NY Times: Attacks on Asians Highlight New Racial Tensions

An article by Gerry Shih discusses racial tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans in San Francisco. Prejudices on both sides must be combated:

George Gascón, the San Francisco police chief, announced last week the emergency deployment of 32 additional beat officers to the Bayview-Visitación Valley neighborhood. Although “crime numbers have not gone up,” Chief Gascón said in an interview, he wanted to address the “tremendous amount of fear and apprehension” among Asians.

It is these historically black neighborhoods in southeast San Francisco that have undergone the sharpest demographic changes in the city in the past 20 years. Decades after Koreans transformed the Fillmore district from what it once was — the “Harlem of the West,” its blocks lined by the swaggering, smoky haunts of jazz lore — Chinese started moving to the Bayview in large numbers.

Community leaders predict that the 2010 census will show the Asian population, almost all Chinese, now making up 40 percent of the Bayview’s residents and as many as 60 percent of Visitación Valley’s.

“At one point, one group may emerge because they’ve got greater population and another group feels pushed out — feels like they don’t have any voice anymore,” said the Rev. A. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church. “It involves a kind of power shift. That, of course, creates some of the tension.”

The rapidly deteriorating climate has alarmed local leaders. The president of the Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, noted that on Wednesday, hundreds of Chinese lined up at a board meeting to tell stories of assaults and intimidation, sometimes without clear motivation, by young African-Americans.

Two days later, a young black man, Amanze Emenike, 21, said he was 12 when he heard older boys talking about why they singled out Asian and Latino immigrants: they would not report the crime and had no gangs to back them up. On Friday morning, on a Hunters Point hilltop with a breathtaking view of the Bay, Mr. Emenike and his sister, Sherry Blunt, 22, recounted their “spree” of crime against Asian and Latino immigrants several years ago.

By the time he was 15, Mr. Emenike said, he and his brother, Armani Bolmer, would get up at 5 a.m. to rob Mexican day laborers who got off the 23 Monterey bus from the Mission district.

They began to single out Chinese, he said, because they had more money. In 2006, they stalked a Chinese man at the last Muni stop, robbed him, and were arrested hours later.

...

But at these Chinese rallies and vigils, beneath the megaphone-amplified din of positive rhetoric, there are worrying murmurs about revenge, said Henry Der, who was the executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, an influential Chinatown organization, for more than two decades.

“I’m getting e-mails saying, ‘We need to retaliate, it’s time we pick up arms,’ ”Mr. Der said. “And these are from grown, supposedly responsible adults.”

At such a fraught time, leaders like Ms. Tan say they must tread a narrow path between irresponsibly amplifying racial tensions and dishonestly ignoring them.

Part of the frustration, some say, is fueled precisely by the reluctance — both among Chinese and among San Franciscans generally — to discuss such issues.

“Because San Francisco sees itself as very progressive, people just don’t want to talk about these issues,” Mr. Der said. “But that’s how people feel about it. You can’t argue it away.”

...

Mr. Emenike and his sister, Ms. Blunt, said the teenagers involved in the recent attacks were following in his footsteps, as he had followed older boys.

“It’s not ‘this is an Asian person let’s get him,’ ” Mr. Emenike said. “It’s we thinking, ‘this Asian person is probably carrying a large amount of money. And this is our neighborhood, this is our home, why not?’ ”

But if the motivations were largely strategic, and not out of unadulterated racial hatred, they were also influenced by complex emotions and a wariness of change.

“I wake up and I’m hungry, my stomach growling,” Ms. Blunt said. “Why am I just getting by when there’s this Asian walking out of the house with a laptop going to the cafe?”

There is also the frustration at perceived prejudice by Asians. Ms. Blunt still recalls a Chinese classmate in junior high ignoring her requests to borrow a pencil.

“You approach them, and they just keep giving you the cold shoulder,” Ms. Blunt said.

Emenike and Blunt are both to be commended for their candor. At the same time, it is counterproductive for both sides to downplay the role that historical racial tensions have played. In any case, Emenike's essay can be found here.

Time Magazine: Vignettes of Immigration in Southern Europe

Time Magazine has some stories about the ways that immigration policy in Southern Europe - Greece, Spain and Italy - has both progressed and regressed.

New York Times: Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

The

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.

Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.

“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”

One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.

Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.

“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”

Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.

Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”

And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

WSJ - Toyota: A Crisis Made in Japan

Jeff Kingston of the Wall Street Journal attributes Toyota's latest spate of errors to a cultural failing. An excerpt:

Japanese firms often seek to cover up or fudge the facts and the people communicating with the media and public often do not have the information they need to do their job. The absence of a structure to quickly get accurate information to top management hampers an accurate and adequate response. That leaves management unprepared to deal with media questioning and conveys an image of stonewalling and indifference.

There is a cultural element to this penchant for mismanaging crisis. The shame and embarrassment of owning up to product defects in a nation obsessed with craftsmanship and quality raises the bar on disclosure and assuming responsibility. And a high-status company like Toyota has much to lose since its corporate face is at stake. The shame of producing defective cars is supposed to be other firms' problems, not Toyota's, and the ongoing PR disaster reveals just how unprepared the company is for crisis management and how embarrassed it is. In addition, employees' identities are closely tied to their company's image, and loyalty to the firm overrides concerns about consumers.

There is also a culture of deference inside corporations that makes it hard for those lower in the hierarchy to question their superiors or inform them about problems. The focus on consensus and group is an asset in building teamwork, but also can make it hard to challenge what has been decided or designed. Such cultural inclinations are not unknown elsewhere around the world, but they are exceptionally powerful within Japanese corporate culture and constitute significant impediments to averting and responding to a crisis.

This crisis offers an opportunity to reform Toyota's corporate culture and improve quality assurance. This can be done by becoming more focused on the customer, using two-way flow of information and feedback; improving corporate governance by appointing independent outside directors; and making risk management more than an afterthought. It is not too late to turn the situation around, but this means shedding the constraints of a fusty corporate culture and wowing customers with a recall and above-and-beyond after-sales service and care. Yet early signs are that Toyota is no longer the nimble company that took the world by storm over the past half-century.

When Mr. Toyoda took the helm in mid-2009 he was unable to express a reassuring sense of how he would deal with his company's problems of overcapacity as well as the need to diversify away from reliance on the U.S. market and build its presence in China, India and Brazil. A string of successes, most notably the Prius, may have made the juggernaut a bit complacent, losing the edge that helped it surge since the 1970s by being ahead of the curve on fuel efficiency and top of the class on reliability. Regaining that edge and repositioning the company to tap into growing markets promises to be a difficult transition.

The Japan Inc. model of cooperative and collusive relations between the business and the government delivered the economic miracle, but has run out of steam. Japan's Lost Decade of the 1990s is entering its third decade, discrediting the powers that be.

I am hesitant to ascribe all failings solely to cultural issues, but Kingston is on the money in this case. While not all Western organizations are as open as they should be, Asian cultures should certainly learn to be more open.

Angie Chuang: Haiti's Orphans and the Transracial Adoption Dilemma

Angie Chuang, an assistant professor at American University's School of Communication, writes an article in The Root about race and international adoption:


Call them kidnappers. Call them good Samaritans. Call them unwitting victims to a political drama staged by the beleaguered Haitian government.

Call the 10 American missionaries under arrest for taking 33 children out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti what you will, two facts—rarely mentioned in news media accounts—are indisputable:

All of the detained members of the Idaho-based Baptist group are white.

All of the 33 children are black.

Black like Madonna and Brangelina’s adopted African children. Black like 1 in 3 American children in foster care and awaiting adoption. Black like the race least “preferred” by prospective adoptive mothers, according to government data.

Bring up race and adoption, and watch people squirm. The deep racial politics of adoption are mired in centuries of colonialism, as well as white paternalism over domestic minority groups and developing countries. The result: They have left scars as deep as forced adoption of American Indian children into white families in the mid-20th century—and fresh ones from the campaign to convert Muslim Indonesian orphans to Christianity after the 2004 tsunami.

The current-day realities of transracial adoption remain tangled in the U.S. government’s own conflicted policies about race-matching versus “colorblind” adoption, as well as constantly shifting regulations in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union and Guatemala. There are uncomfortable contradictions: Whites are chastised for their reluctance to adopt black children, but then those who do adopt black children are criticized for not being able to prepare black adoptees to face discrimination—or embrace their identities.

And the most unsettling contradiction of all: Isn’t adoption an act of love? A selfless act? Can we honestly tell the parent of an adopted child who happens to be of a different race that their bond is somehow tainted by generations of racism?

But societal attitudes about race and adoption are not borne of a single family, incident or policy. And our unwillingness to address them amid the clamor over “Haiti orphans” only stymies the real discussions Americans—whites and people of color, adoptive parents and adoptees—need to have.

To avoid them only deepens the hurt. No one wins, not the adoptive parents bruised by stares and judgments, nor of the children who must struggle with the unsolvable puzzle of who they are. Ultimately, the losers are all people of color, forced to see a measurement of their own value reflected in society’s cavalier handling of adoption and race.

Popular culture treats transracial adoption like trends in ownership of Yorkies versus Golden Retrievers. On the Us Weekly site, a commenter wondered if Angelina Jolie would soon be adopting from Haiti so that she can “find … one to match Zahara.” Meanwhile, there’s the White Swan Barbie, which conveniently comes equipped with a special accessory: an adopted Chinese daughter.

Then there’s Gia, a contender on the The Bachelor whose job description is “Swimsuit Model.” Snuggled in front of a campfire with bachelor Jake, Gia tells him that she wants to have a couple of kids, then adopt a Chinese girl—“and a potbellied pig.” Giggle.

‘Degrees of separation’

I asked Terrance Heath, a black, man who blogs with his partner about raising two adopted African-American sons for The Republic of T, what he made of the rush to adopt Haitian “orphans.”

It “reflects a desire to avoid certain aspects of our history in this country, and may be based on the assumption that Haitian children are somewhat removed from that history,” he said.

”It does give them a couple of degrees of separation from the history of racism in this country,” as does adopting from Asia or Latin America.

There’s an unspoken hierarchy of adoption, said Rev. Joseph Santos-Lyons, a transracial adoptee from Portland, Ore., who has worked within the Unitarian Universalist faith to educate young people of color raised by white adoptive parents.

On the top tier are white children, either adopted domestically or from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. When restrictions on those regions made it more difficult to adopt, China and other parts of Asia became the next most desirable. Latin America is next, followed by Africa (and Haiti, not accounting for the disaster effect). Mixed-race or biracial children can vary on this spectrum, but are considered desirable if they can "pass" for the biological offspring of their parents. Black American children remain in the bottom tier. “These perceptions are actually realities in people’s attitudes,” said Santos-Lyons, 36, who is Chinese and Czech, and identifies as hapa. He understands this firsthand: His adoptive parents, who are white and adopted him domestically, told him that they had been offered a black child before him.

“They declined, and waited until they got a child of my mixed ethnic background,” he said. “That’s a pretty heavy realization.”

When transracial adoptees grow up and begin to understand the history and politics of adoption—particularly the fact that many international adoptions have been the products of black-market child trafficking or coercion of birth families, Santos-Lyons said, “It leads them to become hurt and upset.”

Witness the group Transracial Abductees (subtitle: “angry pissed ungrateful little transracially abducted mother****ers from hell”), whose Web site asserts, “‘Adoption’ conceals the unequal power between abductors and abductees, and in the abduction industry in general.”

Voices less extreme have also sought to discourage transracial adoption, on the grounds that children of color raised by white parents lose a part of their identity, and aren’t equipped to live in a society that will judge them by the color of their skin. Historically, the National Association of Black Social Workers has taken a vehement stance against white parents adopting black children. Heath says he does support cross-cultural adoption, if the adoptive parents take the responsibility to ensure the child is not culturally and ethnically isolated.

“I try to teach my boys that they do not have to reflect all that will be projected on them as young African-American men. That’s something I learned from my parents,” he said. “It’s something that adoptive parents of Haitian children are going to have to learn.”

Matthews Investments: In China's Shoes

Matthews Investments is an investing firm that specializes in East and Southeast Asia. I'm not endorsing their funds. However, their chairman, Mark Headley, wrote a very interesting article on China. I believe his insights into China's national psychology are more or less on the money and am posting them here:


In the evolution of global trade and finance, China’s relative increase in almost every level of economic statistic over the last 30 years is one of the defining events of our times. Yet, in many ways, China is still a poor country with a per capita annual income of roughly US$3,000 versus about US$40,000 for the U.S. When pressured to address vital issues such as terms of trade, human rights and the environment, China constantly refers to its own internal challenges, external grievances and long road to development.

Many developed countries are increasingly frustrated with China’s unwillingness to “play by the rules.” China seems to want the full benefits of access and membership to the global system while maintaining unfair advantages. The currency issue is the most obvious source of friction for many developed and developing countries alike struggling to maintain jobs. China has frustrated the world a great deal in the past 30 years and generally has paid little or no price for its obstinacy. Access to China’s potentially huge domestic markets is one of the obvious reasons that other countries complain but seem to do little. No one wants to be China’s “least favored” trading partner.

But tensions are rising and the need for major adjustments is slowly becoming inevitable. So why does China behave the way it does and how do we, as citizens of the world’s most powerful nation, work with China?
Some months ago I made a crude attempt to describe China’s psychology to a large group of professional U.S. investors. I had precisely two minutes, so on a whim I decided to lay out an alternative history of the U.S. with the hope of giving the audience some understanding of China’s domestic identity. So, forgive the vast revisionism and crude reductionism, and please consider what our national attitudes and debates might resemble if the U.S. had gone through something like the Chinese experience.

A Revisionist’s History
Imagine if the U.S. had lost the War of 1812 against the British. Instead of a messy end to a sideline for the then mighty British Empire, the U.K. established total domination in key American cities. The War ends with Manhattan transferred to the British in perpetuity. Some 50 years later, they demand and receive Long Island on a 99-year lease. Backed by British power, other European nations demand their allotted piece of our coastal cities and economy. Imagine if this outrage to a nation’s sovereignty ended only 13 years ago with a formal handover ceremony—the Union Jack finally replaced by the Stars and Stripes in Times Square.

China and Britain went to war in 1839, largely because China objected to the vast opium imports devastating its domestic population. China’s forces were utterly defeated and Hong Kong was later demanded as a national territory of Britain. In a series of treaties, China was stripped of much of the ability to manage its own terms of trade. This set the tone for all future colonial depredations along China’s coast with European nations, and later Japan, demanding the right to virtually run their own private states within Chinese territory for much of the next 100 years. The demise of China’s 2,000-year-old imperial system can be significantly attributed to this ruthless attack on its sovereignty. Certainly, any hope of a smooth movement to democracy was greatly diminished. India did have the advantage (if it can be called that) of total British domination in forming its democracy. China, on the other hand, fell back after years of devastation on an imperial model dressed in Marxist robes.
Imagine if the U.S. Civil War, so etched in our national psyche, had not lasted four years and cost less than 1 million lives, but rather lasted over 15 years and resulted in losses 20 times what we actually suffered. Imagine if Washington, D.C., not Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy for almost two decades.

China’s little known Taiping Rebellion lasted from 1850 to 1864. It was launched by a Cantonese farmer who interpreted the Christian teachings he was exposed to by the new Western presence to mean that he was the younger brother of Jesus. Vast armies fought battle after battle, and at least 20 million people died. The Taiping were finally slaughtered after ruling much of central China from the southern city of Nanjing. The Qing Dynasty was left even further weakened in its ongoing battle with colonial powers. Anyone who wonders why Chinese authorities are so paranoid about Christian activity or other spiritual organizations, like the Falun Gong, should study this history.

Imagine if the Japanese Imperial Navy had successfully captured Hawaii following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. This setback allowed Axis forces to capture much of the East (or West) Coast (take your pick) and hold that territory through eight years of brutal warfare. Military and civilian causalities in the tens of millions resulted. Many of America’s major coastal cities are left devastated. We are saved by the U.S.S.R’s defeat of Germany and Japan.

China, desperately weakened by its ongoing civil war between the Nationalists and Communist forces, faced direct Japanese hostilities in mid-1937. A bitterly divided country fought the Japanese in battle after battle until Japan’s final collapse in 1945. China fought approximately two-fifths of all Japanese forces in World War II, perhaps keeping Japan from successfully invading Australia and holding Southeast Asia against the Allied counter-attack.

Imagine if the radical left successfully captured power during the turmoil of the 1960s, and decided the best way to move the U.S. forward was to close virtually every school, college and university in the country for almost a decade. An entire decade’s worth of students received little or no education and floated through our society, terribly handicapped, ever since. Many of our most precious national monuments and historical artifacts were destroyed in the name of the new order.

China’s Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Chairman Mao Zedong as a political move to distract the population from the horror of the Great Leap Forward, a failed economic plan that resulted in mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution inflicted such chaos and brutality on an already tortured nation that it is hard to grasp. There remains in China a generation—who are roughly 50 to 60 years old today—that received little education. Being educated in the Soviet Union saved, and indoctrinated, a handful of the elite who run China today.

China’s View of the World
Each of the hypothetical examples above is flawed in any number of ways, but may give some insight into how the Chinese and its leaders view the world. The experiences in the U.S. that truly compare to what has happened to China in the last couple of centuries might resemble the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of African Americans. Until the last 20 years, America’s worst decade in the last 200 years would be far preferable to China’s best decade.

Imperial collapse, foreign invasion and civil war have typified China’s modern experience. So when China behaves brutally, petulantly and, so often, reactively, this is largely a product of historical trauma of the highest order—a proud and ancient nation brought to its knees by both internal and external strife. Mao’s final madness was a terrible gift to a nation that is searching for a new path but remains distrustful of foreign nations and obsessed with internal stability.

When we look today to solve complex issues such as China’s fixed currency system, there are several implications:

China, its government and its citizenry, value stability very highly. So anything that threatens stability, whether that is a floating exchange rate (which devastated richer neighbors in the Asian Financial Crisis) or freedom for Tibet, will be treated with immense caution. China’s citizens seem to have accepted Deng Xioaping’s proposal, made in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square protests, of encouraging economic freedom while not tolerating challenges to the power and ideology of the state. The Communist Party has allowed a major degree of economic freedom, unleashing a market economy, while forcefully putting off political freedom to some distant future resolution. This is a deal that the vast majority of Chinese have embraced, at least while the economy is flourishing.

China will respond very negatively to harsh foreign pressure. Threats and insults in foreign negotiations, while often playing well to any nation’s domestic audience, are unlikely to do anything but encourage Chinese intransigency. China’s government does not dare to appear weak before its own population and feels time is on its side in most areas of friction. China sees negotiating with the West as a 300-year continuum, and it is playing the game very seriously with a huge commitment to winning a few rounds after so many losses.

China, as a nation, is a developing economy, with all the associated cultural baggage such terms imply in a post-colonial world. But unlike most such nations, China sees itself as a resurgent great power with the tools required to meet the West and Japan on an even playing field for the first time in the modern age. No other nation is in a comparable position of returning to greatness with a very large chip on the shoulder. This will make negotiations difficult and, at times, virtually impossible.

China’s industrial development, export success and rising domestic market give it a very strong hand in global negotiations. Today, we are literally in China’s shoes, or at least our children are. Any trade war would devastate our economy at least as much as China’s. Not to mention the many implications of China’s holdings of U.S. dollars. The potential of China’s market—where car sales have now exceeded those in the U.S., there are more cell phone users than European Union citizens, and more Internet connections than people in North America—keeps every nation rightfully nervous about being excluded. A fear China has used very effectively.

This is not an argument for handling China differently than other nations. Most developing countries have similar histories of colonial outrages and profound domestic trouble. But to attempt to understand China, one must recognize that a country that has been the Rome and Greece of Asia for over 2,000 years, rightfully, has great pride—just as we do. Its citizens know this history well. Sadly, we rarely know much about our own history let alone China’s deep and complex story.
I write this piece to warn against the simplistic notions about China that permeate our media, and to challenge the powerful special interests that want to paint China as a nation to be attacked, not vigorously debated. We face a long and very challenging dialogue with China, and I believe knowledge is an infinitely better negotiating tool than crude propaganda and simplistic nationalism.

Am I really saying China should be handled differently? No, just intelligently.

For More on China, I Recommend:

“The Search for Modern China,” by Jonathan Spence (The definitive history of modern China by our greatest living China scholar; “God’s Chinese Son,” Spence’s book on The Taiping is also an interesting read)
“China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy” by Mark Mancall
“The Tiananmen Papers,” edited by Liang Zhang, Andrew Nathan, Perry Link and Orville Schell (A fascinating view into the Chinese leadership’s mind)
“One Billion Customers,” by James McGregor
“Asia, America and the Transformation of Geopolitics,” by William Overholt

Washington Post: Why Two Black D.C. Pastors Support Gay Marriage

In a moving op-ed piece on the Washington Post, pastors Christine and Dennis Wiley, who are African-American, tell us why they support same-sex marriage and their church's struggle with the issue. They also give us some opinions on why some in the Black community oppose it.


On a beautiful Saturday afternoon a couple of years ago, we entered the sanctuary at Covenant Baptist Church and took our places in front of the altar, just as we had countless times before in our more than 20 years as partners in ministry. We had been united in holy matrimony ourselves in the same spot where we now stood to unite others.

As the couple walked down the aisle, we recalled the previous evening's rehearsal, when we commended all the participants for their courage and prayed that God would be in our midst at the ceremony. When we pronounced the couple "partners for life," we felt our prayers had been answered. It was the same feeling we had experienced so many times before when asking for God's blessing of the union of a man and a woman. Only this time, the union was of a man and a man.

Our church is the first and only traditional black church in the District of Columbia to perform same-sex unions. We conducted our first two union ceremonies, one gay and one lesbian, in the summer of 2007. The rapid political developments that followed in our nation and our city have made us optimistic that by the summer of 2010, same-sex nuptials will be not only blessed by churches such as ours, but also sanctioned by law in the District.

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council voted to legalize same-sex marriage. This historic measure passed 11 to 2, with the two no votes cast by council members Yvette Alexander of Ward 7 and Marion Barry of Ward 8 -- the ward where our church sits. Both wards are east of the Anacostia River and have the highest percentages of black residents in the city. Both members said that the majority of their constituents, who live in the same communities where many of our parishioners live, do not support gay marriage.



We have seen the resistance that Alexander and Barry were talking about. We know it has deep cultural and historical roots. But we have also seen that this resistance is not stuck in concrete.

After that first ceremony in our church, we were pleased and relieved; many members and guests told us how beautiful the service had been. But not everyone who attended shared this feeling. After most of the guests left, one longtime parishioner approached us, shaking. In a voice filled with rage, she asked how we could desecrate the sanctuary with such an ungodly act. She vowed to no longer be a member of our church.

After leaving our congregation, she contacted denominational leaders and local newspapers, including The Washington Post, to complain about our "immoral" behavior. She also took us to court in an unsuccessful attempt to recoup two years of tithes because, in her opinion, we had misled her in presenting ourselves as a "real" Baptist church.

For us, the courage to perform same-sex unions is in keeping with the proudest traditions of our Baptist and congregational heritage. Within the Baptist tradition of freedom and autonomy, Covenant Baptist Church has a long history of progressive ministry emphasizing social justice, service to the community and inclusion.

Several years ago, our congregation unanimously adopted a vision statement that we recite together every Sunday morning as a reminder that "all are welcome, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, age or sexual orientation." In leading our congregation to adopt this vision, we knew that one day we would face the question of same-sex marriage. We did not know how we would respond when the moment came. We didn't arrive at the altar for that first same-sex union ceremony in 2007 because the couple asked us to perform their wedding. Instead, an openly gay man, enrolled at a local seminary, had sought our church's endorsement in his quest to become ordained. We treated him just as we would any aspiring minister who needed our guidance and support: We asked him about his personal life. He revealed that he was living with his partner, also a church member, but that they had not made a lifetime commitment to each other. We could not ask the church to license him if he was living with someone -- male or female -- in an uncommitted relationship. After about a year of counseling, he and his partner were clear that they wanted to be together for life. The ball was then back in our court.

This couple did not press us to perform a union ceremony, nor did we encourage them to have one. If they had been heterosexual, their decision to make a permanent commitment to each other would have probably resulted in marriage. Since this couple were homosexual, however, what were their options? Not only was same-sex marriage illegal in the District, it was also forbidden in most churches and faith communities.

Through Bible study, reflection on theology and history, and experience, we had come to believe that it was unjust to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to consecrate their relationships in the same way that we allow opposite-sex couples to. Before the ceremony in the church, each of us had performed a same-sex union ceremony elsewhere. But this was our home. The church had voted to become an inclusive congregation. How could we justify treating same-sex couples as second-class citizens?

We knew what was in our hearts. But if the ceremony was to be held at Covenant, we had to present this matter to the congregation. We believed that a traditional up-and-down vote could be too divisive. We chose instead to seek some form of consensus.

About three months before that first union ceremony, we held a church meeting to present the two requests and to explain that we intended to honor them. We asked for the congregation's support and received an overwhelmingly positive response. However, as we drew closer to the first ceremony, the goodwill we thought we had witnessed on that evening slowly evaporated. The anger and dissension that had been bubbling erupted when that longtime church member confronted us at the end of the ceremony. She, and the scores of other members who left the congregation after the same-sex ceremonies began, painfully reminded us that although everyone in the black community does not think alike, the roots of homophobia run deep.

We are sometimes asked what accounts for the homophobia within the African American community. This question seems to assume that the community is disproportionately homophobic compared with other racial and ethnic groups. We are not aware of any credible study that has conclusively proved this assumption. However, our first-hand experience has convinced us that homophobia within the black church and the wider community is real. And the factors that have nurtured these beliefs over the years are complex.

When issues of gay rights and gay marriage come up, the first question many black people ask is, "What does the Bible have to say about it?" This seemingly innocent question doesn't acknowledge that when we approach the Bible, our perspective has been shaped by where we were born, by whom we were raised, what Grandma taught us, where we went to school and what our pastor preached in church -- usually conservative ideas on matters such as homosexuality. Therefore, we tend to interpret the Bible not objectively, but through the lens of our cultural and historical context.



The conservative strand of black religion is evident in what Harvard professor Peter Gomes calls "bibliolatry" -- the practice of worshiping the Bible rather than worshiping God. It is also found in a "literal" interpretation of the Bible that focuses more on the letter of the text than on its spirit, and concentrates on passages about domination, oppression, hierarchy, elitism and exclusion rather than on the major themes of love, justice, freedom, equality and inclusion that run throughout the Bible.

A more complicated element of black homophobia is the lingering influence of sexual stereotypes that originated during slavery. According to theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, the myth of "over-sexualized" black bodies portrayed black men as violent "bucks" who posed an ever-present threat to white women, and black women as "Jezebels" who seduced white men.

These stereotypes served to justify the whipping, lynching and castration of black men, and to excuse the sexual violation of black women by white men. They were just one element of what blacks had to struggle against to gain acceptance and respectability in white society, especially during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. On this matter, religion has often been a vehicle of suppression, accommodation and control. While the church was a refuge from the horrors of racism and played an empowering role in African American history, it also taught black people to repress behaviors -- especially sexual behaviors -- that might attract unwanted attention, appear uncouth or seem threatening to white people.

A final piece that shapes black attitudes toward same-sex marriage is the preoccupation with racism in the black community. This obsession, although justifiable, has led to a failure to appreciate how racism is inextricably connected to all other forms of oppression. Those who fail to see this connection may resent the comparison of gay rights with civil rights. But as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Last week, two black D.C. Council members voted against the same-sex marriage bill. But five black council members voted for it. Our black mayor signed it on Friday, and our black congressional representative has promised to defend it on Capitol Hill. Although the bill faces the possibility of intervention by Congress, something revolutionary is happening in this city to debunk the notion that the black community's homophobia is entrenched.

Many new members are joining the church, excited by our vision. The couple for whom we performed the first union ceremony at our church are still together and doing well. And the man who aspired to the ministry was ordained a few weeks ago and is now a chaplain supervisor at a local hospital. Some who disagree with us have condemned us to hell. But we believe that God has granted us the courage of our convictions.

We will continue to stand at the altar in our community, telling all the couples who come before us: "Let it be known that you are joined together not only by your love for each other, and by our collective love for each of you, but by the love of God."

The Rev. Dennis W. Wiley and the Rev. Christine Y. Wiley are pastors of Covenant Baptist Church in Washington. They are co-chairs of the organization DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality.

NY Times: In job hunt, college degree can't close racial gap

Michael Luo writes for the New York Times.

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”

Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.

“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.

That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.

But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.

College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent.

Various academic studies have confirmed that black job seekers have a harder time than whites. A study published several years ago in The American Economic Review titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” found that applicants with black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names.

A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did.

The discrimination is rarely overt, according to interviews with more than two dozen college-educated black job seekers around the country, many of them out of work for months. Instead, those interviewed told subtler stories, referring to surprised looks and offhand comments, interviews that fell apart almost as soon as they began, and the sudden loss of interest from companies after meetings.

Whether or not each case actually involved bias, the possibility has furnished an additional agonizing layer of second-guessing for many as their job searches have dragged on.

“It does weigh on you in the search because you’re wondering, how much is race playing a factor in whether I’m even getting a first call, or whether I’m even getting an in-person interview once they hear my voice and they know I’m probably African-American?” said Terelle Hairston, 25, a graduate of Yale University who has been looking for work since the summer while also trying to get a marketing consulting start-up off the ground. “You even worry that the hiring manager may not be as interested in diversity as the H.R. manager or upper management.”

Mr. Williams recently applied to a Dallas money management firm that had posted a position with top business schools. The hiring manager had seemed ecstatic to hear from him, telling him they had trouble getting people from prestigious business schools to move to the area. Mr. Williams had left New York and moved back in with his parents in Dallas to save money.

But when Mr. Williams later met two men from the firm for lunch, he said they appeared stunned when he strolled up to introduce himself.

“Their eyes kind of hit the ceiling a bit,” he said. “It was kind of quiet for about 45 seconds.”

The company’s interest in him quickly cooled, setting off the inevitable questions in his mind.

Discrimination in many cases may not even be intentional, some job seekers pointed out, but simply a matter of people gravitating toward similar people, casting about for the right “cultural fit,” a buzzword often heard in corporate circles.

There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities.

Many interviewed, however, wrestled with “pulling the race card,” groping between their cynicism and desire to avoid the stigma that blacks are too quick to claim victimhood. After all, many had gone to good schools and had accomplished résumés. Some had grown up in well-to-do settings, with parents who had raised them never to doubt how high they could climb. Moreover, there is President Obama, perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that belief.

Certainly, they conceded, there are times when their race can be beneficial, particularly with companies that have diversity programs. But many said they sensed that such opportunities had been cut back over the years and even more during the downturn. Others speculated there was now more of a tendency to deem diversity unnecessary after Mr. Obama’s triumph.

In fact, whether Mr. Obama’s election has been good or bad for their job prospects is hotly debated. Several interviewed went so far as to say that they believed there was only so much progress that many in the country could take, and that there was now a backlash against blacks.

“There is resentment toward his presidency among some because of his race,” said Edward Verner, a Morehouse alumnus from New Jersey who was laid off as a regional sales manager and has been able to find only part-time work. “This has affected well-educated, African-American job seekers.”

It is difficult to overstate the degree that they say race permeates nearly every aspect of their job searches, from how early they show up to interviews to the kinds of anecdotes they try to come up with.

“You want to be a nonthreatening, professional black guy,” said Winston Bell, 40, of Cleveland, who has been looking for a job in business development.

He drew an analogy to several prominent black sports broadcasters. “You don’t want to be Stephen A. Smith. You want to be Bryant Gumbel. You don’t even want to be Stuart Scott. You don’t want to be, ‘Booyah.’ ”

Nearly all said they agonized over job applications that asked them whether they would like to identify their race. Most said they usually did not.

New York Times: Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

Martin Fackler writes in the New York Times about another facet of Asia's race problem: racism between Asian ethnicities. I previously reposted another NYT article about racism between mainland Asians and Americans of various racial/ethnic groups.

YEONGGWANG, South Korea — Just a few years ago, the number of pregnant women in this city had declined so much that the sparsely equipped two-room maternity ward at Yeonggwang General Hospital was close to shutting down. But these days it is busy again.

More surprising than the fact of this miniature baby-boom is its composition: children of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the offspring of Korean fathers and mothers from China, Vietnam and other parts of Asia. These families have suddenly become so numerous that the nurses say they have had to learn how to say “push” in four languages.

It is a similar story across South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas like this one in the nation’s southwest.

Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them.

South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.

“We bring these children into the world, but sometimes I worry,” said Kwak Ock-ja, 48, head maternity nurse at Yeonggwang General, where a third of the 132 births so far this year have been of children of mixed background, up from almost none a decade ago. “Prejudice against these families is something society must resolve.”

The surge in births of mixed children is the product of the similarly explosive growth here in marriages to foreigners, as a surplus of bachelors and the movement of eligible women to big cities like Seoul have increasingly driven Korean men in rural areas to seek brides in poorer parts of Asia. In addition, a preference for male babies has helped skew the population so there are fewer native-born women to marry. The Ministry of Public Security says the total number of children from what are called multicultural families in South Korea rose to 107,689 in May of this year from 58,007 last December, though the ministry said it might have slightly undercounted last year.

That is only about 1 percent of the approximately 12 million children in South Korea under the age of 19. But if marriages to foreigners continue to increase at their current rate — they accounted for 11 percent of all marriages here last year — more than one in nine children could be of mixed background by 2020, demographic researchers say.

The trend is even more pronounced in rural areas, where most of these marriages take place. Among farming households, 49 percent of all children will be multicultural by 2020, according to the Agricultural Ministry.

This increase is coming as South Korea’s overall birthrate has fallen to about 1.22 children per woman of child-bearing age, one of the world’s lowest rates. While many Koreans say they hope that the rising number of mixed children will help rejuvenate their rapidly graying society, they also say they fear that a failure to assimilate them could create the sort of poor, alienated underclass of ethnic minorities they see in the United States and Europe.

The increase has also begun to prompt a national soul-searching here about what it means to be Korean. While most of these children have Korean fathers and Korean citizenship, their dual ethnicity still gives them an uncertain status in a society where membership was long seen as being based on blood.

“The hard reality of our low birthrate is forcing us to realize that we can’t be homogeneous anymore,” said Park Hwa-seo, a professor of migration studies at Myongji University in Seoul. “It isn’t easy, but there is no turning back but to embrace these more diverse families.”

The increase of mixed-background children is so recent that relatively few have even reached elementary-school age. Still, signs of strain are already appearing.

According to the Education Ministry, the dropout rate of mixed-background children from elementary school is 15.4 percent, 22 times the national average. Part of the problem, social experts say, is the mothers’ lack of Korean-language skills, which prevents them from filling the expected social role of guiding children through the nation’s high-pressure education system.

Compounding the risk is the fact that most of the foreign women marry older farmers or manual laborers. Some 53 percent of mixed families live on earnings at or below the national minimum hourly wage of 4,000 won, or less than $3.50, according to the Welfare Ministry.

However, social experts say the biggest threat to the mixed children is that they will be ostracized in a society that began grappling with ethnic diversity only when labor shortages forced South Korea to accept foreign workers in the 1990s. The risk has been underscored by recent studies showing that the children of mixed marriages are more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse or bullying in school.

“I’m afraid we are already too late in responding,” said Suh Hae-jung, a researcher on gender equality at the government-financed Gyeonggido Family and Women’s Research Institute in Suwon. “On top of getting slighted for their color, their learning is also falling behind.”

Such concerns are quietly felt by Vicky Merano, 29, who came here from the Philippines six years ago to marry a Korean rice farmer 18 years her elder. Their 5-year-old daughter, Kim Da-som, does well in a local kindergarten, and on a recent evening she proudly showed off her ability to read the Korean language’s script and several Chinese characters.

Her father, Kim Hee-jong, beamed with pride and said that his relatives accepted the girl, including his parents, who share their 80-year-old tile-roofed farmhouse. Ms. Merano agreed but said she worried about what might happen as Da-som advanced beyond elementary school.

“Maybe if they don’t see me, they’ll just think my daughter is Korean,” Ms. Merano said.

The South Korean government says it has tried to respond quickly, opening 119 multicultural family support centers across the country in the past three years to offer help in education and vocational training.

The one in Yeonggwang, a small provincial city of 57,000 residents, opened in January. On a recent afternoon, its four small rooms were filled with Chinese, Thai and Filipino women learning to use computers and sewing machines while staff members watched their young children. Teachers also offered Korean-language classes to the mothers and children.

One woman, Edna Dela Cruz, said she preferred raising a family here because South Korea had better schools and a higher standard of living than the Philippines, where she was born. But she also worries about her 6-year-old son, who wants her to speak to him only in Korean so his classmates will not treat him as a pariah.

“Koreans tell me my child will be insulted because of me,” said Ms. Dela Cruz, 33, who married a local farmer.

New York Times: Donaldson Institute Study Details Struggles of Korean Adoptees

Ron Nixon writes for the New York Times.

As a child, Kim Eun Mi Young hated being different.

When her father brought home toys, a record and a picture book on South Korea, the country from which she was adopted in 1961, she ignored them.

Growing up in Georgia, Kansas and Hawaii, in a military family, she would date only white teenagers, even when Asian boys were around.

“At no time did I consider myself anything other than white,” said Ms. Young, 48, who lives in San Antonio. “I had no sense of any identity as a Korean woman. Dating an Asian man would have forced me to accept who I was.”

It was not until she was in her 30s that she began to explore her Korean heritage. One night, after going out to celebrate with her husband at the time, she says she broke down and began crying uncontrollably.

“I remember sitting there thinking, where is my mother? Why did she leave me? Why couldn’t she struggle to keep me?” she said. “That was the beginning of my journey to find out who I am.”

The experiences of Ms. Young are common among adopted children from Korea, according to one of the largest studies of transracial adoptions, which is to be released on Monday. The report, which focuses on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea, found that 78 percent of those who responded had considered themselves to be white or had wanted to be white when they were children. Sixty percent indicated their racial identity had become important by the time they were in middle school, and, as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.

Like Ms. Young, most Korean adoptees were raised in predominantly white neighborhoods and saw few, if any, people who looked like them. The report also found that the children were teased and experienced racial discrimination, often from teachers. And only a minority of the respondents said they felt welcomed by members of their own ethnic group.

As a result, many of them have had trouble coming to terms with their racial and ethnic identities.

The report was issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption research and policy group based in New York. Since 1953, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, the vast majority of them from orphanages in Asia, South America and, most recently, Africa. Yet the impact of such adoptions on identity has been only sporadically studied. The authors of the Donaldson Adoption Institute study said they hoped their work would guide policymakers, parents and adoption agencies in helping the current generation of children adopted from Asian countries to form healthy identities.

“So much of the research on transracial adoption has been done from the perspective of adoptive parents or adolescent children,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the institute. “We wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge and life experience of a group of individuals who can provide insight into what we need to do better.”

The study recommends several changes in adoption practices that the institute said are important, including better support for adoptive parents and recognition that adoption grows in significance for their children from young adulthood on, and throughout adulthood.

South Korea was the first country from which Americans adopted in significant numbers. From 1953 to 2007, an estimated 160,000 South Korean children were adopted by people from other countries, most of them in the United States. They make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the United States and, by some estimates, are 10 percent of the nation’s Korean population.

The report says that significant changes have occurred since the first generation of adopted children were brought to the United States, a time when parents were told to assimilate the children into their families without regard for their native culture.

Yet even adoptees who are exposed to their culture and have parents who discuss issues of race and discrimination say they found it difficult growing up.

Heidi Weitzman, who was adopted from Korea when she was 7 months old and who grew up in ethnically mixed neighborhoods in St. Paul, said her parents were in touch with other parents with Korean children and even offered to send her to a “culture camp” where she could learn about her heritage.

“But I hated it,” said Ms. Weitzman, a mental health therapist in St. Paul. “I didn’t want to do anything that made me stand out as being Korean. Being surrounded by people who were blonds and brunets, I just thought that I was white.” It was not until she moved to New York after college that she began to become comfortable with being Korean.

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J. Michael Short for The New York Times
Ms. Young's visa and items that came with her from South Korea when she was adopted in 1961.
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Times Topics: Adoptions

“I was 21 before I could look in the mirror and not be surprised by what I saw staring back at me,” she said. “The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”

Ms. Weitzman’s road to self-discovery was fairly typical of the 179 Korean adoptees with two Caucasian parents who responded to the Donaldson Adoption Institute survey. Most said they began to think of themselves more as Korean when they attended college or moved to ethnically diverse neighborhoods as adults.

For Joel Ballantyne, a high school teacher in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who was adopted by white parents in 1977, the study confirms many of the feelings that he and other adoptees have tried to explain for years.

“This offers proof that we’re not crazy or just being ungrateful to our adoptive parents when we talk about our experiences,” said Mr. Ballantyne, 35, who was adopted at age 3 and who grew up in Alabama, Texas and, finally, California.

Jennifer Town, 33, agreed.

“A lot of adoptees have problems talking about these issues with their adoptive families,” she said. “They take it as some kind of rejection of them when we’re just trying to figure out who we are.”

Ms. Towns, who was adopted in 1979 and raised in a small town in Minnesota, recalled that during college, when she announced that she was going to Korea to find out more about her past, her parents “freaked out.”

“They saw it as a rejection,” she said. “My adoptive mother is really into genealogy, tracing her family to Sweden, and she was upset with me because I wanted to find out who I was.”

Mr. Ballantyne said he received a similar reaction when he told his parents of plans to travel to Korea.

The Donaldson Adoption Institute’s study concludes that such trips are among the many ways that parents and adoption agencies could help adoptees deal with their struggle with identity and race. But both Ms. Towns and Mr. Ballantyne said that while traveling to South Korea was an eye-opening experience in many ways, it was also disheartening.

Many Koreans, they said, did not consider them to be “real Koreans” because they did not speak the language or seem to understand the culture.

Mr. Ballantyne tracked down his maternal grandmother, but when he met her, he said, she scolded him for not learning Korean before he came.

“She was the one who had put me up for adoption,” he said. “So that just created tension between us. Even as I was leaving, she continued to say I needed to learn Korean before I came by again.”

Sonya Wilson, adopted in 1976 by a white family in Clarissa, Minn., says that although she shares many of the experiences of those interviewed in the study — she grew up as the only Asian in a town of 600 — policy changes must address why children are put up for adoption, and should do more to help single women in South Korea keep their children. “This study does not address any of these issues,” Ms. Wilson said.

Ms. Young said the study was helpful, but that it came too late to help people like her.

“I wish someone had done something like this when I was growing up,” she said.

NYT: a bit more on Australia's apology to British immigrant children

An NYT article has a bit more back story on why British children were sent to Australia.


LONDON — Laurie Humphreys, at least, had the advantage of being a teenager — if anything about being uprooted from family and homeland in 1940s Britain and sent 12,000 miles to brutal and often sexually abusive orphanages in western Australia could be called advantageous.

Mr. Humphreys was 14, old enough to understand at least some of what was happening to him.

Others among the boys and girls known in Australia as the “lost innocents” were as young as 3, children abandoned by single mothers or impoverished families, placed into institutional care in Britain, then transported across the world, often without parental consent, with certificates bearing wrong names and birth dates, and falsely noting that they had no living parents or siblings.

Mr. Humphreys arrived in Fremantle on Sept. 22, 1947, one of 100 boys and 40 girls who were part of the first wave of child migrants to leave Britain for Australia after World War II, resuming a program that was started in the 1920s but that had origins in the early 17th century, when child migrants were shipped across the Atlantic to the Virginia colony. The scheme broadened in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a total of perhaps 150,000 children sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Rhodesia.

At the Bindoon orphanage, 60 miles from Perth, Mr. Humphreys was put to work on one of the farms that propelled Australia’s postwar rise to prosperity, and he was subjected to the harsh regime of the Christian Brothers order that ran the orphanage.

From the late 1940s until 1967, when Australia halted the child migration program, 7,000 to 10,000 British children made the same voyage, buoyed by the promises of happy new lives in Australia that were dashed by an institutionalized system of heartless, Dickensian repression.

“We were told it was the land of milk and honey, that we would ride a horse every day to school,” Mr. Humphreys, 76, said by phone from his home in Perth. “We all put our hands up because we didn’t have a clue where Australia was and we thought it was a bit of an adventure.”

Last Monday at a ceremony in Canberra, Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, formally apologized for the program, expressing contrition to all who bore “the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care,” that characterized the experiences of many child migrants. “Sorry for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy, of childhoods lost,” he said.

The opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, broke down as he, too, apologized, prompting a wave of applause from audience members, Mr. Humphreys among them. “We acknowledge that already feeling alone, abandoned and left without love, many of you were beaten and abused, physically, sexually, mentally — treated like objects, not people — leaving you feeling of even less worth,” Mr. Turnbull said.

The apologies in Australia set the stage for one by Britain for what the children’s minister, Ed Balls, has called “a stain on our society.” But officials in London said Prime Minister Gordon Brown would delay his apology until early next year, perhaps to allow time to weigh demands for financial compensation made by survivors of the program in Australia. Survivors have suggested as a model the more than a billion dollars in compensation that the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has made in the past two decades to victims of sexual abuse in church-run institutions.

The Rudd government has already said there will be no compensation in Australia. The Canadian government has gone further, saying it has no plans to apologize for its program, which outstripped Australia’s. Studies in Canada have shown that as many as 100,000 British children were sent there from about 1860 to 1939, when the Canadian program was effectively halted.

An association of former child migrants called Home Children Canada, the term by which child migrants were known, estimates that two-thirds of the children sent to Canada were abused. In his 1980 book, “The Little Immigrants,” the journalist Kenneth Bagnell documented examples of sexual and physical mistreatment, as well as widespread flouting of regulations that required farmers to pay children’s wages into trust accounts.

But because there are relatively few of the migrants still living in Canada, the issue has gained less political traction than in Australia. Jason Kenney, Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration, told the Canadian Press news agency after Mr. Rudd’s apology that there was no need for Canada to apologize. Other Canadian officials have said that most of the children who were transported to Canada were not abused.

The extent of the abuse suffered by the children who went to Australia was extensively chronicled in a 1998 report by the British Parliament’s Select Committee on Health, and in a 2001 report by the Australian Senate. The reports set out the harsh colonial rationales that underpinned Britain’s thinking in sustaining the migration over 350 years, and explored the miseries the program caused, through interviews with victims.

The British report said the impetus for the program came from the mixture of realpolitik and idealism that ran through Britain’s centuries of empire-building. “On the one hand, there was a genuine philanthropic desire to rescue children from the destitution and neglect in Britain and send them to a better life in the colonies,” the report said. “This went hand in hand with a wish to protect children from ‘moral danger’ arising from their home circumstances — for instance, if their mothers were prostitutes.”

The report also cited more hard-headed calculations rooted in the overcrowded poorhouses and orphanages described by Dickens. “Child migration was often seen to be of economic benefit both to Britain (because it relieved the burden on public finances of looking after these children) and to the receiving countries (because child migrants were seen as being potential members of a healthy and well-trained work force),” it said.

The program also had a racial motive, the report said. It quoted John Hennessey, a former child migrant, as describing “how on arrival in Fremantle he and the other children were greeted by a senior clergyman who said: ‘We need white stock. We need this country to be populated by white stock because we are terrified of the Asian hordes.’ ”

Perhaps the grimmest part of the story lies in the incidence of sexual abuse. Mr. Humphreys said that because he was older than many of the children at Bindoon, and better able to defend himself, he escaped what the report described as the “quite exceptional depravity” that was the norm there and at several other Australian institutions. The report cited one boy who had testified to the inquiry that the members of the Christian Brothers had “competed as to who could rape him 100 times first.”

The report acknowledged that many child migrants thrived. One of those who made a successful career in Australia was David Hill, who became the director general of the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation, after his impoverished single mother responded to a British newspaper advertisement promising a better life for children in Australia in 1959. But Mr. Hill, too, suffered after arriving in his new homeland.

In an interview at corporation headquarters in Sydney, he said the voyage from Britain, aboard a luxury liner with five-course meals, had been followed by a spartan life working on farms and as domestic helpers in an isolated settlement in New South Wales. There was limited opportunity for education, and a common experience of beatings and sexual abuse, a theme that ran through both the British and Australian parliamentary reports.

“The scheme was an amazing piece of British empire social engineering,” he said. “Rather than address why British society generated such appalling inequality and poverty, the British empire simply exported large numbers of its poor children. People don’t appreciate how big, and how recent, it all was.”

Sojourners: The Plank in Australia's Eye

Jarrod McKenna blogs on Sojourners.


“F%*# OFF! WE’RE FULL!” read the bumper sticker I saw this morning, written within the outline of the Australian continent. The offense of the bumper stickers I felt twice as hard after hearing that another boat of people fleeing horrific circumstance had sunk off the Australian coast. This is the side of Australia you won’t see advertised in our tourism campaigns. Beaches, barbecues, bronzed bodies, and beautiful sunsets are what we love to show the world. Yet the prophets’ poetry draws our attention to what we want to ignore. What we hide. What we silence and long to keep a secret.

Who wants to mess with the world’s image of the sun-kissed, fun-loving, larrikin nation “Down Under”? I believe God does. Biblically our redemption is not found in hiding our shame but in letting the Spirit transform it. As Philip Berrigan would say, “The poor tell us who we are. The prophets tell us who we can be. So we hide the poor and kill the prophets.” One of Australia’s greatest shames is the way we imprison, ignore, silence, and hide [now offshore] refugees who tell us who we are, and who we can be.

Australia must face what Dr. Cornell West would call “the night side” of our national identity. Tied up in this ‘night-side of Aussie pride’ is the irrational xenophobia that makes it not just possible, but popular(!) for both sides of politics to use the plight of some of God’s most vulnerable children seeking safety — refugees — as a political football. Tragically, how asylum seekers have been treated by Australia reads as a case study of anthropologist Rene Girard’s theory of “scapegoating” as the glue of society. Power politics in this country are being held together by the hatred of this most defenseless ‘other’.

A couple of years back while working with Aboriginal activist Uncle Kevin Buzzcott, he said to me, “When are you white fellas going to realize that you are all ‘boatpeople’!?! If you are not going to let them [refugees] in, us black fellas should send you all home!”

Maybe deep in the white Australian psyche is the fear that just as the European colonisers stole the land from the indigenous peoples, so we might have the land stolen from us. Maybe what Uncle Kevin Buzzcott is pointing us to is the reality that what we fear is not “the other” but a projection of own worst selves. This would explain the both blatant and veiled history of legislated racism such as the “White Australia policy” and more recently, the supposedly overhauled “Pacific Solution.” We Australians can be very quick to point out the racist histories of South Africa and the United States without removing the plank in our own eye.
[to be continued...]

NY Times: South Koreans Struggle With Race

The New York Times documents some of South Korea's struggles with race. It also touches briefly on race relations between Whites and South Koreans - it's somewhat more acceptable to intermingle with Whites than with non-Whites. South Korea's race problem is in some ways worse than the US', because the South Koreans have a more limited minority presence than the US, are unwilling to acknowledge the problem, and are at the stage where overt hostility is still widely accepted. Of course, this is not intended to minimize the extent of racism in the US.


SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

Vanessa Carmichael: What we don't say about illegal immigration

Vanessa Carmichael has a very insightful article on the Huffington Post about race in Latin America and how it impacts immigration to the US. Here's a big chunk:


On my last trip to Mexico in December of 2006, I took my mother to see the ruins of the Aztec and Mayan temples with a few days of leisure on the beaches of Cancun. My mother, who is from a farming family of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, constantly remarked how lovely a country Mexico was. She had not seen the rural towns and abject poverty that much of the Indian population of Mexico subsists in as I had many years ago backpacking through the country. To her, Mexico City was a bustling metropolis with clean streets and pristine neighborhoods, nice restaurants and great shopping. We arrived at night.

We stayed at the Camino Real Hotel in the upscale neighborhood and Jewish enclave of Polanco, which hosts some of the best restaurants, private homes and landscaped parks the city has to offer. Not far, in the heart of the financial district, masses of professionals went about business, in and out of prodigious skyscrapers and elegant old world municipal buildings. The streets were lined with fine sculptures displaying the roots of Mexican art, a convergence of vibrant native and exquisite European aesthetics. What was striking about Mexico City and Cancun as opposed to Latin American communities in the United States was, no doubt, the color line. The banks, hotels, municipal buildings, and upscale residences were operated and occupied by Mexicans who looked quite different from the Latinos you see tending garden or cleaning house in Los Angeles.

According to the Journal of Diversity Management 2008 Report on Mexico:

Individuals of mixed European and Indian background, the Mestizos, represent 60% of the population. The rest of the population is 30% Indian, 9% white and 1% other. Income and wealth are distributed very unequally among these racial groups. The oligarchy is exclusively white, and whites are the vast majority in the wealthy social class immediately below it. Next in the economic hierarchy are the Mestizos. Within the Mestizos, however, there is a discernable economic pecking order, with those of predominantly European features, especially light skin, the white/Mestizos, ahead of those with predominantly Indian traces, like dark skin. At the bottom are the Indians, who are the majority in the two poorest deciles. That is, there is a strong positive correlation between European appearance and income in Mexican society.

In Brazil, Afro Brazilians make up almost half of the total population -- but nearly two-thirds of the nation's poor. Nonwhites were nearly nonexistent in Brazilian universities until affirmative action was instituted in 2001 and as a consequence the middle-class and the elite of the country are almost entirely white. Similarly, in 2004 The United Nations Economic and Social Council sent a delegation to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, where the majority of the population is Mestizo, and found that trends in all three countries reveal the existence of deeply rooted discrimination:

(a) a troubling correlation between poverty-stricken areas and areas inhabited by communities of indigenous people and people of African descent; (b) the marginal involvement of representatives of those communities in power structures - the government, parliament and the judiciary - as well as their insignificant presence in decision-making positions in the media; and (c) their treatment in the media as objects of folklore. Ironically, what this study also found was while the Spanish language has come to prevalence in the United States on much of the west coast, Southwest, Florida and New York, the indigenous people of Central America fear they will eventually lose their language and identity because of the shortage of bilingual education and programs there. No doubt, Latin American society has relegated much of its population to abject poverty, without a hope of ever getting out, on the basis of skin color.

Color discrimination is undeniably widespread in Latin America, a belief and practice that is tacitly promoted and promulgated through the generations. The question that begs to be asked is how the caste system in Latin America has gone on for so long without much acknowledgment from the international media or the American government? We have seen revolution over racial inequality in India, the United States, and South Africa, yet all the while Latin America has been allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin color without much protest from within the region or the outside world. Perhaps it is because there is a grave misperception of race in Latin America from the international community. Perhaps to the outside world everyone in Latin America is one race, a new race: Hispanic/Latino. This misperception doesn't equate the color bias in Latin America to the apartheid of South Africa. For the injustice of South Africa was committed by whites against blacks, imperialists against natives. But the origins of the caste system in Latin America are fundamentally the same, founded on beliefs that are indistinguishable from those that created apartheid in South Africa, or Jim Crow in the United States and the Jātis in India--the belief that physical characteristics deem mental acuity, ability and moral character and therefore justify inequality.

The caste system in Latin America may be more surreptitious but it is most similar to the caste system in India in that it is commonly adhered to by those who suffer the most within its restrictions. In 1994 with the passing of Proposition 187 by nearly 60% of California's voters, some 70,000 people showed up on the streets of Los Angeles to protest the passing of an anti-immigration policy in California. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to find such activism in Mexico, or in the United States amongst Latinos for that matter, to combat color discrimination in Latin America. Perhaps it is because in the United States, it is easy for Latinos to forget the oppression they left behind because in the United States all Latinos are relatively the same, which ultimately is the right way of thinking. However, if we are ever going to address the real causes of illegal immigration, we must apply this new thinking in Latin America and call on governments and citizens to address the issue of ethnic and color discrimination there.

Barbara Ehrenreich: the Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Barbara Ehrenriech is a journalist who wrote a book, Nickled and Dimed, after she went undercover, worked several minimum-wage jobs and basically failed to make ends meet. In an article on Huffington Post she coauthored with Dedrick Muhammad, a researcher at the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies, she argues that the African-American middle class is being severely affected by the recession:

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment -- or, we should say, re-impoverishment -- of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley -- from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers -- are sliding down toward destitution.


For African Americans -- and to a large extent, Latinos -- the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment -- even among college graduates -- consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What's happening now is a depression.


Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African American children to slightly over half. No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.


But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial "wealth gap" makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years -- and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.


All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income white to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, while blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history."

I'd invite readers outside the US to think about wealth and income disparities in their own countries. How are various minority groups in your own country being affected by the recession? Is your government directing aid targeted at those most in need?