By Nazarul Islam

Race is a sensitive subject in America, even at the most easygoing of times, and these are not the most easygoing of times. The issue is particularly fraught as the nation struggles to come to some kind of racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, who died under the knee of a white police officer.

It’s not surprising, then, that a renewed call for ethnic studies in the country’s public schools has caused a nationwide wave of contentious school board meetings, with opponents of such courses hurling accusations of indoctrination and in some cases attempting to recall the education leaders they had elected.

The verbal cudgel that opponents wield most often against ethnic studies is that it’s a version of “critical race theory,” an area of academic study that emerged during the 1970s that has lately become the bête noire of the right. More than 10 Republican-controlled states have moved to ban teaching anything about critical race theory in schools, even though many people have very little idea what this complex vein of scholarship is.

Not surprisingly, what many of its detractors do realize — and what they can’t stand — is that critical race theory challenges the notion that this is a land of equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, ethnicity or background – As it should. This is a land of equal opportunity — but only for some people. In those groups, opportunity has been passed on from one generation to the next, while other groups are perpetually left out.

One of the main tenets of the ‘race’ theory is to point out this reality and make students of all backgrounds aware of the impact it has on their lives almost every day.

So, It’s disturbing enough when parents rise up against their children learning uncomfortable realities. It’s deeply problematic for legislators to turn this into a political opportunity by putting a chokehold on the truth. But it’s particularly troubling when a board of education assembles a panel to educate itself and the public about ethnic studies and stacks it with people who detest critical race theory.

Exactly, That’s what happened in July at a forum hosted by the Orange County Board of Education, where panelists at times misrepresented critical race theory and made statements about the current state of racism in America that were out of touch and sometimes downright false.

The panelists repeatedly talked about the dangers of teaching children that systemic and institutional racism exists.

Overall, their presentations went something like this: Once the Jim Crow days were over and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, racism in the country was pretty much relegated to isolated acts of hatred. We’re all one and we need to unify; besides, they said, look at Black students’ dismal scores on standardized math tests. Clearly what’s needed to help them is more math instruction, not ethnic studies.

Again, they had conceded that low-income children might have been stuck in underfunded schools before, but now that federal aid has raised per-pupil funding for them, there’s little reason to worry about inequality in education. And one panelist brought up the tired and largely discredited old saw of “mismatch theory,” the idea that if Black students are given a boost to get into selective colleges, the classwork will be too hard for them.

One other concern voiced by some attendees at the forum was that critical race theory teaches white children that they are oppressors and Black and Latino kids that they are perpetual victims. They have a point. Some badly fashioned curricula based on critical race theory separate and isolate groups, and imply that white students should feel guilty. But that’s neither inherent to the theory nor its aim, said Theresa Montaño, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge.

A proponent of critical race theory, Montaño was originally scheduled to be on the panel but withdrew, saying she’d been told this would be a conversation by ethnic studies experts, but that instead it was a stacked panel of people who were uninterested in discussing ideas. Montaño was pretty much correct, but her presence was missed. She could have informed some very uninformed people about what critical race theory is and what they were getting wrong about racism in modern America.

Oft referred, one frequently repeated statement that made sense during the forum is that students need to learn facts rather than be indoctrinated into taking one side or another. True as that is in principle, the discussion showed that what is considered a “fact” really is a matter of individual or group viewpoint.

At the heart of critical race theory is the concept of systemic and institutional racism — the notion that racism isn’t an occasional aberration of individuals acting in biased or hateful ways, but entire systems that have built up over this nation’s history that put people of color at a perpetual disadvantage and that will take purposeful action to remedy.

Just look at the situation in our schools. Research shows that Black male students incur harsher discipline at school than white ones, for the same infractions. Low-income children live with daunting obstacles to academic achievement, including daily food insecurity for 1 in 6 children, according to the Children’s Defense Fund — have you tried feeding a family on the amount that food assistance programs provide? — And historically underfunded schools staffed by teachers who assume their students will not succeed.

Obviously, it’s an attitude that rubs off, and it doesn’t magically get waved away by correcting funding formulas now — in other words, there’s a lot more to it than spending more money on math instruction. Those schools helped perpetuate systems that held some students back while launching others to success. Just “working harder” isn’t going to cut it.

Not surprisingly, the fact that the panelists — as well as politicians, journalists and the education experts — reflexively use the phrase “low-income Black and Latino students” is telling. The terms almost always go together in metropolitan areas because of a long history of frameworks that put those groups at a disadvantage. White people get professional jobs that lift their incomes, then help their friends get hired at the same places — friends who are usually white. That’s not intentional, hateful racism, but it is a system that acts in a racist way, day after day, across the country.

Yet it is important to acknowledge that (critical) race theory confuses parents and the public — and many educators — because its adherents take different views about how it should be interpreted and used. Those who rail against it point with some justification to the first draft of California’s model ethnic studies curriculum, which Montaño played a role in creating. It attempted to inculcate in students the idea that capitalism is, like racism, a form of oppression and power.

In the state public schools, the curriculum left no room for the idea that there might be another side, and that the students could research and debate this in meaningful ways. The same was true of its one-sided and loaded take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, its list of social justice groups worth studying and various other topics.

It might not matter what’s in the model curriculum, which has been overhauled in response to several volleys of critiques.

School districts don’t have to use it, even if the state mandates an ethnic studies course as a high school graduation requirement. And that might be the biggest problem of all. In very progressive areas of the state, something akin to the original and troublesome model curriculum is being adopted; in conservative areas, ethnic studies will likely be watered down to a modern version of last century’s National Brotherhood Week.

Needless to say, Public education has gotten better at bringing the history, literature and art of marginalized groups into the classroom. But it has not gone nearly far enough, generally making the nation’s past sound much brighter and shinier than the full story suggests. Ethnic studies is one place where the intention is for students to see topics through the history and eyes of Black, Latino, Asian and Native Americans, the nation’s four most marginalized groups.

Our Students are spending most of their schooling seeing these issues through the eyes of white people who had the power to create the institutions and tell most of the stories.

It is true that students should not be proselytized and told what to believe. But they need to be taught the truth. The nation’s treatment of its most marginalized groups must not be glossed over.

School students should be researching the very rich though disturbing topic of this nation’s racial history and current realities, learning both sides of controversial topics and debating those with others as they learn to reach informed and independent opinions.

Our counties’ forum missed the chance to demonstrate that very thing.

If the adults can’t be bothered to conduct open-minded research and deliver balanced reports based on the full facts, how can we expect students to carry it off? If nothing else, the bias shown by panelists, the board and most of the audience illustrated— why an ethnic studies course is needed in our high schools, and why the study of systemic and institutional racism needs to be part of this course, wherever implemented?

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Analyzing Race Issues in Schools first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Colleen Murphy

On a Sunday morning in Atlanta in April 1899, white churchgoers, dressed in their finest, filled the pews to hear the word of God. As the postlude concluded, the congregants poured out of their houses of worship, bought sandwiches for lunch, and crammed onto trains heading toward Newnan, Ga., to watch the gruesome extrajudicial murder of Sam Hose.

Hose, a 21-year-old Black farmhand, had been pulled off a train by a white mob and was later murdered while thousands watched his lynching. “’Sweet Jesus’ – Hose was heard to exclaim, and these were believed to be his last words,” writes Philip Dray in ‘At the Hands of Persons Unknown’.

The relationship between religion and injustice in the United States is complicated. U.S. Christians tend to emphasize the role of Christianity in contesting injustice, while forgetting images such as churchgoers going seamlessly from worship to an extrajudicial execution.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the U.S. witnessed the largest protests in our history. This new moment in the long movement for human freedom arises in response to high-profile police and white vigilante killings of Black men and women; it demands an end to police violence and redress for centuries of racial injustice. This “reckoning” has pushed local, state, and national efforts to reform police practices, hold individual police officers accountable for abusive violence, repair the injustice caused by policies such as redlining, and establish the truth about lynching.

As in the past, there has been backlash to this movement, animated predominately by white Christians. Today, some want to ban discussion of race and racism in classrooms and in church. Then-president Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13950 to remove “divisive concepts”—such as that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist”—from all federal literature, contracts, and speech. Critical race theory (CRT), a body of legal scholarship that examines how institutions such as law empirically operate in ways that maintain racial inequality, has become a particular target for the Southern Baptist Convention (as well as for Republicans in several states, such as in Tennessee where Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill banning the teaching of CRT in public schools). In response, some Black pastors publicly severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention. As Pastor Joel Bowman put it, “I can’t sit by and continue to support or even loosely affiliate with an entity that is pitching its tent with white supremacy.”

A background of inequality

The intersection of religion and race in the United States is complicated. It pulls in opposing directions—revealing deepening divisions in the U.S. as well as countervailing calls for unity.

In this context, efforts led by Rep. Barbara Lee are underway to establish the U.S. Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT, or truth commission) “to properly acknowledge, memorialize, and be a catalyst for progress toward jettisoning the belief in a hierarchy of human value, embracing our common humanity, and permanently eliminating persistent racial inequities.” In an April letter to President Joe Biden, some Christian religious leaders, including from Sojourners, requested an executive order to establish a truth commission to “examine the systems in place that lead to the disenfranchisement and marginalization of Black people and [to] shed light on the legacy of institutional racism and how it continues to impact every aspect of American life.”

The theory and practice known as transitional justice provides invaluable resources on which the truth commission movement can draw. The starting point of transitional justice is that the repair of damaged relationships requires that wrongs be acknowledged and redressed. From the perspective of transitional justice, attempts in the U.S. to silence speech about white supremacy, critical race theory, and systemic racialized abuse are ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Silence will not end racism or heal the deep divisions and fractures in the United States. Burying history does not remove the impact of historical wrongs on contemporary relations.

In recent decades, more than 40 countries have heeded the central insight of transitional justice, establishing a wide range of processes to address widespread wrongdoing. Transitional justice was a central part of the transition from communism to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, from apartheid to multiracial democracy in South Africa in 1994, and from conflict to a commitment to peace in 2016 to end more than 50 years of warfare between the Colombian government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia.

Processes of transitional justice take many forms. Domestic, international, hybrid, and ad hoc criminal trials have held perpetrators to account for human rights violations. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and a similar tribunal for Rwanda were ad hoc criminal procedures that led to the formation of the now-permanent International Criminal Court.

Truth commissions (official, temporary bodies established to document specified human rights abuses, name perpetrators and victims, and identify both the underlying causes and consequences of such violations) have been used in dozens of countries, including Canada, the Philippines, Morocco, and South Korea.

Material and symbolic reparations have been offered in Malawi, Brazil, and Haiti. In Malawi, for example, the National Compensation Tribunal processed claims for monetary compensation to victims of wrongdoing such as wrongful imprisonment and exile during the autocratic regime from 1961 to 1993. Post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe pursued lustration (or “cleansing”), a process of vetting officials for ties to extremist organizations. In Poland, lustration limited the participation of former communist secret police informants from positions in the successor government and civil service. All are part of transitional justice processes.

By addressing and redressing wrongdoing, transitional justice seeks justice for victims and the transformation of political relationships. To transform relationships is to fundamentally alter how members of a political community interact both with each other and with government officials. Transformation is needed when wrongdoing is widespread, with state officials complicit in (and in some cases perpetrators of) wrongdoing. Widespread wrongdoing characteristically occurs with impunity, which is a product of weak state institutions, the absence of political will to hold perpetrators to account, and/or distrust of state institutions, which renders them ineffective. Background inequality often results in members of marginalized communities being more vulnerable to wrongdoing, as their rights claims are less recognized and protected.

These features are present in the American context, as police abuse disproportionately targeting Black, brown, and Indigenous people occurs without meaningful accountability and against a background of racialized inequality.

The five pillars of transitional justice

Because it is concerned with the repair of damaged relationships, transitional justice is linked with reconciliation, a fundamental concept for many faith communities. But the reconciliation pursued in political contexts is not identical to theological understandings of what reconciliation entails. Importantly, forgiveness is not a necessary part of the process of repair and transformation that transitional processes pursue. Nor is forgiveness a goal that such processes should aim to facilitate.

By addressing and redressing wrongdoing, transitional justice seeks justice for victims and the transformation of political relationships.

Calls to forgive—understood as the forswearing of resentment and anger stemming toward one’s wrongdoer—make sense against a background of a valuable and morally defensible relationship. In such relationships, a refusal to forgive can obstruct the possibility of maintaining a relationship and reflect an individual’s failure to recognize his or her own fallibility.

However, when the relationship in question is abusive, forgiveness is less compelling. Urging a victim of domestic violence to forgive, for example, does not address the abusive structure of the interaction, can reflect a failure to take seriously the claims of victims to better treatment, and can implicitly encourage a victim to capitulate to her own abuse.

Transitional justice is pursued where political relationships are abusive. Urging forgiveness in response to widespread wrongdoing can reflect a failure to take seriously the claims of victims and their experiences and may implicitly be asking victims to become complicit in their own oppression. Forgiveness by victims will not address the underlying social and institutional conditions that made widespread human rights abuses possible. Yet it is precisely those conditions, and the broader structure of political interaction that is the root problem and must change.

The repair and transformation that transitional justice requires is built on five pillars: truth, justice, reparations, non-recurrence, and memorialization. Importantly, transitional justice requires the pursuit of all five together. For example, truth is no substitute for justice. Reparation will not by itself ensure conditions for non-recurrence.

TRUTH: Documenting and acknowledging the occurrence of human rights violations, their consequences for victims, responsibility for them, and conditions that facilitated their occurrence is necessary. There is a basic right to such truth, and this information provides the foundation for understanding what must change to prevent wrongdoing in the future.

JUSTICE: Holding perpetrators to account for wrongdoing matters for its own sake and contributes to institutional reform efforts by underscoring that no individual is above the law. Respect for human rights is binding on all members.

REPARATION: The harm victims experienced has a moral claim to repair. The sources of harm are multiple: not only the material and physical losses suffered, but also the harm stemming from the denial of the respectful treatment that victim’s merit. Through redress, communities acknowledge that victims are members of the political community and rights holders.

NONRECURRENCE: It’s essential to alter the underlying social and institutional conditions that explain how wrongdoing became widespread. One common condition is the absence of the rule of law due to corruption or politicization of the judiciary and impunity for abuses by police or security agents.

MEMORIALIZATION: This “fifth pillar of transitional justice” requires communities to commit to remembering the past, including past atrocities, as part of a broader effort to honor victims, understand wrongdoing, and prevent the recurrence of wrongdoing. Memorialization efforts contribute to democratic societies by providing a framework for debating the specific causes of, responsibility for, and present-day effects of the wrongs that are remembered.

‘In silence, wounds deepen’

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE PROCESSES are not entirely foreign to the United States. There are past and ongoing efforts on which the U.S. Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation could build.

For instance, the 1981 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was a national effort that focused on reparations for Japanese American relocation and incarceration during World War II. The Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Maine and the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission are examples of state-level efforts. At the city level, the Greensboro (N.C.) Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated “the context, causes, sequence, and consequence” of the events surrounding Klan-related killings on Nov. 3, 1979.

While every country’s experience is unique, there are invaluable insights to be gained from the experiences of other countries and regions. Heeding those insights requires overcoming a common form of American exceptionalism that holds up the United States as only a model for others, and not the other way around.

Comparative experiences from other countries provide lessons of the importance of both local and national truth-seeking efforts. They underscore the importance of calibrating expectations appropriately for what any single truth commission or reparations program can achieve. Transformation does not occur overnight; it is a generational undertaking. Another key insight is that, given the ways religion and racial injustice are interwoven in the United States, churches and faith communities should be part of the process of transitional justice.

Whether looking at dictatorships in South America, genocide in Rwanda, apartheid in South Africa, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the story of religion and its place in conflict, repression, and genocide is complex: It’s a story of religious actors who are implicated in, resistant to, victims of, and also perpetrators of political injustice. The Troubles in Northern Ireland fueled conflict between ethno-national communities aligned along religious lines (Catholic and Protestant). Catholic nuns and priests were implicated in the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis. Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated by government operatives while saying Mass because of his commitment to documenting human rights abuses and speaking against violence during the civil war in El Salvador.

Religious leaders also lead and animate transitional justice efforts. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu was chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Guatemala, Bishop Juan Gerardi formed a truth commission, while in East Timor Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo played a central role in calls for reconciliation.

Transitional justice is also useful as a lens for critically evaluating the complicity of religion in upholding racial injustice in the United States. The South African truth process provides a model for the form such critical evaluation might take. While most truth commissions have not focused specifically on the complicity of faith communities in in justice, the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did. As part of its process, the TRC held special hearings on the role of faith communities (ranging from African Traditional Religion to numerous strands of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Baha’i) in both supporting and resisting apartheid.

Faith communities were asked to categorize themselves as “agents,” “victims,” and/or “opponents” of apartheid in their submissions to the TRC. Agents of apartheid reflected on how “the system of apartheid was regarded as stemming from the mission” of the church and how churches “gave the apartheid state tacit support, regarding it as a guarantor of Christian civilization” or, in the case of the Dutch Reformed Church, as required by the Bible, as prominent South African human rights leader Glenda Wildschut reports. They acknowledged the legitimizing role that church chaplains ministering to the South African Defense Forces played through their presence, and the ways in which white churches benefitted from apartheid, able to buy confiscated lands and buildings from Black congregations at reduced prices.

Other faith communities, including the South African Council of Churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples contested, resisted, and suffered under apartheid, according to the final South Africa truth commission report. Black South African religious communities who were victims of apartheid lost land through state confiscations, were forced to sell land at low prices under the Group Areas Act, and had religious activities disrupted, religious buildings bombed, and their leaders targeted for detention, phone tapping, torture, and in some cases murder.

In addition to being partners to and supporters of transitional justice processes that take up human rights abuses committed by state actors or with state complicity, the South Africa example indicates the vital importance of churches being open to interrogating their own roles, as agents or victims of injustice. Publicly documenting and officially acknowledging these roles can provide the foundation for churches to be partners in the broader pursuit of relational transformation in American society.

To be sure, the role of religion in American racial injustice is not entirely unknown. But knowing is not the same as formally and officially acknowledging. Part of what transitional justice does is counter the denial that enables silence about the past to persist and that undermines efforts to redress past and ongoing wrongs.

The centenary this past May of the 1921 white mob’s attack on the Greenwood district of Tulsa helps us remember Christian complicity. First Baptist Church in Tulsa has a prayer room set aside to “provide a place for our church and our community to explore the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and to prayerfully oppose the sin of racism in our world, in our churches, and in our heart.” President Biden noted in his commemoration of the Tulsa attack, “Just because history is silent, it does not mean that it did not take place.”

Biden continued, “We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know. I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen.”

Colleen Murphy

Colleen Murphy is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice and A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation.

Courtesy:Sojourners

The post Facing our Ugly Past: To Tell the Truth first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

The global audience had witnessed the lynching of George Floyd, on May 25, 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

Floyd’s agonizing death by suffocation, his pleas for help, and his final words, “I can’t breathe”—recorded in a cell phone video and promptly shared on Facebook by a quick-witted young bystander—have been viewed billions of times and have unleashed a shock wave of outrage and revulsion have continued  to reverberate around the planet.

The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, really mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us. Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of black bodies as property and subsequently three-fifths human continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it.

In the midst of a national reckoning on race relations in America, something extraordinary is happening. We are building a winning edge against divisiveness and racism by standing up for what is right and showing that we are braver and stronger together.

For once I believe that in the human race there are men and there are machine men. There are human beings and there are animals in human skin. There are innocents and there are brutes, exhibiting brutality against humanity.

Murders of black people in the United States by law enforcement officers are not uncommon, and thanks to near-universal access to video-enabled smartphones and social media, they are increasingly well documented.

In recent years, videos recording these killings and other forms of police violence against African Americans have emerged with horrifying regularity; their release and the outpouring of fury, grief, and calls for change that they inspire have become a macabre national ritual. Global condemnation of racist violence by U.S. law enforcement is not new, either.

However, the extraordinary scale and reach of the reaction to Floyd’s death—which has ignited weeks of mass protests in at least 60 countries and prompted the UN human rights chief to convene a special session this coming September.

Racial equality is a prize worth fighting for. At present we are facing two pandemics in the United States. The first is the coronavirus and the other is racism.

We still tiptoe around having an honest discussion about what it really means to exist while Black in this country. All lives can’t matter if Black lives don’t matter. Demanding equality and equity isn’t radicalism. This is realism. We make these demands because the Constitution isn’t an accurate reflection of Black life in this country.

If liberty escapes few, it escapes all.

____________________

About the Author

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post When knees were stained in blood… first appeared on Sindh Courier.