Deride Actions, Not the Group

Originally published in The Centre Daily Times, Sept 30, 2010

My family and I recently spent a difficult summer in India, dealing with the unexpected passing away of my father. Relatives, friends and strangers offered us incredible support during this long stay.
A few of them were curious about Americans, who they “knew” from Hollywood movies, TV shows and news media. They asked us about the “lack of family values” and “materialistic attitudes” among Americans.
We offered them counterexamples of Americans invested in families, of the sandwich generation creatively caring for children and parents and of those volunteering locally and globally.
Our anecdotes were received appreciatively with comments such as, “There is good and bad in all cultures, isn’t there?”
On coming back here, I found stereotypes thriving amid a turbulent global landscape dotted with fault lines at the intersections of different groups and sensitivities. The ground zero mosque controversy provided a fertile ground for creating anti-Muslim and anti-American sentiments.
I believe varied role models could provide anecdotal antidotes to negative perceptions and rebuild our post Sept. 11, 2001, empathy.
To those who want to destructively target Americans, I offer the counterexample of Greg Mortenson, of “Three Cups of Tea” fame. Mortenson, a U.S. veteran, discovered the lack of schools in remote areas of Pakistan after a 1993 climbing expedition to K2, the world’s second highest mountain peak.
He has since built 131 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Bill Clinton said Mortenson “is effective in an area where Americans are not popular, because he relates to people as human beings.”
Mortenson’s work may persuade others to treat Americans as individual human beings too.
To those who hate either Americans or Muslims, I suggest the work of Muslim American Fazlur Rahman Khan, considered the “father of the modern skyscraper.”
Khan was born in British India and educated in India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He immigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and earned a doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He was the structural engineer who built the John Hancock Tower and the Sears Tower by innovatively conceiving of the skyscraper as a hollow three-dimensional tube. He made the outer wall of this tube with closely spaced interconnected columns to provide support for the whole structure.
This concept, first executed in 1964, used less material and cost substantially less. It was used in all modern skyscrapers, including the World Trade Center and the tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Consider these realities.
A Muslim American’s idea was used to build the World Trade Center, which later was destroyed by Muslim terrorists.
An American builds schools in Islamic countries, while some Americans attack U.S. mosques.
Obviously, there are Muslims and Americans who are creative, hard working and compassionate, just as there are some who commit acts of violence or intolerance.
Acknowledging diverse role models in peaceful times can prevent blind hatred during a crisis and allow us to reach solutions through dialogue.
We Americans, with our incredible diversity, can take the lead in acknowledging that stereotyping is a losing proposition. We can stand against specific actions without hating a whole group.
Fazlur Khan versus the Sept. 11 terrorists is a great way to counter the negative stereotyping of Muslims. And with Khan and Mortenson as examples, the world may stop stereotyping Americans, too.


Read more: http://www.centredaily.com/2010/09/30/2241359/deride-actions-not-the-group.html#ixzz11UjIDRr2

On the road to becoming simply Americans

Originally published on January 31, 2010, in Centre Daily Times.

“I forgot Obama was black tonight for an hour,” commented MSNBC’s Chris Matthews last week after the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama.
Apparently for Matthews, this was an indication of how far the country had traveled on race and how post-racial we have become. And he gave credit to Obama’s election and leadership for making him forget such a monumental thing as the president’s race for an hour.
This statement had me contemplating how much further we have to go on race, and how we unnecessarily distort our impressions of people with meaningless adjectives.
Matthews’ statement reflects the newness and uniqueness of having a “biracial” president, and the common practice of tagging adjectives onto others, when they are not the “norm,” such as a “black” senator, a “Hispanic” judge, a “female” CEO, an “American Indian” congressman, and so on.
But we do not use adjectives for the “norm,” which in the U.S. public arena is the white male.
And this “norm” is assumed to have leadership qualities. But if someone from a group other than the norm appears on the public arena, their otherness stands out as a qualifying adjective.
We might describe that someone as a “female astronaut,” “African American doctor,” or “Indian senator,” instead of simply using astronaut, doctor or senator.
Of course, descriptors of otherness are used globally. The labels could vary from words like “foreign” to religious ones like “Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew” to ethnic-, tribal-, language-and politics-based ones.
Labeling others is a common human activity, but we can control what we do after we label someone.
And my fellow Americans and I, with origins from all around the world, have a unique opportunity to engage in an exercise of remembering and forgetting such things, not just for an hour, but forever.
We need to acknowledge the accomplishments of those from “minority” groups, by remembering, registering and then forgetting.
When we remember and register, we expand our idea of the possibilities for different groups of people. But then we need to forget, and forget not momentarily, but forever.
When someone enters a room, I wish we could both remember and forget their ethnic origins.
When we meet someone, I wish we could both remember and forget our religions.
When we succeed or fail, I wish we could both remember and forget our gender.
And so on, till we register just the unique individual before us.
I wish we would acknowledge that our physical realities and backgrounds may or may not have any bearing on our thoughts, acts and performance, depending on the context.
In such a world, where we both remember and forget, we would view Obama’s successes and failures as simply the journey of an American politician, who happens to be biracial, and has strengths and failings like the rest of us.
In such a world, Matthews would have remembered and then forgotten Obama’s biracial heritage forever, not just for an hour, and restricted himself to comments on the quality of the president’s State of the Union address.
Just like we remember and forget Matthews’ race.

Building a community by seeing "the other"

Originally Posted on the Common Threads blog
Centre Daily Times, May 31, 2007

Since I wrote my last blog on “mixing-it-up” and embracing more diverse people in our lives, I have been receiving feedback on how most of us do very little of it in our lives.

As I was thinking of practical ways of “mixing-it-up,” an article in Monday’s CDT, with the title, “Bill Clinton: Focus on similarities,” caught my attention. Since this is the theme of my column, Common Threads, and the focus of all my writing efforts – I was of course interested. I went to Middlebury College’s website, where a video of the speech is posted, and an article gives more details - the full version is worth accessing.

Former President Clinton asked the graduates to remember the importance of community - a best community being one that provides a broadly shared chance to participate, a sense of responsibility and a sense of belonging.

His speech had some other messages -
“Build community by focusing on the similarities among humans rather than differences.”

“The bigotry you have to work hard to avoid is not seeing everyone else.”

“While our differences may make life more interesting, our common humanity matters more. So much of the world’s difficulties today are rooted in the rejection of that simple premise.”

And in today’s CDT, I see that a local task force on civility may be formed to figure out how we can get along better with each other and behave courteously to one another. I suggest that it would help if we see and acknowledge our common humanity first, and also the existence of other points of view.

Each of us can take little steps. Say hello to a new person, learn another’s name, get to know a neighbor, try a new experience with people who are different than you in some way, pick up a new book, try a new food, arrange a playdate for your child with someone who is different… the ideas are endless. With each experience, we will see our commonality, and that our strengths and weaknesses are universal.

Another step we can take is to share our “mix-it-up” ideas with each other. So please send in your comments and experiences, and also your ideas on what we can do, to create a true, caring community – where we build on our common humanity. Perhaps this blog and your responses could be the catalyst, to speed up the process in Centre County.