Word: racism
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This was never going to be an easy conference," said Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, as she spoke in Durban last week at the opening session of the U.N. Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. That was an understatement. The conference was a disgrace. It was a disgrace in conception--in the very idea that a few days of talk could lead to any useful action directed against a scourge that diminishes the lives of millions--and it was a disgrace in execution. The only good thing that might conceivably come...
...fighting for a deeply held principle. Backers of the recent rulings say the courts are ushering in a laudable "post-affirmative action" era--when people will be judged as individuals, not as members of groups. But opponents argue--as did many reparations advocates at the U.N. racism conference in South Africa last week--that the slave trade's effects have not yet been erased, and it is far too soon to consider dismantling programs designed to increase minorities' access to higher education...
...assumed a Western liberal-humanist bias. We think of earnest guitar strummers in natural fabrics singing for human rights and tolerance. But as recent history teaches, in the new cold war--between the Hollywood/Mickey D's axis and every other world culture--genuine cultural pride can morph into nationalism, racism and worse. To the world's musical rebels today, is the enemy within or without...
Some political artists are also questioning just what "native music" is. The Malagasy group Tarika, which earlier focused on racism and corruption in its own country, took a trans-Indian-Oceanic pilgrimage to Sulawesi, the Indonesian home island of the first settlers of Madagascar, in search of the roots of their roots. The mesmerizing result, Soul Makassar, aims to transcend the local and the global, melding guitar and organ with traditional string instruments. On Aretina, singer Rasoanaivo Hanitrarivo bemoans finding many Sulawesi people ashamed of their own music, preferring Western pop: "You can hear something different/But it is hidden...
Growing up in America, I was made hyperaware of racism. And then going to South Africa, the concept was punctuated at a pretty young age, 13 or 14. I became more and more horrified, first at the absurdity of it but then with the horror that comes of it: the power that's put into the wrong people's hands. Seeing people thrown off trains. Watching people being arrested, or people being molested by the authorities, or friends being mistreated...