Links Of Interest: Hide Your House, Russian Mercenaries, Doctors Without Borders

Some things I've run into recently that may be of interest.  

1.  How To Hide Your House On Google (and other online) maps - street view.

"With the rise of increasingly convenient features such as street-level 360º photos available on Google Maps and other competing mapping services, there’s always a risk your personal data will be captured in a publicly available photo in a way you’d rather avoid—whether than means the outside of your house or the location where you park your car.

If you face this kind of a problem, there’s a simple solution available in many cases—you can ask the mapping service to blur or remove the picture. We’ll going to show you how to do that on the most popular mapping services."

Then it gives you step-by-step instructions.  Doesn't look hard 

2.  Another story I found fascinating - from NewslinesMag. A British reporter, a fluent Russian speaker apparently, pokes around the remains of what had been a Russian mercenary post outside of Tripoli. A story about the Wagner Group.  A couple of excerpts:

"From September 2019, photographs and reports had begun to emerge of Russian mercenaries in Tripoli. They were identified as units from the so-called Wagner Group, a secretive and highly controversial organization of mercenaries that fought first in Ukraine, then in Syria, and later in Sudan, Mozambique, the Central African Republic and Libya.

"Reportedly financed by the Russian catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been sanctioned and indicted by the United States for his election interference efforts, the Wagner Group has been accused of acting as President Vladimir Putin’s shadowy expeditionary force, even though mercenaries are technically illegal in Russia. The group has also been linked to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, from whose ranks its ostensible head, Dmitry Utkin, and other rank-and-file members hail. And yet, as has often been the case with Wagner, beyond such reports and speculation over Wagner personnel’s involvement in the fighting, little detailed evidence had emerged.

"But this spring we obtained a small white Samsung tablet with a cracked screen, protected by a battered brown leather case. GNA fighters said they had recovered it from positions held by Russian fighters in Ain Zara, the area where Haitham had fought. We put it through extensive tests to ensure it didn’t contain some kind of tracking device or malware; we examined it minutely, searching for clues to its users and making sure it was the genuine article. It was."

3.  For a different view of foreigners working in poor countries, we have the group Doctors Without Borders  (MSF French acronym) which saves lives but its local staff says it also  perpetuates colonialism and racism.  I heard this riveting radio show on Reveal the other day.  Decolonize MSF is an organization trying to change how things are done.  It's troublesome.  The organization does a lot of great work around the world, providing life saving care who otherwise might die.  Yet, this radio report is really well done.  It maps out, through interviews, what structural racism and colonialism looks like.  Do go to the website with the audio.  Below is some description from that page.

"The organization, also known by its French acronym MSF, has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries. While foreign doctors parachuting into crisis zones get most of the attention, 90% of the work is done by local health workers. 

In the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 current and former staffers wrote a letter calling out institutional racism at MSF. They say MSF operates a two-tiered system that favors  foreign doctors, or expat doctors, over local health workers. 

On the eve of MSF’s 50th anniversary, reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell talked to about 100 current and former MSF workers to investigate how deep these issues run. We meet Dr. Indira Govender, a South African doctor who in 2011 accepted what she thought was her dream job with MSF in South Africa, only to get a front-row seat to the organization’s institutional racism. Even though she’s officially the second-in-command of her project, she says it feels like a select group of European expats and White South Africans are running the show."  

We think of the doctors going from Western countries to help out in poor countries as being better than this and I'm sure many, if not most, are.  But this shows us how blatantly racist some are but also how the separate treatment of foreign doctors and native medical staff institutionalizes the separation between local staff (about 90% of the staff) from those who come to help from overseas.  

Maybe I can believe this troubling story because I've run into this sort of thing.  When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand I got pressed into helping a Thai dentist negotiate with the Israeli construction company paving the highway near the town I was teaching in.  She needed a translator and so I went along.  After it was over the Israeli negotiator offered me a job because he couldn't trust any of the Thais and was surprised that I could live alone with them.  I was shocked by his view of Thais.

And when I traveled home from Thailand I took the long route so I could visit D who was teaching in Uganda.  I'd met him while I was a student in Germany and we'd hit it off and we traveled together a bit in England where he was from.  There, he came from a modest background, didn't drive, and had dropped out of college without completing his degree to start teaching.  In Uganda he lived in this giant compound surrounded by a ten foot wall.  Inside was like a giant golf course - green grass, trees, and cute little cottages scattered all around.  D lived in one and his car sat outside it.  There was dining hall with white table cloths and napkins and there four or five course dinners served by African waiters.  D's main interactions with Africans was with his students at the elite school he taught at, maybe some African teachers (I don't remember meeting any of them), the waiters and other help in the compound where he lived.  Again I was shocked.  But as we talked it was clear that D was socialized to live separate like this.  That's how all the Brit ex-pats, or at least the ones he knew, lived.  He didn't learn any of the local languages because "everyone speaks English" in this recently independent country.  When I'd talk with Africans in the market or anywhere, they would be very reticent, and after a few minutes they'd say something like, "You aren't a resident are you?"   Coming from Thailand where we'd had to learn Thai before even getting to Thailand and living and working completely with Thais, D's situation was hard for me to believe.  This was not the kind of life he' d had back in England.  We had long talks while I was there and that continued for years via letters.  And eventually he visited Alaska and I later visited him in England.  He had some harrowing experiences there and one African he did get to meet was Idi Amin.  But that's another story - his to tell.  

But those experiences were 50 years ago!  I would have thought things had changed since then.  I'm sure they have, but not as much as one might expect.  

As someone who has contributed to Doctors Without Borders I'm forced to think about how to support the good things they do and push for change.  The program talks about a protest group within MSF - Decolonize MSF.  Maybe contributing to them would be the way to go.  

Third Party Groups Monitoring The Redistricting Process In Alaska -Maps In Today[Updated Slightly]

In addition to the two maps the Board approved last Thursday, the Board solicited maps from third parties.  In this post I thought I'd let you know which groups submitted maps and give a little background.  The benefit of third party maps is that they can show the Board, possibly, alternative ways to meet the various criteria, sometimes better than the Board's maps.  After the final maps the Board approves in November, third parties can use their maps to demonstrate in court that there are better ways to remap the districts.  Then the judges have to decide.  

Several groups have been watching the redistricting process.  I've been aware of a few of them.  The Board has agreed to share these other maps with their own proposed plan adopted Thursday, September 9, 2021.   This has been the practice in previous redistricting rounds.  I don't remember the exact language the Board used, but they have said they would share all the 'reasonable' (my word)  maps submitted.  I suspect that means that meet the various federal and state requirements.  Ultimately, they all want to be sure their interests are met in the final maps.  

Here are the organizations that have submitted maps by Wednesday's noon deadline. 

• AFFR
• Doyon/Sealaska "Coalition" [UPDATE Sept 16, 2021 11:30am:   Coalition of Doyon, Limited; Tanana Chiefs Conference; Fairbanks Native Association; Sealaska; and Ahtna]
• AFFER
• Mat-Su Borough
• Alaska Democratic Party
• Alaska Senate Minority

Alaskans For Fair Redistricting (AFFR)

From their website: 

"Alaskans For Fair Redistricting (AFFR) is a coalition of Alaska Native groups, organized labor, public interest and community organizations. AFFR was created amid the 2000 redistricting process to ensure an equitable map for the people of Alaska. AFFR’s membership includes redistricting veterans who have a clear scope of the necessary strategic process and data aggregation needed to achieve an equitable map. In addition, AFFR leadership is focused on community-driven collaboration, finding ways to make both the maps submitted as well as the coalition process reflective of and driven by Alaska’s communities who are often at most risk of disenfranchisement throughout the redistricting process--specifically, rural Alaska Native communities, and urban communities of color."

The Alaska Public Interest Research Group (AkPirg) is one of their financial supporters.   

Doyon/Sealaska Coalition [UPDATED Sept 16, 11:30am:  Coalition of Doyon, Limited; Tanana Chiefs Conference; Fairbanks Native Association; Sealaska; and Ahtna]

From Doyon Native Corporation  website page on land:

Under the provisions of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) Doyon will receive approximately 12.5 million acres across Interior Alaska. To date Doyon has received title to just over 11.5 million acres, primarily around the 34 villages within our region. 

From Seaalaska's website:

"Headquartered in Juneau, Alaska, Sealaska owns and manages 362,000 acres of land on behalf of more than 23,000 shareholders. Sealaska’s land holdings in Southeast Alaska are roughly 1.6% of the traditional homelands that the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people have inhabited for more than 10,000 years." 

 Doyon has had a group monitoring the process and working on their own maps.  They have voiced an interest in having their villages in districts that maximize their representation in Juneau.  Their President and CEO Aaron Shutt has testified before the board in Anchorage and their Senior Vice President, External Affairs Sarah Obed has testified over the phone.  

Alaskans For Fair and Equitable Redistricting (AFFER)

This group was led by Randy Ruedrich, former president of the Republican Party in the 2010 round of redistricting.  I've been told they're active again this time, but I can't find any web presence.  I did see Ruedrich at the first public meeting in Anchorage.  I was thinking that AFFER had probably helped Board Member Marcum draw her map, particularly the Anchorage districts, that the Board approved in its proposal.  Seems I'm not the only one thinking that.  Rep. Zack Fields (whose district was combined with two other Democratic reps) tweeted today: 

"Pretty straightforward: Bethany Marcum drew map V1 based on Randy's guidance, clear partisan gerrymander with singular goal of adding R seats and districting Dems together at expense of compactness, socioeconomic integration."

Mat-Su Borough

When I got this information from Peter Torkelson today, he mentioned that at the first look the Matsu map, it seemed identical to AFFER's map.  If I recall right, there were a lot of overlaps between AFFER's 2011 maps and an Anchorage map submitted by some members of the Anchorage Assembly.  

Alaska Democratic Party

While there have been Alaska Democrats at Board meetings, I don't recall them identifying themselves as representing the party when they testified.  

Alaska Senate Minority

Sen. Tom Begich (D) gave a preview of their maps at testimony last week.  Begich, like Ruedrich, were present at most of the Board meetings in 2011-2013.  

The Native American Rights Fund (NARF)

Here's there guide "Fair Redistricting in Indian Country"

Here's their online Alaska Redistricting document.

They have links to all their 990 tax reports here and a note about their funding:

"NARF receives financial support from individuals, corporations, foundations, government agencies, religious groups, and tribal organizations. NARF is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, so contributions are tax-deductible. Fee arrangements are negotiated with clients having the ability to pay."

NARF monitors the redistricting to make sure Alaska Native representation is fair.  They have not submitted a map.

 

Maybe Vietnam Is The Wrong War For Afghanistan Comparisons

 We keep hearing that Biden has ended the US's longest war.  Technically that's true, but also technically, the Korean War isn't over.  There's never been a peace treaty.  And the US has about 28,500 troops still in Korea, some 60 years after the active shooting war is over.  

There are 80,000 US troops stationed in Japan.  

And 35,000 more in Germany.

What's different about Germany, Japan, and Korea from Vietnam and Afghanistan?  First Germany and Japan.  Both were soundly defeated in WWII.  Germany was divided by the Soviet Union, the US, France, and England.  The Soviet Union, which controlled East Germany, was seen as the biggest threat to West Germany.  

Japan was also soundly defeated and ruled by the Allied forces, though effectively headed by General Douglas MacArthur.  A democratic Constitution for Japan was created under MacArthur's leadership.  Japan's two greatest adversaries were neighboring China and the Soviet Union.  Again, the US presence served as protection for the severely battered post-WWII Japan.  

South Korea was threatened by North Korea supported by the Chinese.  The US helped keep the North Koreans and their Chinese allies from taking over South Korea.  

In all three cases, the US was seen as a military protection from outside invasion - China in Korea's case, the Soviet Union and China in Japan's case, and the Soviet Union in West Germany's case.  

In contrast, both in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US was supporting a government that was more aligned with foreign powers.  Vietnam had recently gotten rid of the French colonial rulers.  The US came in backing the Catholic French colonial Vietnamese against the indigenous Buddhist Vietnamese.  

In Afghanistan, again, the Kabul government was aligned with the US against Afghan groups - Taliban and local tribal leaders.  It's more complicated than that, of course, but basically the Muslim nation was fighting a basically Christian outside force.  

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, there was outside support for the North Vietnamese and the Taliban, but it was to oust was was seen as an occupying force from the West.  

So in the cases of Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US military was fighting a war, far away from home, in a country they knew little or nothing about.  They didn't speak the language and needed interpreters or locals who spoke English to communicate.  They couldn't tell their friends from their enemies.  Their opponents were fighting for their homeland and to expel the invaders.  

Perhaps this is one of the key lessons we should have learned.  We can support countries that see us as allies against their fight against a feared enemy.  We oughtn't, otherwise, be outsiders picking a side in a civil war, especially in countries we (the average US citizen and the soldiers) know little or nothing about.  

And, of course, we should not assume that what happens us in the future will be exact matches to what happened in the past.  We must be careful to choose our models carefully and to weigh various factors.  

And the world has to figure out how to protect humans from their own ruthless rulers.  It's all very thorny and no one emerges unscathed.  

Afghanistan Takes Over NPR's Morning Edition, With Brief Nod To Haiti Earthquake

Afghanistan has been a disaster waiting to happen for the last 19 years or so.  The English has to give up and leave Afghanistan and then later, so did the Russians.  

The US didn't learn from these examples, or from Vietnam.  We think of ourselves as exceptional and above history.  

Now NPR is struggling to figure out what is happening today. The line up of stories today was pretty much all Afghanistan, plus two segments on the Haitian earthquake.  It's what you'd expect of coverage in the middle of a crisis - lots of random comments, some blame game activity, and lots of opinion, most of it focused, without context, on right now..  The basic impression is disaster, failure, catastrophe.  

Of the NPR segments I heard two people who seemed, at least in part, clear headed:

• Former U.S. Ambassador To Afghanistan Comments On Developing Situation In The Country Ronald Neumann served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007   He said, in various ways, "I really don't know enough to say."  That's probably what many others should have said more.  He also said that Biden's decision to pull out was a correct decision, but the execution of that decision has been absolutely disastrous.  I think that's probably the clearest and most accurate assessment I heard.  

KEITH: The Biden administration has essentially indicated they don't see this as all their fault. You know, this was two decades in the making. The Afghan military was trained by the U.S. and equipped. And in a way, it's like President Biden does not want to own this. Do you think that that is possible?

NEUMANN: Short answer is no. The long answer is you need to distinguish between the decision to withdraw, which I didn't like but is arguably correct, and the manner of implementation, of execution of that decision, which has been an absolute disaster from beginning to end. They could have taken more time. They had no plan how to support the Afghan military that they were leaving. We built an air force that depended on contractors for maintenance and pulled the contractors. Supply system - ditto. And we profoundly shocked the Afghan army and morale by pulling out and pulling our air cover when we trained them.

[I'd note that Neumann served as the Ambassador to Afghanistan under Bush/Cheney.] 

But the US has been training the Afghan army for 20 years.  How we're getting out is, the problem, but is there a different exit available.  Neumann complains that we pulled out the contractors who maintained the equipment.  Should we have left them in there?  Many of them were highly skilled whites from around the world.  Others were low skilled laborers hired on the cheap from poor countries.  Why hadn't we trained Afghans for those positions?  Surely in 20 years we could have.  There are many highly educated Afghans.  They aren't incapable of learning those skills.  

The specific disaster he and others are speaking of is the failure to get out all the interpreters and others who helped the US.  And all the women who are in jeopardy of a Taliban patriarchal dictatorship.  But the Trump State Department and Homeland Security had been holding up those visas for years.   Biden announced, in the end of June, that he was relocating tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country.  But bureaucratic obstacles have held many of these up.  

But realistically, how many Afghan women would the US take and how long would that take?  My sense is that this was a disaster that was going to happen eventually and up to now, no president was willing to let it happen on their watch.  

If, indeed, the women of Afghanistan have the most to lose from the Taliban, maybe the US should have trained an all women Afghan army that would have fought as hard as the Taliban.  

But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough.  

The other interview that I thought made the most sense was an Army vet. Mike Jason.

• A Vet Formerly Deployed In Afghanistan Shares His Perspective On The Chaos In The Country   -  "JASON: We're all trying to process that, right? Like, 20 years - $89 billion, 300,000-some odd Afghan security forces. How is it collapsing as we watch? And so all I can write is my own little corner of the global war on terror. You know, Afghanistan - righteous anger and indignation over the 9/11 attack. And we went in with a light footprint and took the country over, like, lightning quick. And then what? What was the next step? And all of a sudden, we turn around, and two years later, we're in Iraq, and resources start flowing over there.                    And the question is, what was the strategy and policy for what the military should be doing with regard to security forces in both theaters? We didn't fight a 20-year war. We fought 20 individual wars incoherently, kind of without a policy strategic direction. So at the same time, the Afghans who are the recipients of this training, advice and equipment also know the clock is ticking and making their own calculus for their own safety and the safety of their families, while never really tackling, you know - all this cash is flowing in, the corruption, the drugs, the morale, the logistics. Why weren't we able to ever address these really problematic institutional issues?                  We voted - we, the American people - we voted for four sequential administrations that campaigned on getting out of this operation. The intent was clear. But I look back on the presidential debates over the last several elections. I mean, Afghanistan may have gotten seconds or minutes of debate. It was always in the background. But why didn't we debate it more? Why didn't we discuss it more forcefully? Why didn't somebody make the case to the American people clearly and forcefully why we should stay or go and why the sacrifice is or is not worth it?"

His take makes a lot of sense to me, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, who knows how much being able to speak to the people in their own language matters. It means you don't have to depend on interpreters, and it means you have a much better understanding of the culture and the differences between yours and theirs.  Your struggle with their language means you understand your own ignorance and appreciate when they speak your language much better than you speak theirs.

I also did research in China, using my own Hong Kong students to help me out with interpretation.  They would tell me when the official translation was not what the Chinese speaker had actually said.  They told me about unspoken cues such as when the Chinese speaker's response was a non-sequitur:   it meant, "Drop this line of questioning because I don't want to answer these questions."  My students even took advantage of my foreignness and apologized for my ignorance and sometimes were able to get answers they themselves, because of culture, would never had asked.  In other situations I had just one Hong Kong student acting as my interpreter and I could negotiate with him to ask the question a different way that sometimes gave us break throughs.  I learned a lot about the politics of translations. Interpreters are human beings with egos.  My students had to be sure they were respectful to the official interpreters and avoid making him look bad.  And my Peace Corps experiences in Thailand helped me understand that I knew nothing and which made it easier to be humble and respectful. 

I'm sure, from the fervor some US vets are showing in their efforts to get their Afghan interpreters out of the country, that many of them, if not most, had very close bonds with the interpreters.  But I also suspect there were interpreters whose motivation for being their friend was a visa to the US, while others were passing on information to the Taliban.  We all want to be liked and even knowing the culture and language, we get taken in by people who see us as a ticket to their freedom - whether that be financial, political, or professional.  

We Didn't Learn From Vietnam

The basic justification for getting into Vietnam was the Domino Theory, based on how the Soviet Union took over the countries of Eastern Europe after World War II.  The politicians and the military leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had been part of WWII and didn't want to repeat the mistake of trusting the Soviet Union.  Thus we had to hold Vietnam lest China and the Soviet Union use Vietnam as the stepping stone to take over the rest of Southeast Asia.  One domino falling after the other.  

It was the wrong model.  In Vietnam we were fighting a battle of independence from colonial masters.  The French threw in the towel, but the US stepped in to take France's place.  The US backed the Catholic (learned from their colonial conqueror) faction in the South and spent years trying to train the ARVN- the South Vietnamese army - so it could defeat the North.  In that war, we had a conventional military mentality fighting against an army that used guerrilla tactics.  The US troops never really knew who was one of our Vietnamese and who was one of theirs.  We were fighting on Vietnamese land against an enemy that wanted to rule its own country.  We were supporting the remnants of the colonial rulers.  And we had the same problems with corruption because of the massive amounts of supplies and money coming into the country.  

You'd think that the military and political leaders - again, many of whom had fought in Vietnam - would have learned from that war.  But again, we went into a country that had thrown out two world powers - first the British and then the Soviet Union.  Again, most of our soldiers knew nothing about Afghan culture or language.  Again, there was an assumption that "the greatest country in the world" knew better.  There was an assumption that modern weapons would defeat a guerrilla army.  

A couple aspects of Afghanistan today are quite different from Vietnam in 1975.

• Afghanistan has been fought with an all volunteer army and extensive use of contracted labor.  Since only those who wanted to serve (or saw the military as a way to get a job and education), the rest of the country could ignore the war.  With all 18 year old men eligible to be drafted, the anti-war movement had a much more vocal and aware support to end the war.
• In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had more control over what battle field footage the US public saw in the evening news.  Embedding journalists with units had much different results than the way journalists and photographers were assigned in Vietnam.  (See Embedded Journalism and the Forward of The Military and the Media 1962 - 1968)
• As Kabul falls, modern technology - phone cameras and social media - mean that we're seeing civilian created content and people are talking by phone live today and putting video on social media.  For Vietnam we only saw or heard what the news media offered us.  

Finally, Jason mentioned $89 billion.  There's another way to look at this war. 

💯As @attackerman has written, the GWOT was a historic transfer of public wealth to private hands. https://t.co/YqgFW2PF1K

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) August 14, 2021

Little UN at Muldoon Farmers' Market In Anchorage

 Finally made it to the Muldoon Farmers' Market Saturday.  It's a little smaller and has fewer venders than when I was here last in 2019.  Maybe there will be more venders as the summer crops ripen.  

Still, I got to buy veggies from Cherry, who's from Myanmar.  

She spent something like ten or twelve years in refugee camps - first and longest, in Thailand.  And then in Malaysia.  She was in the refugee camp near Maesot, Thailand which I passed on the way to and from Umphang where one of my former students is the headmaster of the local school.  He tried to take us into that huge camp, which sprawls across a mountainside, but the officials he knew there were away that day.  Here's a picture I took from a post back in 2007.  They said 25,000 refugees from Myanmar were kept there.

This booth was set up by Vonnie whose company is Arts by Vonnie.  She has her own unique Alaska cards that she designs.  Vonnie's got cards with a number of different styles as well as stand alone prints.  The website reveals a lot of interesting pieces and also a woman who's involved in important social issues, like projects at Hiland Correctional Center and the Let Us Dream project - for which she did clever portraits of the various participants.  I recognized EJR David as soon as I opened that page.  

The vendor at this booth sold us some great kale and some baked goods.  She's from Somalia and ok'd a photo of the table, but not of herself.  

Another vendor was from Bhutan and I got a jar of rhubarb-raspberry jelly from an Alaska Native woman.  

Here are some  posts from 2018 and2019 that feature the market.  And yes, by September there are a lot more fresh vegetables for sale.  

There's also a great playground here for the kids.  

Enjoy A Little Thai Humor

Creativity and humor are evenly distributed around the world.  The west has no monopoly.  

This may take several views to catch it all.  

พุง is pronounced phung and means belly

ปาก is pronounced baak and means mouth

ดนฃา  is pronounced tonkaa and means thigh

มัน  is pronounced man (rhymes with fun) and means fat (like chicken fat)

น้ำมัน is pronounced num mun and means oil.  

The Thai words and their English transliteration in red are on the road signs, but the subtitles translate to the English words so if you don't know the Thai you might not catch it as they say it. 

It does all make sense - where they are coming from and going to.

Living Through A Pandemic Is A Little Like Living Abroad For A Year

Back in June there were various news stories about how high school students felt that they were being robbed, by the pandemic, of sacred high school experiences, like prom and graduation.  My reaction was that in ten years, their pandemic year stories will be much more meaningful than most people's graduation stories.  

As I thought about it more, it seemed that the pandemic has been, in many (not all) ways - a lot like living living abroad for a year.  

Of course, there are lots of ways to live abroad - with work, in the military,  a school year overseas, traveling from country to country, etc.  The impact of the year (or more) abroad ranges widely, depending on whether you live in an ex-pat bubble or you're the only foreigner in your community. Most people's experiences are somewhere in between those two extremes.  

Some key factors that affect the experience include:

• whether you have to learn and to speak the other language(s)
• how many others from your culture are there with you
• whether you work with locals or not

But regardless, there are certain things that happen to many people living in another culture.

• your new culture makes you think about your home country differently
• you think about things you miss, but also learn that the new culture has alternatives, some of which are better 
• you start comparing the two cultures, which is the first step to realizing that the way you've always lived isn't the only way to live, or even the best
• things you thought were necessary turn out not to be
• you see that your new culture interprets news about your culture differently - whether it's in the newspapers or comments from your new friends and colleagues
• you start thinking about what the new culture does better than your old culture and vice versa
• if you learn to speak the language well enough to negotiate life in it
• you find out that your native language is just one of many, many ways to communicate
• that translation is not simply substituting the foreign words for your native words 
• you learn that there are words in the new language that don't exist in your own, that give you different ways of thinking about the world, 
• as you master the grammar, what first seemed awkward or just plain weird, now becomes an alternative to what you once thought was the only way words could be arranged together
• there's a certain freedom to navigating without ever using your native language, a liberation from the biases and limits every language imposes on its native speakers
• If the new language has a different alphabet or characters instead of letters, you have to rearrange brain cells to adapt even more

• when you return you are not the same person who left - your mind and expectations have been expanded
• there's the pleasure of old food favorites and seeing friends and family
• but you start missing food specialties from the new culture 
• and your old friends haven't gone through what you've gone through and they don't realize you see things differently, and while they like the exotic pictures, they don't understand the less visible aspects of the other culture and how that's changed you

The list can go on and on.  But overall being in another country forces you to see your own country differently and also to see yourself differently.  You see that there are other possibilities than the life you used to live.  This is true if you went to the other country voluntarily or not (say, if your parents took you.)

I think the same will prove true for all of us who have lived through the pandemic.  

• It interrupted our routines and forced us to find other ways to do things.  
• We learned to order delivery or use curbside pick up for groceries and other items.  
• We learned to wear masks and gloves.  
• We learned to use zoom and streamed a lot more videos.  
• There were many things we didn't understand - particularly about the virus and how to respond to it - and it took time to figure out what worked and what didn't.  
• Some people resisted changing their routines. 
• They refused to believe that the virus was real.   This happens, say, to US citizens overseas who insist on only eating US food and will only speak English and think they are not subject to the new country's laws and customs
• We've had more time home alone or with our families.  Time to think.
• We've learned new vocabulary, from COVID to community spread and Zoom

Changes are already being reported.  I'm hearing news of people who want to keep working from home post pandemic.  Or even rethinking whether they want to stay in the same job or profession.  

Some people get back from an overseas stay with new insights, but gradually fall back into their old routines.

Other people's lives are profoundly different when they get back.  They gravitate to new friends who have overseas experiences too and can understand their new perspectives.  They cook their favorite foods from overseas and try to find ways to keep up their language skills.  They see bias in the media covering their new country.

Nobody chose to spend these past two years in a pandemic, but some people took advantage of the changes while others endured it kicking and screaming.  But even they will have learned from this experience.  I think of my son who did not want to spend a year in Hong Kong and didn't particularly enjoy all the changes in his life.  He was 15 at the time.  But he used his overseas experiences in his college essays when he got back.  Later he took Chinese in a community college so he could speak to work colleagues using their own language.  He taught English in China for a year, worked a year in Europe, and got a masters degree in SE Asia.  I don't think those things would have happened without the year in Hong Kong.  

One obvious difference between the pandemic and a year abroad is that the whole world participated in the pandemic at the same time.  And the pandemic exposed inequities between nations and within nations.  

For all of us, 2020 and 2021 will be landmark years in our personal lives and in the history of the world.  If we're lucky we will have learned a lot.  We'll be better prepared for a future pandemic.  We'll take climate change more seriously. We'll realize that changes to our routines to combat climate change may be initially challenging, but they will also offer opportunities we didn't expect.  

The Eight Pillars Of Caste And The Fight To Hide Truth

  The critics of "Critical Race Theory" are out in full force.  Today (I started this Friday) I heard Ted Cruz attacked CRT with lots of venom and no facts.  I read a piece by gay conservative Andrew Sullivan give a more nuanced description of 'liberal' defenses of CRT.  And I read about how the Southern Baptist Convention, while managing to elect a new president who promises a thorough investigation of sexual abuse complaints among Southern Baptists, also 

"approved a consensus measure regarding critical race theory that did not mention it by name but rejected any view that sees racism as rooted in 'anything other than sin.'"

[I read the AP article in the Anchorage Daily News, but getting a link now directly from AP, I see the handling of CRT by the Baptists was more complex than just this quote suggests.] 

I wrote a letter to the editor almost two weeks ago, because I think it's important for people to understand that this is a cynical ploy by conservatives to do two things:

• make people associate any talk of race with anti-white, anti-American, anti-capitalism
• supercharge an issue to rile up whites to vote in 2022 

In any case I've been wanting to add more information from a book that documents systemic racism and thus would be caught up in the very big net being cast by the anti-CRT campaign) to show how much this CRT and discussions of race are NOT what the conservatives claim.  CRT is based on well researched, factual evidence that the attacks make no effort to disprove.  Rather they have created a bogey man they call CRT without actually defining what it is.  They just list their supposed  dangers.   

I'm almost finished with  Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, she argues in this book that caste is a bigger factor than race in the subjugation of Blacks in the United States.  Though, of course, skin color is the critical marker of caste.  

She compares the caste system of India - the most clearly articulated caste system - to the systems in the United States and Nazi Germany.  In the US she says the two castes are White and Black with a gray zone in between.  In Nazi Germany she looks at how Jews were systematically dehumanized and treated as a subordinate caste to Aryans.  She compares the lowest class,  Untouchable class - the Dalits - to African-Americans.  

To make the comparison she identifies The eight pillars of Caste.  I'll describe the a little further here (Wilkerson takes 60 pages so my quick summary will be just that, a quick summary.  But first I'll just offer the list and let you speculate what each might entail.

• Pillar Number One:  Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
• Pillar Number Two:  Heritability
• Pillar Number Three:  Endogeny and the Control of Marriage and Mating
• Pillar Number Four:  Purity vs. Pollution
• Pillar Number Five:  Occupational Hierarchy
• Pillar Number Six:  Dehumanization and Stigma
• Pillar Number Seven:  Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control
• Pillar Number Eight:  Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

That all makes sense, right?  I'm assuming mostly US readers here, though folks from India drop by as well regularly.  This list probably is easier for the lowest classes - Dalits and Blacks - to relate to than members of other castes, particularly the highest classes.  

1.  Divine Will and the Laws of Nature - The key point here, if I understood this right, is that opposing the caste system is to oppose the will of God, to attack the laws of Nature, because, according to caste upholders,  Caste system are not created by humans, but by God(s) or nature.  

She tells us about Manu, "the all-knowing" explaining the origins of the world 

"and then, to fill the land, he created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishya from his thighs, and from his feet, the Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas...

"Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even the feet of the Shudra.  They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.  Their very shadow was a pollutant.  They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes.  [How many of you had ever considered 'outcastes' so literally before?]  These were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate caste of India."

Christians, Wilkerson tells us, also justified their treatment of Blacks with their holy book.  Going to the story of Noah.  Noah got drunk of the wine from his vineyard.

"The wine overtook him, and he lay uncovered inside his tent.  Ham, who would become the father of a son Canaan, happened into the tent and saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside."

Shem and Japheth went into the tent backwards and covered Noah without seeing his nakedness.

"When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham's son, Canaan, and the generations to follow, saying, "Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers."

"As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.  From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah's curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God's emissary, Noah himself." 

How does she know this?  She's quoting Thomas R.R. Cobb who wrote a history of slavery in the mid-1800s.  In the endnote she writes:

"This interpretation of Genesis was debated, oddly enough by some who were even more hateful of blacks than most enslavers.  They argued that this interpretation could not be true, because Africans were not human, they were beasts and therefore could not have descended from a son of Noah, cursed or not"

Okay.  Clearly I can't go into so much detail for each of the eight pillars.  But knowing about the Indian caste origins is probably not something most US readers know.  I also wanted here, at least, to show that these points are documented.  The other seven pillars are treated the same way.

I'd note that I haven't heard any CRT critics dispute facts like these.  They merely dismiss CRT as un-American and as attacks on whites, while I see it as offering us a factual counter-narrative to the history written by the victors - the people who enslaved Blacks and forcibly removed the Indigenous people from their land.  

Each of the pillars has the same kind of examples and documentation.  I won't go into as much detail because I think they're relatively easy for people to understand.  And those who can't, can borrow a copy of the book from the library or even buy one.  

2.  Heretibility-

"You were born o a certain caste and remained in that caste, subject the high status or low stigma it conferred, for the rest of your days and into the lives of your descendants."

Which requires the next pillar.

3.  Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating - Engodogamy is the restricting of marriage to people within the same caste.  Wilkerson documents the many laws in many states that prohibited marriage between Blacks and whites.  

Which is also required because of the next pillar.

4.  Purity versus Pollution - This one is particularly obnoxious.  She talks about the extremes required to keep Dalits from (in some cases, even being seen by) the higher castes.  

"A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to 'drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints' and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his 'foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin.'"

The notion here is that the lowest castes can pollute the higher ones by their mere presence.  And if the Hindu example above seems extreme, Wilkerson talks about the sanctity of water and the near universality of US Blacks not being allowed to pollute the water that whites drink or swim in.  Separate drinking fountains and bathrooms in the South.  But bans of Blacks using white swimming pools and even beaches throughout the US. 

"In the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out.  In the 1960s, a black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and the emerging to towel off.  'The response was to drain the pool entirely,' wrote the legal historian Mark S. Weiner, 'and refill it with fresh water.'"

Then she talks about blood quantum. 

"Arkansas first defined Negro as 'one in whom there is a visible and distinct admixture of African blood.'  Then in 1911, the state changed it to anyone 'who has. . .any negro blood whatever,' as it made interracial sex a felony.  The state of Alabama defined a black person as anyone with 'a drop of negro blood,' in its intermarriage ban. Oregon defined as nonwhite any person with 'with 1/4 Negro, Chinese or any person having 1/4 Negro, Chinese or Kanaka blood or more than 1/2 Indian blood.'"

5.  Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and Mudsill - Wilkerson explains 

"When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam hammered into place to anchor the foundation.  That piece is called the mudsill. . . In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon."

That explanation is needed by most of us today to understand the point of this US Senate speech from 1858: 

"'In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,' Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina told his fellow senators.  'That is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.  Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity.  Such a class you must have. . .  It constitutes the very mud-sill of society."

In India the castes themselves define the kinds of work caste members are allowed to do, but in the US it's less explicit.  Nevertheless,

"In 1890, '85 percent of black men and 96 percent of black women were employed in just two occupational categories,' wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, 'agricultural and domestic or personal service.'  Forty years later as the Deression set in and as African-Americans moved to northern cities, the percentages of black people at the bottom of the labor hierarchy remained the same, though, by then, nearly half of black men were doing manual labor that called merely for a strong back." 

I hope you are getting the idea.  She's offering us the characteristics of caste and then example after example of how each characteristic plays out.  It's not some fictional narrative as critics of CRT argue.  It's not a screed against white people.  It's simply a factual recitation of the many ways that our law, regulations, and customs separated (and in many cases still do) whites from blacks.  

I haven't seen critics of CRT dispute facts like these.  Rather they make broad accusations of CRT being an anti-white attack on US democracy.   

Michael Harriot, mocking the claims of CRT detractors, started a Twitter trend today posting:

"CRT took my guns away and gave them to the transgenders.  How did CRT ruin your life?"

We only have three more pillars of caste.

6.  Dehumanization and Stigma - I think this is obvious enough.  Wilkerson gives examples of how the Nazis treated Jews as they arrived at concentration camps and the conditions they were forced to live in.  She writes about African slaves in the US South.  After a list of dehumanizing actions, she writes:

"Beyond all of this, the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target's own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting.  Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste.  During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live. . . Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant cast rep telling itself.  They were punished for being the humans that the could not help but be."

You might pause and say, well this is interpretation, not facts.  Yes, in this case I left out the facts - you can find a copy of the book and read them yourself.  This is, indeed, interpretation of the intent of those facts.  One can dispute the interpretation, though I find the context and the facts make this interpretation seem quite reasonable.  Especially given the many similar interpretations by contemporaneous observers.  What are some other interpretations?

I think about meeting a nicely dressed, very gracious, middle aged white man in Vicksburg, Mississippi who told me that they hadn't needed the  'Northern, communist, hippy agitators' who came to Mississippi in the 1960s to march for civil rights.  "Our Negroes were happy with how things were down here." That was in the year 2000.  

7.   Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control - 

"The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society.  They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment.  But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body.  This twelve generations of African-Americans faced the ever-present danger of assault and battery or worse, every day of their lives during the quarter millennium of enslavement."

The book gets much more graphic. 

8.   Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority - Wilkerson writes about Hollywood's portrayal of whites in superior positions and Blacks as servants (not simply in portrayals of the South), and then about how rigidly that was actually enforced in the South.

"Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americanswere still being brutalized for the least appearance of stepping out of their place. Planters routinely whipped their sharecroppers for 'trivial offenses,' wrote Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in 1941.  A planter in Mississippi said that, if his tenant 'didn't stop acting so big, the next time it would be the bullet or a rope.  That is the way to manage them when they get too big.'  In 1948, a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi was severely beaten by two whites, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, 'because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.'"

This is not "an interesting side topic."  

This issue is already a major thrust of the Republican effort to retain the House and the Senate, as well as winning local elections.  It's part of the current effort to disenfranchise lower caste voters and to pass laws that give Republicans the power to decide whether elections are fair and who the winners are. 

Trump is teaching them that refusal to abide by the law and facts is a winning strategy.  It didn't quite work this time, but it was a good trial run.  Next time, they'll fix the parts that didn't work for them.    

This is about the ability of democracy to survive in the United States.  Republicans are hoping that fear of losing their superior place in the US caste system will mobilize enough votes for Republicans to hang on.  For those of us who can see that strategy clearly, it's time to educate ourselves and everyone we know. And then to find those folks who, for various reasons, don't vote and help them understand what their not voting can lead to.  

". . .forced labor camps that were politely called plantations," From Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

As I'm reading Caste I'm struck by so many things I never saw before.  The title quote is probably the most profound.  Of course, plantations with slaves were forced labor camps.  The workers had no choice of anything - when to work, what work to do, how hard to work.  They had no control over their own bodies or their spouses or children.  All those decisions were made by their owners.  And, of course, they didn't get paid.  How come I never thought of that before?  But our history books never use that description.  Plantations are such genteel places with pretty green lawns, magnolia trees,  white columns and mint juleps.  But that was all cover up.  But Wilkerson rubs off the cosmetics our historians have applied to what happened in the United States.  

This is an important book.  I'm not yet finished, but I've already been changed.  This is one of several posts I expect I'll do on the book.  For those who haven't read the book, consider this an appetizer.  

I'll start with some quotes from the early part of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  After researching and writing a previous book, she decided that focusing on race doesn't capture the extent of the conflict that's usually depicted as a racial conflict in the United States.  Race is relevant, but the real issue, she tells us convincingly,  is CASTE.    

"Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone based on their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." (p. 70)

The rest of the book defines caste, looks at caste systems in India, the US, and Nazi Germany.  Outlines the 'eight pillars of caste' and more.  It's a very thorough explanation of how the hierarchy - with white on top and black on the bottom and shades of gray in between - permeates how we think even if our caste system is not explicit like the Hindu one.  

In this post I want to look at a few quotes from the beginning and relate them to police treatment of African-Americans.

"The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master," wrote William Goodell, a minister who chronicled the institution of slavery in the 1830s.  "What he chooses to inflict upon him, he must suffer.  He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress," fewer than the animals of the filed.  They were seen as "not capable of being injured, "Goodell wrote.  "They may be punished at the discretion of their lord, or even put to death by his authority."

"This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict," wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, "for it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of 'regulating' Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law."

The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.  

I think these quotes should help us understand some of the videos we've seen in the last couple of years of police beating and killing Blacks who have done little more than ask questions about why they were being stopped, who have hesitated when told to do something by the police.  If you watch many of those videos again, you'll see cops who totally lose it the moment there is any resistance whatsoever by the person they've pulled over.  There is little or no tolerance for the slightest disobedience.  

"He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress."

That was the rule throughout slavery and very much the rule in the post civil war South.  Whites expected blacks to be polite, to get out of the way if they met on the sidewalk, to accept what the whites told them without question.  To not even question the change they got from a white cashier.

Studies of why people become police officers show that " social-capital motives (i.e., power and authority, prestige, influence by media & friends)" (from Motivations for Becoming a Police Officer)  regularly play an important role. 

I would argue that for a number of police the authority of the badge and a gun plays a big role.  And for them, respect from suspects - obedience and subservience - is important.  And if these people come from families that have historically expected such obedience from Blacks, then their behavior can be better understood.  

Just watch this video of how these officers speak and act compared to the black man they have stopped.  It's consistent with the expectation that Wikerson says whites had for Blacks during slavery and Jim Crow.  

This is a black military officer who has not actually stopped until he's pulled into a gas station nearby so that there would be light and other people around.  While the cops seem to be reacting to his not instantly getting out of the car, the suspect is clearly worried he's about to be killed by out of control white cops.  

As long as the judge or jury only had the word of the cop versus the word of the suspect (just the word suspect raises questions about the person's truthfulness), officers could pretty much do what they wanted with impunity.  The rapid growth of small videos recorders and then phone cams, changed all that.  And that's where we are today.  

These behaviors and reactions are probably unconscious for most cops.  They haven't been aware that they were treating white and black traffic stops differently.  Or if they were, they believed that the blacks they were stopping were more of a threat and thus justified being tough or pulling out their guns.  

So I urge people to look at the videos - old ones, and ones that will be shown next week and beyond on social media - to see what triggered the cop to become violent.  And compare that, if you can, to how cops treat whites.  

That's the key connection I wanted to make in this post, but I offer some other quotes from this same section - pages 44 or so to 49, where Wilkerson is trying to demonstrate the extent to which Blacks were considered a subservient class, lesser human beings, than whites.  

"What the colonists created was "an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world," wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross.  "For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the 'human race' and into a separate sub-group that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity."

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium , the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, soon in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate.  They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them.  Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

"Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement.  Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations."

"The slave is doomed to toil, that others may reap the fruits" is how a letter writer identifying himself as Judge Ruffin testified to what he saw in the Deep South.  

"As a window into their exploitation, consider that in 1740, South Carolina, like other slaveholding states, finally decided to limit the workday of enslaved African-Americans to fifteen hours from March to September and to fourteen hours from September to March, double the normal workday for humans who actually get paid for their labor.  In that same era, prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept t a maximum of ten hours per workday.  Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country."

"For the ceaseless exertions of their waking hours, many subsisted on a peck of corn a week, which they had to mill by hand at night after their labors in the field.  Some owners denied them even that as punishment and allowed meat for protein only once a year.  "They were scarcely permitted to pick up crumbs that fell from their masters' tables," George Whitefield wrote.  Stealing food was 'a crime, punished by flogging.'"

"Your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride,"  Whitefield wrote in an open letter to the colonies of the Chesapeake in 1739.  "These after their work is done, are fed and taken proper care of."

"Enslavers bore down on their hostages to extract the most profit , whipping those who fell short of impossible targets, and whipping all the harder those who needed them to wring more from their exhausted bodies."

"Whipping was a gateway for of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist.  Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding.  

"Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world, granting them "the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice."  But from the time of enslavement southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed.  "No one was willing," Baptist wrote, "to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture."

Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate case seem normal and righteous.  "In the gentlest houses drifted now and then the sound of dragging chains and shackles, the bay of hounds, the report of pistols in the trail of the runaway," wrote the southern writer Wilbur J. Cash.  "And as the advertisements of the time incontestably prove, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron."

"The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners who's crime was that they were born with dark skin.  Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings." 

"This is what the United States was for longer than it was not.  It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United states that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.  No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaed.  That will not come until the year 2111."

Another example of this still today, Blacks are considered inferior, less mentally capable, we have this recent story From the AP:  Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards."

A June 4 Repost: What's An Iconic Photograph? Thinking About Tank Man

 I posted this five years ago.  Since then, the most iconic 'photo' was actually the video of George Floyd,  And probably some photos of the January 6 insurrection.  (Yes, that's the term that I think best describes what happened even if the majority of Republicans think (or say, even if they don't believe it) it was just a boisterous demonstration.)

 A lone student protestor blocks Chinese army tanks near Tiananmen Square. 

In 1989, when this photo was taken, most people still believed in the power of a photograph to tell the truth.  With digital photography and Photoshop people are still taken in by the apparent 'truth' of a photograph, but many people are also much more skeptical.

PetaPixel writes about this photo:

"AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century."

 Though Business Insider says that Stuart Franklin's image is the iconic image,

". . . Franklin's image is arguably the most iconic, having appeared in Time and Life magazines, and winning him a World Press Award."

There were actually four photographers who managed to smuggle their film out of Beijing that day, all shooting from balconies or rooms at the Beijing Hotel about half a mile away:  Widener, Charlie Cole, Franklin, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. A fifth photographer, Terril Jones, got shots from ground level, but did not publish them until the 20th anniversary in 2009.  He wasn't aware of what he had until the film was developed several weeks after the events.  There were also two videos made of the event that got out.

My questions today, 27 years later, are about what makes a picture 'iconic,' what story does it tell, and  how close is the story to what really happened (assuming anyone can even know that)?   I'm afraid I'm only going to make some quick stabs at answers, and perhaps raise more questions about how we interpret what we see.   

1.  What makes a picture iconic? 

Wikipedia's definition is similar to many others I found:

An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is typically a painting depicting Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, which is venerated among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and in certain Catholic Churches. Icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick.

The term has evolved to have a more generic meaning which is appropriate to the idea of an 'iconic photo'  (from Oxford online):

"A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something: 'this iron-jawed icon of American manhood.'"

So, what exactly is the tank man photo a symbol of? 

2.  What does the picture tell us? 

Here's how the New York Times interpreted the photo in 2009:

"The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."

Charlie Cole, one of the photographers on a balcony at the Beijing Hotel, says it this way (from the same NY Times article, in which  he also gives a detailed account of what happened and how he got his film past the Chinese Public Security Bureau):

"I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers." 

For people outside of China, this is probably the story we give to and take from this photo. [Yes, 'give to' because all interpretation is based on how our brains relate the meaning based on what we already know and expect.] 

For Chinese officials, I suspect it represents the restraint of the Chinese government which patiently bore months of demonstrations.  It also showed the compassion of the tank drivers who didn't run over this man.  We get a hint of this in a 1990 interview Barbara Walters conducted with then Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

"Walters : Yes. Do you have any idea what happened to him ?
Jiang : I think the picture you mentioned just now shows exactly that the
person stood in front of a tank and the tank stopped. Why did the
tank stopped ? Did the child stop the tank ? It's because the tanks--
the people in the tanks -- didn't want to run over the people
standing in the way. But I think this picture just proved that."  (Emphasis added)
(Transcript of the interview are from a Google Group forum.)

I'd add one more interpretation.  I arrived in Hong Kong for my Fulbright at Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1989, barely a month after Tiananmen.  I met a number of people who had been in Beijing during those times, and ended up taking a group of students to Beijing the following May.  It was a trip we had to schedule well before the first anniversary of Tiananmen, because the parents of my students didn't want them in Beijing during the anniversary.  One student wasn't allowed to come at all because his father thought it was potentially too dangerous.

But I'd like to highlight here just one story.  I had a student who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  He'd spent time in a mental hospital and had either thought about or actually tried to commit suicide (I don't recall exactly.)  He told me his interpretation of this picture, which went something like this:

"I wanted to be Tank Man.  I could end my life as a hero."

I'd say this was a version of what in the US is called suicide by cop.  When he told me this, he had a wistful smile on his face.  He considered this the perfect way to go.  This was his reaction to this photo.  [As I write this, 27 years later, I realize that I don't know if he had a wistful smile.  I've seen him with a wistful smile, but did he really have it when he told me that?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm just writing this to remind folks not to trust people's old memories.]

We could spend days studying what this image means to different people and whether it has any meaning to people in China at all?  The photo was suppressed in China.  Given the scope of the internet today, I'm not sure how many people have since had access to this picture.  But as I was working on this post, I came across a  Japan Times story on a photoshopped version of this picture from 2013 with Tank Man standing in front of a line of giant, yellow rubber duckies.  The article said

"Internet searches for 'big yellow duck' were blocked by Chinese censors, but the image went viral on social media overseas."

But let's move on to the more concrete aspects of the picture.  What does it factually tell us?

3.   How close is our understanding of the content of the picture to what actually happened?

Here's how Wikipedia describes the photo:

"Tank Man (also Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide."

Did you catch that?  June 5.  June 4 is the date of the so called Tiananmen Massacre.  The photo was taken the day after.  I didn't realize that until I was working on this post.  If you google Tank Man Tiananmen, you'll see a number of pictures.  This one is very closely cropped.  Others show a long line of tanks.  And here's one from the shots taken by Stuart Franklin (you can see it and more of the original slides and about Franklin's story here.)

Image from Business Insider

This is an image of one of the original slides that Stuart Franklin took that day from a balcony of the Beijing Hotel. 
The green arrow was on the image I copied.  It points to Tank Man walking into the road.  I've added the yellow circle.  It shows Tiananmen Square, which continues to the left of the circle beyond the photo.  The tanks are headed away from Tiananmen Square.  In the bigger scheme of things, I don't think that means all that much, except for the way we in the West, most of whom have never been to Tiananmen Square, associate this with atrocities in Tiananmen Square itself.  Knowledge gained since June 3, 4, and 5, 1989, seems to show that most of the people who died did not die at Tiananmen Square, but at other locations in Beijing.  And most of the deaths were workers, not students.  Again, I think those are details that don't change the meaning of all this, but I am simply trying to discuss the difference between people's perception of the facts and the facts of the photo.  And how cropping
a photo can take away the context of the image. 

Again, the images (since multiple images of this event  shot from the same location were published and now we can see many more that weren't originally published) have a meaning that goes beyond what happened that day. 

And now that we've discussed the photo and questions about what it means, here's some video footage of the event that also gives more context (though it doesn't show the people walking Tank Man away.)



 


And, here's another take on the image.  Stuart Franklin talks about another image he took during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in spring 1989, that he would prefer symbolized Tiananmen demonstrations. 

From Business Insider

"This is an image that changed everything because, for me, it crystallized the spirit of revolt. The uprising in Tiananmen Square was one of the most moving events I’ve witnessed. It was a tragedy to see unarmed young people shot down in cold blood. It was a movement for freedom of expression, for basic rights, and against the outrage of official corruption. It ended badly, a stain on the reputation of a great country. The facts should not be denied, but discussed, so that people can move on. A lot of things were misreported on both sides. A lot of outside actors were involved that may have worsened the situation for the students and their protest. I want this photograph to be available to people for whom this is an important memory. It symbolizes the courage of the time. What it doesn’t show is the bloodshed. I am best known for the image of the tank man. That is called an ‘iconic’ image, but what such images sometimes obscure, with the passing of time, is all the other pictures that lend explanatory power to the story. I’m interested in history, and this landmark event changed my life.” — Stuart Franklin

An ironic twist I can't help but mention, TechDirt reports that a Chinese firm now owns the rights to the Tank Man photo.

And finally, I'd note that Tiananmen 天 (tian) , 安 (an) , 门 (men)  means, literally, Heaven+Peaceful+Gate (Door)

An Obsession With Motorcycle Gangs

The LA Times has an article today on Bo Bushnell, who became obsessed with collecting the memorabilia of outlaw motorcycle gangs.  He spent years finding and getting to know members and former members.  Many of the original members are now in their 70s or dead.  The article mentions at the end that Bushnell has a new obsession - street gangs.  

"It’s not that he’s obsessed with gangs any more than he was with motorcycle clubs.

“'The gangs and the clubs, they’re just the backdrop,' he said. 'It’s the people, and the personal stories, that fascinate me. I have always been interested in outsiders and outlaws, and these are the ultimate outlaws.'”

And I think that is something we need to always be doing all the time - look closer at the stereotypes we have of people and groups we only know through the media.  Yes, motorcycle clubs and street gangs have done terrible things.  But why?  Who are the people who were attracted to those organizations?  What do they have in common?  Are there things we can do as a society to minimize the number of people who get involved in organized violence against others?  I'm not sure Bushnell's interviews and documents answer those questions, but it's worth reading the article.  

"The real value of the collection is its capacity to correct the monstrous image of outlaw bikers and give them their true place in history, said Paul d’Orleans, motorcycle historian and curator of the influential bike culture website the Vintagent.

“These few hundred club members had an enormous impact on our culture at large by their mere existence, and they also created a unique and peculiarly American folk-art movement with their custom motorcycles,” D’Orleans said. Like it or not, he added, 'That movement evolved into a billion-dollar worldwide custom motorcycle industry'.”