Orpheus wrote:Personally, my problem with the majority of Spenno's posts (and by extension, the actions of white moderates in many places) is that 1) they seem to suggest that Trump is always acting in good faith, and the people opposing him are acting in bad faith and 2) many of the ideas in them are antithetical to not only my work as an educator, but to a democratic society as a whole. When I see someone espousing the ideas that:
--protest is unproductive and almost purely the product of hysteria
--young children shouldn't be aware of their political reality or engage in protest
--language doesn't matter and is superfluous to the creation and execution of laws
--elected leaders shouldn't be poised, or controlled, or professional
--it's acceptable to give one religion preferential treatment in matters of immigration
--Steve Bannon's idea of a "Judeo-Christian Economy" is acceptable
...when I see those types of things being encouraged, I have to be concerned about them. It is fine to have opposing viewpoints, but other people get to criticize them as well. For example, I'm a little curious why the actions of protesters represent hysteria and Trump/Bannon's viewpoint that America is some sort of rusted out post-capitalist hellhole does not. Their rhetoric before and after the election repeatedly presented America as a country on the brink of disaster. How is that not hysteria? Why is the benefit of the doubt being given to the Breitbart news guy in all matters and never to average, normal Americans? It just doesn't sit well with me.
Orpheus, while I respect your position here I think you might be confusing several aspects of the debate. And it's not just you or other posters here, it's rampant in media as well. Mainly, the idea that seeking to objectively and dispassionately understand the real world impacts of Trump's EOs is somehow an endorsement of them or the alleged motives behind them. But secondly that the moral motives that frame your world view, those things you value as sacred, are what is best for the country or are even shared by a majority of people within it.
I'll pick on this one, since it's not too hard to construct scenarios that might make you rethink it:
--it's acceptable to give one religion preferential treatment in matters of immigration
First, look at the regional context here. The EO explicitly favors persecuted minority religious groups in the seven countries effected, not in broader 'matters of immigration'. And in this is not solely a matter of immigration, but of nation security as well. As you said, language is important, but we can put aside the national security element for a moment. It is a fact that hundreds of thousands have been killed in areas controlled by Islamic Fundamentalists are these are amoungst the most conflict rife areas on the planet. It is a fact that minorities are at greater risk in ISIL and other Islamic Fundamentalist controlled areas than other Muslims are, much like the Jews were to the socialists in Europe in the early-to-mid 20th century (bit of a strawman, but you get the idea). Now, have we as a society have determined that we have an obligation to help refugees affected by these terror groups? I would say Yes. We have admitted tens of thousands of refugees from all over the world. When helping, do we prioritize more ‘at risk’ minorities or not?
To help answer that, let’s take a simple example of how we work with minority groups inside the US but subbing in refugee numbers from Syria. Imagine a state where the student population was 90% white and 10% black. Now let’s say there was a university there that admitted only students from that state. Assuming no malice by the school, if the enrolling class was 99.7% white, it is my belief that most Americans would say that would be a clear sign of a situation that should be addressed to increase minority opportunity, hence the reason most universities have ‘holistic’ admission processes. In this case, we give minorities preferential treatment. There are plenty of other examples of affirmative action at play that can demonstrate this.
So we believe we should help refugees effected by Islamic Fundamentalism and we believe we as a society should prioritize more vulnerable, minority populations in many matters. What is wrong with mixing the two? I would say nothing. And I would go so far as to suggest the reason that many people are generally upset is not at all because minority groups are being given preferential treatment, but because the minority group being mentioned most often is
Christians, which happen to be the majority group here right now. We cannot accept the idea that Christians in other parts of the world are not our obnoxious upper-middle class WASPy neighbors because of the history of Christians in our country.
Natasha Moore from Cambridge pointed this type of thing out rather well:
It also doesn't help that our society is undergoing a rather uneven and confusing transition from a Christian to a "post-Christian" identity. In Australia, this means we live with a welter of contradictions - many of us may think and speak of religion generally, and Christian belief in particular, as outmoded, but we continue to think of Christianity as the "majority" religion. Thus, for example, while it's (at best) politically incorrect to ridicule minority groups, Christianity remains fair game to those who resent its once held (but ever diminishing) power.
As the gap between the Christendom we still seem to think we partially inhabit and the society we actually do widens, we find ourselves with an increasing number of these blind spots. So long as we think of Christianity as essentially a Western religion, it's almost impossible for us to really register what's happening to Christians like those in northern Iraq.
The reality is that Christianity can no longer (if ever it could) be called "Western". It originated in the Middle East. Its epicentre for the next five centuries was somewhere around Syria. Up to about 1400 it was actually more dominant in Asia and Africa than in Europe; and, with the addition of Latin America, this is true once more of 21st century Christianity. More than 60% (some suggest 80%) of Christians today are not Westerners. The "global south" now sends missionaries to Europe and other former centres of Christian belief. As Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby observed recently, "The average Anglican is a sub-Saharan African woman in her 30s."
If we get this wrong, then we are left without a framework for assimilating stories that do not square with our assumptions about Christianity as a Euro-American, colonialist religion - such as those in which Christians around the world find themselves in the role of the oppressed, not the oppressor.
This is not quite the world we think we live in, the world we write and read news reports about. It's not only Christians who are today subject to horrific religious persecution - look at Rohingya Muslims in Burma, Tibetan Buddhists in China, Shiites in Saudi Arabia, just to name a few - but it's our cultural and historical baggage with Christianity that thwarts our ability to recognise and resist it.
If we fail to think clearly as a society about religious realities, it's not only our understanding of world events that is compromised - the kinds of facts we can accept, the news stories we care to hear - but our response to current, urgent injustice around the world.
"The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
