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Why do I as a black American continue to love and defend a country that treats me like an unwanted child? |
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by Kamal Boullata | 0 votes | 
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Kigge Hvid: Hi Jason, 27. I don’t know. Actually I don’t know. This is a very, very probably -- this is a very personal question, I think. It’s also an overall question, of course, but also a personal. I am not a black American. I don’t know how and why you stay on loving and defending your country if it treats you really unjust. I think basically it must be about finding out how to level. Does your country give you so much good that even though you are on some levels treated badly that you still get something from your society that you need? Actually living in New York in these days, my advice to you would be that if you really, really feel that you’re not welcome in the States, move because you live in a part of the world where you are actually free to go where you want. So do that. It’s not my – I know, of course, about the racial problems in the States and all over the world. I also know about your history of racial issues. But actually, I think you should not accept it; and if you can’t live with it, move. Go somewhere else. Find someone else to play with. Do that. Do not accept it. If you are pressed, don’t accept it because you are able to not doing that because you live somewhere where you can move. by Kigge Hvid |
Kurt Weidemann: The fact that today people can easier and more often get to know other people, other continents, other languages, other ways of life will help us to be more tolerant in regard of others. The fact that the black Americans came to the US as slaves makes it certainly more difficult for them to know how to treat others. Indians used to live there and they have been killed and the whites do not have any right to consider these people as less important or not equal to them. Their attitude towards ethics, believe, moral is often stronger then with white people. |
Lesego Rampolokeng: I don’t know why you continue to defend that country as a black person. I just think that unfortunate concept such as patriotism and such like "ha ha ha" lead people to defend the indefensible. Slaves defend their masters in very perverted human relations. Certain people celebrate their whole humiliation. Some people love the fact that pain gets visited upon them daily, and there is no telling what sickness that resides in the mind will push the human being to do. I just believe that first of all issues such as race came to the fore when there was a need for an excuse to visit the exploitation and oppression of one sect of humanity by another, economic, social and otherwise that then it became "essential" because race is so easily "identifiable". Race is this construct that forever remains. It’s there. Caste is not the first thing anybody sees when they see me. It’s the fact that I have got such a lot of melanin in me, and so they can then oppress me and humiliate me to the extent of the melanin I carry within my system. So, why people would continue to celebrate and defend systems that have been set in place on their own blood at the expense of their own lives is beyond me to say. I just think that what needs to be done is the wiping away of pretense, the wiping away of the falsity that is that race does not matter. Race was made to matter because it saved [pebbles] that set up slaves against… |
Leung Ping-Kwan: I would like to rephrase the question to like, “When would it be necessary for us to reconsider whether the law is justifiable? Whether it's in good practice and so on... There may be times when we have doubts about a certain regulation about certain laws in practice but is it in line with the actual need of the people, and whether they are needs to reexamine the law. But I think as Bob Dylan says that if you want to live outside the law, you have to be honest. That is one saying, so it doesn’t mean that you justify yourself for breaking the law and take [inaudible] as being revolutionary or revolting to the regime, but rather how to considered the law, how to take about law when it has become, when has it become too rigid or restrictive to the real needs of the people, like laws or regulations on the [inaudible] of offense or on the individual human right and so on. Then when we get time, we need to reexamine the law and to see whether it is still feasible for this law to be in practice. And how to rate the doubts on the question, how to discuss it open forums, how to make a lot of people aware of that, that would give time to make it possible for people to reconsider and accepting the law. |
Lijun Fang: I'm borned in China mainland in 1963. I'm 43 now. According to my own experience, if you asked the same question in certain place in the world, you might have been beheaded. In that case, you wouldn't have such a question any more. by Lijun Fang |
Lillian Holt: Well this is the paradox of existence in some ways for me as an indigent Australian, as an average Australian, because I both love and defend my country. I love my country physically, mentally and spiritually. I belong there. My ancestors lived there for thousands and thousands of years, and yet --and I love it and I can defend it, but also I can be severely critical of it from time to time, because it is a rich and abundant nation but it's also a racist or racialized country in many ways. There's a [gang] of the soul called racism – the [gang] of the soul. We continue to be critical of it because that is about disconnectedness and it's about diminishment, because what diminishes me is that [inaudible] Australia also diminishes white people, but they actually don't understand the connectedness of it [audio glitch] and connect to the soul. As I said I will continue to be critical of my own country while loving it, loving it deeply because it's like family. I belong in Australia. But I will love and defend it and also be critical of it, just as I would my own family and community. by Lillian Holt |
Livingstone Maluleke: Why a person in America being black and they continue to love and defend a country that treats him or her like and unwanted child. All this thing is all about color which is not very important, because in my understanding a country in which one is born is one’s original place and he belongs there irrespective of the negative treatment that may come from any other person. So, it is all about how one feels about the originality where he or she finds himself, and therefore one is a patriot to one’s country, I belong to where I come from. So, all this thing is all about where do I come from that made us the issue of color whether black or white or yellow is not an issue. Here it’s all about where do I come from? Where are my roots? If am an African, then it means I come from Africa. If I come from Asia, then I am an Asiatic and I have to be respected from my being an Asiatic. That’s all about it. |
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by Mae-Wan Ho | 0 votes |
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by Mae-Wan Ho |
Mahsa Shekarloo: Well, first of all, as a black American, you're not loving and defending a country. You're loving and defending an empire. And you may want to ask yourself if you want to continue to love and defend an empire. -- And when you continue to love and defend that empire, whose interests are you defending? Is it yours? Is it the ruling structure? Is it the government? Those in power? Those who have one foot in the government and one foot in private corporations? What are you defending? Are you defending America's so-called dominance, precedence? Maybe instead of loving and defending a country, you should love and defend certain values, certain principles. Maybe you should find allies and likeminded peoples within the U.S., outside the U.S., other oppressed peoples. Because ruling structures, ruling governments, ruling corporations, they protect each other. They defend each other transnationally. And I think perhaps people should consider forming transnational movements so that their interests, financial, economic, political, cultural, social, so their interests can be met. |
Mark Benecke: Why do people from oppressed groups, if oppression is the right word, why do they still defend their social group? Well, because they are part of that group. I mean, you can only be oppressed in a group if you accept that group as the people who can oppress you. So if you don't walk away, like in the United States, the person who is asking the question is from the United States, and feels unwanted, if that person doesn't walk away, it kind of accepts that this is the group of people in which he decides to live, in the end. Because you can walk away, out of the United States. You cannot walk away from some other countries, but from the United States, you can walk away. Now if you accept this group as your social group in which you live, then of course, you are going to defend it. Maybe on a lower level, with less energy than somebody who feels closer to the core of that society, but you will still do it. Because if your group biologically provides you with basic goods, especially let's say food, and you feel that this group is the group to provide you with that, then you are going to stick to the group and also defend the group a little bit. It's a biologic principle. If the suffering would be too big, you would walk away, but you don't. So why don't you? Maybe you don't feel that unwanted. by Mark Benecke |
Martin Almada: The hurricane Catrina made obvious, that the social and racial discrimination is wide-spread in the United States. The hurricane devastated a poor and abandoned city of this great country, namely New Oerleans, the cradle of jazz, situated in the south of the United States. And instead of investing money to avoid climate catastrophes, the government invested it in arms to kill Iraqi and Afghan people. The majority of the affected by the hurricane Catrina were black people, so it is no wonder to me, that Afroamericans are treated like an unwanted child. In order to answer this question accurately, it is necessary to study the historical process of the United States of America critically. By doing so one will find many answers and will be able to judge their feelings and agressions and to understand how the education system of this country contributes to increase patriotism for a motherland that exploits its own citizens and sends them to die in a war. In my country Paraguay, the natives are unwanted children, too, due to this class-conscious society. The situation in other Latin American countries is similar. |
Masami Saionji: This is a problem of our own mind. Therefore, whatever the USA thinks about us, if we have our confidence for our life and for our existence, it doesn't become such a situation like this. We should recognize this situation or surrounding as one of our living process. That is, we can think owe to such a situation, why we exist, what our life is, how important we are, and how we live. Additionally, we should change slowly our negative idea that we are not important. Instead of that, we should think that we are necessity. We must also think what we can do to be needed, and how to express ourselves. When we can find the way of life which is loved, adored or respected by everyone, we can live peacefully without discrimination or conflict. It is not important whether who is white or black. There are black people who are happy and live on their own. On the other hand, many white people who are persecuted worse than the black people, and think that they aren't loved by their country. At the end, this is a matter of each one's consciousness. |
Masuma Bibi Russel: Well, Jason, I have to ask you, why you are living in a country where they treat you unwanted child? Why? Because you could go back. There are places in the world. It’s very important that wherever you are, which part of the world, you should be a part of, you know, you should be wanted, not unwanted. Why? As a human being, if you love this country, if you are born in the America, you have every right to be feel wanted. If you don’t feel, can you imagine that if you feel unwanted of a place where you are living, but you love this place, what you will be? I mean you will have some problems. I think that’s so important you should go, you should find a place where you will be more unwanted -- more wanted. I think it’s very, very, very important. I mean, it’s very important. I mean, why? I mean, look at it America is developed country. Why should you feel unwanted? You should try and take this in your -- out of your head or you should try and go to a country where you feel wanted. It’s very, very, very important for your development, for you as a human being. |
Mayank Mehta: I’m not sure I can answer the question. I think people do what [ideal] things in the world. Countries are already amorphous and poorly defined things. It’s very easy to give very brief answer to say, we do this things because we are taught to, because somebody has told us to, but at the end, we need to go beyond these things. And my guess, I guess it’s a hard question and my guess is, the answer to that lies in understanding, what does it mean to defend a country? Is the best way to defend a country by picking up a gun? The second question is what is a country? By definition, yes, it is a certain geo-political entity, but is that necessarily the kind of definition do you want to follow? Or should we take a much more liberal and perhaps more accurate feel to [hold] that a certain geo-political boundary, perhaps, drawn arbitrarily, especially -- definitely to the political boundary that has been drawn arbitrary, is not necessarily the best way to think of the well being of the people who inhabit them. So, my guess will be that it begins by thinking about the questions one at a time rather than thinking about an abstraction called defense, as defended by guns. And the country is defined by some politicians or history, and only rarely by geography. If you think of these things in these terms, the question becomes a little easier and harder too at the same time. We’ll have then to really start thinking about what is the best way to defend something? We really have to start thinking about, what is that boundary? What are they citizens of, citizens of one country? Or as it happens in Europe, a European union of states, or of humanity of this planet? And I think that once we start thinking in those terms and if we can really [audio ends] by Mayank Mehta |
Michael E. Tigar: Oh my goodness, Mr. Robinson. You know, I think that about 30% of the people at this table are going to tell you about Socrates dialogue “The Crito”, in which Socrates ready to take the hemlock that he's been sentenced to drink and therefore to give his life is asked why he doesn't run away, why he remains a loyal Athenian even as the Athenians are seeking his death? And then some other people are going to mention Roland Barthes's wonderful essay about the picture in Paris Match. Well, I am not an African American, but I tell you I have represented people who have been oppressed in my own country and I have represented people who have been oppressed in other countries. I represented the family of Orlando Letelier killed, blown up in the streets of Washington by the Chilean junta, and yet Orlando to the end of his life and despite his exile and the so called stripping of his citizenship by Pinochet who claimed, I am a Chilean. Well, I am an American. I am an American because in my own country I know best how to struggle for social change. Were I to pick up and move someplace else, I might for time be more comfortable, but I would be disempowered from participating in the process by which you and I standing together have got to change the world. And therefore, for no other reason, we ought to remain even if we don't recognize as I do, having been the son of a working class person who managed to get an education in this society of ours, that it is a society that has given many people, including me, I don't know about you, enormous opportunities and it's precisely because I'd like to see those opportunities spread around and shared, that also I think it's important to stay and fight. So, I’ll see you in the struggle. |
Michael Laitman: I think that today's problem of black America lies in that they do not want to prove to the world and to everyone their ability to be effective and good elements of society. Just the opposite, they find themselves in conditions of a very strange expression of their part of society. They are not trying to reach the top of society, even though they have all of the conditions for this. According to IQ and the special qualities inherent to a black person, he has no less opportunities, chances and natural premises than a white person. But here a general culture of its kind or a certain general spirit is becoming manifested, which throws them in the precisely opposite direction, in the search for something easier, more vivid and extravagant. This is why I think that the problem of the young black generation of America becomes manifested in this. They must try to bring themselves to the fact that society will correct its conception of them as a problematic part of society, to bring themselves to such a state where society will be proud of them. This depends only on the value they attribute to society, on the contribution they will add to society. Everything is in their hands. |
Michael P. Totten: Well, that’s an excellent question. There are many times. I mean, how can we not look at our own, in America, the challenge of laws over and over again, with the challenge to slavery in the 1800s, and the civil rights suffragettes getting the right for women to vote and to get laws changed for children labor being changed with Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King leading civil disobedience, or in India with Gandhi showing that civil disobedience is an absolute imperative. Today, in the United States, with the Bush administration leading what, many clearly argue and I have to agree, imperialistic, fascistic set of policies that definitely need to be challenged in a way that they have created such ill-will in this world, at a time when we really need to build bridges and seek to overcome differences and find ways of tolerance. So, there needs to be far more civil disobedience, and challenging the laws, and breaking the laws. Even in dictatorships, you know, the efforts to assassinate Hitler during World War Two was I think -- it took moral courage, and that’s the case with, I feel, many of the dictators today which sadly this country and other countries back, because of -- in the United States for oil or for timber or other resources, is a step back, and we provide military cover for dictators at a time when we should be really thinking about removing those dictators. |
Mohammed Arkoun: Yes. The African-American like the oppressed man in general, the man who lives in a humiliated minority, a marginalized minority generally knows the suffering of this marginalization. The suffering of this dismissal. And, that suffering becomes for the one who carries it a springboard to pass the suffering and to open eyes on what is positive in the majority denying him, in the state that despises him and don't grant him rights, in the people and the nation or in the culture, the culture itself that systematizes the dismissal and find legitimacies to this dismissal. It is therefore a deep tension that is a test of what we earlier called the man's dignity. The man develops his dignity, the man gets bigger and I think here about the experience of Nelson Mandela, I think about the experience of Gandhi, I think about the experience of all those who took the vow of poverty precisely to share the poverty of the other and the humiliation of the other. That is why the African-American likes and defends the country where he lives and that in addition treats him as inferior, treats him the way foreign black or white slaves were treated. There are also fundamental weaknesses of what we call our modern mind because the modern mind made us drift far from these extremely old problems and by rejecting values that are said to be archaic... |
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