to present).

Being a person of mixed ethnicity came with its own drawbacks. Apart from my father’s three brothers, I knew only one uncle from the Chinese side of my father’s relatives. For reasons unknown to me, our Chinese relatives had ostracized my paternal grandmother and her four sons. Was it a question of racial differences, social standing or some other cause? I don’t know.

The Portuguese side of my mother’s family was no different. Her parents had immigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, leaving her and two younger sisters with an aunt and her husband. Her aunt, whom we regarded as our grandmother, died when I was three. Except for two male cousins, we never met any of my mother’s other Portuguese relatives. I grew up with the belief that they had shunned my maternal black Barbadian grandfather on racial grounds. Was I misguided?

Under British rule, our race/ethnicity had not only defined who we were as individuals, but also our place in society. Below the ruling white class, the minority population of Portuguese and Chinese occupied the top rungs of the social ladder. Our independence toppled the status quo.

These are different times. Over the period 1966 to 2002, the percent of the population of mixed ethnicity grew from an estimated 12 percent to 16.7 percent. The indigenous Amerindian population doubled to 9.2 percent. The combined population of white, Portuguese, and Chinese dwindled from 1.7 percent to 0.5 percent. While the percentage of blacks showed little decline with 30.2 percent, the East Indian population shrunk to 43.5 percent. Change is inevitable.

Meanwhile, the capital reflects our national moral decay. The former Garden City of the Caribbean and its environs stink from the corroding sewerage system and accumulation of waste in its streets, alleyways and canals.