Day: September 26, 2016
Iran’s aggrieved entitlement
Sousan Abadian, a scholar with advanced degrees from Harvard, contributed this post. She has served as a Fellow at MIT’s Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values as well as the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Her academic research on healing collective trauma has been described as “pioneering” and “highly original” by Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen. She now guides people and organizations to step free of restrictive narratives and go beyond known thresholds in order to create transformation. She has been awarded a Franklin Fellowship at the US Department of State.
I’m a student of post-conflict restoration, of how communities not only survive trauma but also learn to thrive by adapting and gaining resilience. I was born in Iran but naturalized in the US. Forays into Vietnam and Laos have given me perspective on my Iranian origins.
How did the Laotians and Vietnamese react when they found out I was American? Gracious and unimpressed. The war has been over now for over thirty years. The Vietnamese have succeeded in unifying their country and winning their independence. Laos welcomed President Obama just this month.
Both Vietnam and Laos are not only at peace but profoundly peaceful. As a researcher concerned with collective trauma, I wondered how that had been achieved. For example, there is a surprising absence of road rage given the horrendous crowds and unbelievable traffic in Hanoi. I witnessed the aftermath of an accident involving two motorcycles. A large crowd had gathered around the two riders, who were calmly discussing the incident. I had never seen anything like it.
At the crack of dawn in Hanoi, a large group of elderly do Tai Chi by Hoàn Kiếm Lake and play badminton, laughing and puffing with exertion. Just outside Luang Prabang in Laos, the ancient city of a thousand temples, children stand by the side of the road with buckets of water, splashing passersby and laughing hysterically. Life is about equilibrium and joy.
I could not help but contrast my experience of Iran with Laos and Vietnam. Iranian children, and adults for that matter, are full of mirth and fun. But there is also an intangible heaviness, as though joy must be kept under wraps — like its women, hidden away under black — and squashed under the weight of self-denial, austerity, and even perpetual mourning. Many Vietnamese and Laotians I encountered were by contrast engaged in play, contemplation, or busy moving ahead in life. They appear to ruminate little and refrain from stirring up muck from the past.
Why is it that after all these years, the Iranian government, or at least the Islamist hardliners, continue to express resentment and foment rage at America, their ‘Great Satan,’ while the Laotians and Vietnamese had seemingly let go of their bitter grievances, moving graciously on towards the future? Iran has arguably experienced a fraction of what Laotians experienced (and continue to experience) at the hands of the American government. Laos experienced the most bombings per capita in history. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years. American unexploded ordnance continues to maim and kill innocent Laotian children and adults to this day in an estimated one-third of the country.
What allows Vietnam and Laos to move forward with the US despite legitimate grievances? What prevents Iran from doing so? Read more
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The new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) was inaugurated Saturday on the Mall in the shadow of the monument to George Washington, who was a slave-owner. Here is the full video of the inauguration ceremony:
My family came to America well after slavery had been abolished: early 1890s. I suppose my parents could have claimed it was all over before we got here, so it has nothing to do with us. But that is not what they did or what the new museum allows anyone to do. It’s tagline, #APeoplesJourney #ANationsStory, betrays the intent: no matter who you are, no matter when your ancestors arrived on these shores, you have a relationship not only to slavery but also to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. These were nation-shaping events, as much as the Revolution, industrialization, the World Wars, or Vietnam.
The museum is a 3D multi-media display of a thousand vignettes, illustrated with objects, music, and graphics that confound over-simplification and stereotyping. Who remembers that slavery was once neither linked to race nor a life-time status? Who knew of the 1741 rebellion of blacks and whites in New York City? Who realizes that both George Washington and his British adversaries viewed blacks as vital to their war plans? It wasn’t only Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the revolt. Seven hundred spent the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. Who thinks, when we look at the difference in incomes between blacks and whites today, about the 250 years in which the latter did not pay the former for their labor, which generated a significant portion of the nation’s wealth?
America is founded on a contradiction: all people are created equal is the founding creed, but many (not only blacks but women and the unpropertied) were not treated that way. To his credit, Chief Justice Roberts focused his remarks at the inauguration on three landmark Supreme Court decisions: Dred Scott v Sandford (1857), Plessy v Ferguson (1896), Brown v Board of Education (1954). The first held that blacks could not be citizens, the second upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation. Only in the third did the Court rule in a way that today we recognize as just by declaring segregated education unconstitutional. Racial “isolation” of schools nevertheless remains a worsening problem.
President Bush in his remarks focused on just this capacity for change, for correcting mistakes. This in no way excuses them or lessens the hurt they cause, but it means there is hope, epitomized in the extraordinary abolitionists, both black and white, who sought an end to slavery for decades before the Civil War brought its demise, as well as the civil rights activists who in more recent times sought to make equality real. Their stories are told vividly and well in the museum’s lower depths.
President Obama (at about 1:21 in the video) was in an introspective mood, as he seems often to be in these months before ending his mandate. Particularly effective was his effort to reframe the narrative associated with a single museum artifact, a simple stone with a brass plaque attached, to focus on the thousands of people who were bought and sold on this slave block rather than the forgotten politicians who once spoke from it (and are commemorated on the plaque). He, too, focused on recognizing mistakes and remaking America based on its ideals. He went so far as to praise the American athletes who raised clenched fists in protest at the 1968 Olympics.
No less than the Presidents and Chief Justice, others spoke, sang, and pranced in delight at the opening of a museum that celebrates both suffering and redemption: John Lewis, Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, and the Howard University marching band were particularly notable. So too is the introductory film made by Ava Duvernay and her friends. Focused on a single date (August 28) in various years, it will surprise and delight even the most hardened heart.
Caveat emptor: my wife is the chief curator of the museum, responsible in particular for the visual arts gallery. It offers a haven of calm and incontrovertible beauty after the wrenching experience of walking up the ramps that take hushed visitors from the depths of slavery through emancipation, to the busy galleries devoted to extraordinary black achievement against all odds in sports, theater and film, music and other spheres.
Most of the visitors in the day or so since the inauguration have been black. They are enjoying a museum that stunningly tells their own, inherently heroic story. No harm in that. But a great deal more good will come when whites recognize that this story is also theirs. No one should miss it!
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