Re: Now, here is a conspiracy theory for you: do you think that xenophobic elements in Europe contributed to the circus in Durban to deflect attention from treatment of minorities in Europe? It?s a shame that a conference intended to address serious problems degenerated into what we are witnessing.
Actually, you've answered yourself in your post #3109:
The official religion of Britain is the Church of England. I believe that Spain, Italy, most Latin American countries are officially Catholic republics. Are those states racist as well? [...] Do you think that Germany which grants German citizenship to every person of German origin whose ancestors spent last 500 years in Russia but denies the same citizenship to a third-generation German Turk or an Afghan refugee is racist?
Personally, I think the topic of the UN Conference --Racism-- was way too big and its precincts were too wide to ever bring all the participants to a reasonable, common agenda... I think we should take its emotional statements more as a loud, angry cry of colored people against white/Western discrimination than as an intellectual, cool-headed attempt to solve such a broad issue.
For, as you intimate, racism is so widespread that no country/people is entitled to lecture humankind on this subject --except perhaps the United States. Just ask a Congolese what he/she thinks of Rwandans or Pygmies (a local minority). That is not to say that there's no racism in the US; however, the US is the only country that has successfully enforced co-optation (*) to integrate successive waves of immigrants. Indeed, I think what best characterizes the US is not "immigration" --there's immigration all over the world, after all-- it's "co-optation" (of newly arrived citizens).
That's why I think Americans have the right to feel uneasy about the issue of slavery for that matter. The US has already achieved the best reparations it could possibly do to redress its past slave trade. After all, the US is a country whose most of the 220 million white citizens don't have second thoughts about being represented abroad by a colored guy (GW Bush went even as far as introducing C. Powell as the best America can get) or having a black woman, C. Rice, as the President's closest adviser on security. Just imagine a Turkish fellow as Chancellor Schroeder's top adviser on security/intelligence affairs! Regardless of racist prejudices that still pervade the US fabric, America's endeavor to overcome its slave legacy has paid off --just ask Merrill Lynch's President Stanley O'Neil whose grandfather was a slave... or notice the unusually moderate comments of Jesse Jackson (at the UN conference).
As for Europe's neofascist crowd, it's clear that European leaders are all too relieved to witness Israel getting the flak: it allowed them to sneak away from the limelight and even to cast themselves as a color-blind honest broker between Israelis/Jews and white-hot Arabs! In the meantime, Europe's gruesome history of (neo-)colonialism, especially in Africa, is passed over in silence. Not to mention Europe's domestic predicaments: the rise of the far right (J. Haider, Milosevic, Berlusconi's associates, Belgium's Vlaams Blok) or its jackbooted policy towards immigrants (Schengen,...)
Anyway, I think that such an all-embracing conference on Racism was doomed to wind up with a free-for-all... It'd have been wiser to narrow its topic from the onset to "(Neo-)Colonialism" and the bettering of North/South relations. I mean, just imagine a mega-conference on Religion, gathering bishops, imams, rabbis, the dalai lama, scientologists, Reverend Moon, etc. It'd likely end up in a similar circus...
Gus.
(*) bartleby.com |
