Hold Half an Ounce in Your Hand

What is the best way to rule? The British did it in India and every colonial power has used some variation of this effective ruling strategy. Every child's history book in India has the answer, and it routinely showed up in quizzes. Divide and Rule. A simple idea really. Divide up the populace into at least two groups. You don't care who's who, you just know you're superior to both of them.

Then give one group just a little bit more than the other. Simple! The group getting the fewer more benefits is not just grateful to you, they become loyal to you. They don't want to lose those few benefits, the little scraps. And here's the bonus, this group will work perhaps even harder than you to keep the status quo. Because if the equilibrium falters they might lose whatever little advantage they have. And deeper than that, they start to believe, to truly believe, that they are inferior, less than human, less than you. And since we all need some self-esteem...they also have one group that they can feel better than. Brilliant, isn't it?

The Belgians did it effectively with Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Imagine the horror if a family had a Tutsi wife and a Hutu husband or vice versa. And yes, during the killings in Rwanda, there are documented cases of husbands and/or wives killing the Hutu partner. Sometimes the difference was only as superficial as a skin that was a few shades lighter or darker. These were not seperate races mind you. Frightening! In India it was the Muslims and the Hindus, of course. And then, there was the added complexity of Anglo-Indians and the various types of Indian Christians.

However, nowhere was superiority/inferiority so firmly coded into law in recent times as it was in apartheid South Africa. But there were those pesky anti-apartheid activists to deal with. You could put them all in prison, on Robben Island, but they couldn't all be in isolation. A better plan might be to divide them. How?
That part was easy. South African society was already divided. There were at least three distinct groups: Blacks, Indians and/or Asiactics, and coloureds (I hate using this term but it is used in S. Africa for people of mixed white-black heritage and does not yet have the same connotations as it does in North America). The division between black and colored was so arbitrary (again shades of skin color) that sometimes families were placed in different categories. And yes, this being South Africa, this category was solidified as part of your identity, especially since all non-Whites had to carry their ID card with them. Not doing so was an offence punishable by considerable jail time.

In prison, the division happened at the most basic levels. Black prisoners only got prison-issue short pants, while Indians and coloureds got long pants. Dignity and self-worth measured by half a yard of cloth. And then there was the food. Not enough food to keep a gnat alive either way. But look at this menu card for blacks (Bantus) versus Coloured/Asiatics (which included Indians, of course).



Sometimes this is what it comes down to then. Whether you got 6 oz of mealie meal or 12. Whether you get 6 oz of meat or 5. One oz, that's the privilege you get. Whether you get 2 oz of sugar or 1.5. That is your worth, half an ounce here, one ounce there. Hold an ounce of something in your hand. You can barely tell it's there. Almost like true differences between human beings. Not really there.

Then those pesky coloured and asiatics had to do something unthinkable. They shared their half ounces, they gave away their 1 oz of jam or syrup with their Bantu friends. And in the process they strengthened their ties and their movement.

Perhaps some of those who lived those dark days at Robben Island never lived to see the light of freedom. But, the death of apartheid surely began there somewhere, in those inhuman cells that bore the wounds of deprivation and torture. It surely began when one human being gave another human being a few drops of syrup. And in so giving, he sweetened by just a little bit, the bitterness that was apartheid, the policy that was divide and rule, and the human toll it extracted from all of us. For none of us can truly be unaffected.

It's Not All Godly Golf Courses in Kentucky

I think a lot of people, especially those from the east coast tend to dismiss all southern states as backward and ignorant, not to mention racist. Are they? Well....yes, but, after having lived on the east coast (and the mid-west and the west coast as well) I would say that the east coast is as well. It's all just much better hidden and more camouflaged and more difficult to spot. Whereas in a place like Kentucky it's well...a little bit more accessible and unsophisticated. Of course, Kentucky would benefit from a more Mass. like government, but social change is nothing new to the state.

After all, Kentucky's wonderful Berea College, tucked where the Cumberland mountains meet Kentucky's bluegrass plains, has been integrated...truly integrated since the 1850's. Before that, it was anti-slavery. Not just the college but also the church. Now that is godly and bibilical in the best sense. Not just that, all students who attend the college attend it for free. Yes, if you get into Berea College, you don't pay. You have to work in the college to pay your way. So students make those wonderfully simple but creative Berea handicrafts and they work in the shops, the kitchens, the dining rooms on campus. The college favors anyone who is the first in their family to reach college.

Berea College was founded in 1850 by abolitionist, Reverend John Fee. He was helped by the American Missionary Association and anti-slavery politician Cassius Clay.

Now, I very rarely write good things about religion, but in this case I will. Or rather for good people who saw good--true good--in religion and made things happen in unfriendly and dangerous times. Berea's school and church were dedicated to the Christian principles against prejudice and racism. Fee and others were dedicated to building an inter-racial college and church based on Christian brotherhood. After armed pro-slavery opposition forced Berea workers out of the state, they slipped back in at the start of the Civil War, including Fee himself.



At the end of the war, Fee invited black freedmen to live in Berea, and started building this little interracial town. By 1870, an estimated 200 black families settled in and around Berea. The interracial church on the Berea ridge not only had black members but many also served as deacons and in committees. Contrast this to what was happening not only in the South, but also in all other parts of the US at this time.

Similarly, not only were there black students at Berea College but so were members of faculty. Again, remember this is the 1870's and 1880's when this was unthinkable in most parts of the country. Black alumni taught Latin, math and pedagogy.

By 1874, Berea had 74 white landowners and 40 black landowners. Imagine this! This is before integration anywhere else, before anti-discrimination laws. They were able to be landowners because Fee bought large holdings of land so he could sell it to newcomers, especially black residents who might be unable to buy land otherwise.



So, there is something wonderfully appealing about Berea. Every time I go to Lexington, I make the 40-minute drive up there. I walk around the pretty campus, drink a lovely and frothy capuccino at the Berea Coffee and Tea Company, and buy some wonderful handicrafts or jewelry. I sit and watch its multi-racial and multi-cultural student body bustle about and think about the inspiring history of this little town tucked away from the world, which became a haven and a stepping stone for so many, at a time when the world was especially bleak for them.

And it reminds me that sometimes you just need a little courage and an abiding belief in the equality of all to make a huge difference. And that sometimes, jaded and anti-religion as I am...even I can appreciate brave people who delved into it to find true inspiration, at a time when others were using it to justify slavery and oppression and separatism.

As much as bibilical golf courses make me shake my head in disbelief, Berea is one reason I can never dismiss Kentucky (or any other place I suppose) as just a hick, ignorant backwater. For, if you look below the surface and beyond the obvious horizon, you can see much that there is much that is hidden and wonderful. And I hope in 2009, I can do this for other places and people as well. Look beyond the obvious I mean.

The Hangmen of Kentucky

I lived in Lexington, Ky, for seven years. And yes, I loved it. It's beautiful and the people are polite and well-spoken and I for one find something softly seductive in the uniquely upper-class Kentucky accent.

But there was also the friend and her fiance who saw a glow in the woods outside Lexington and saw a cross burning in a clearing. And that's where someone said they liked Obama and it was a shame that he was black.

In all the years I lived there, no one was racist towards me, but I do know of an affluent African-American businessman (in town for work) who decided to go for a drive and stopped at a little country store to buy a soda. The owner pointed a shotgun at him and told he didn't know where he came from, "but boy if you wanna leave in one piece you betta turn around now."

I consider Lexington to be my U.S. hometown because it is where I arrived, young and fresh-faced from India. It was my portal to the U.S., the America I grew to love despite its problems. And the University of Kentucky (UK), especially my department (Communications) always seemed like a bastion of liberal tolerance.For the most part. Because of course, I had undergrad African-American students who were harrassed on campus late at night and inter-racial couples who were threatened.

And now this, where two young UK students (actually one of them from the community college) were arrested for hanging an effigy of Obama in retaliation for the California woman who in tremendous bad taste had Halloween decorations that involved Palin in a noose and McCain bursting into flames.

But this is the south. Hanging the effigy of a black man from a tree brings to the surface all the hatreds and prejudices not so deeply buried. It confirms the image of the racist South to the rest of the country. And there are other incidents across the country. A lynched Obama effigy at a small Christian college in Oregon, another with a noose and a knife in Redondo Beach, California.

This news on the heels of the Obama assasination plot which was foiled earlier makes you wonder. Forget about voting for a black candidate (who is half white anyway), there are people who actually want him dead because of the color of his skin. It's scary.

We're four days away from a new president (and I hope it is Obama) but with deep-seated hatreds like these among college students of all people, makes me pause. Whoever wins, with racist imagery like this, it's clear that racism still exists and when push comes to shove, we drag out the age-old symbols, especially in places not too long ago where strange fruit did indeed swing on the trees where they now hang effigies. When will it end? Will it ever end? Here are the lyrics to Strange Fruit, one of my most favorite (and heart-wrenching) poems.
And no one sang it better than Billy Holiday though Nina Simone came close.


Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
(Abel Meerspol, writing as Lewis Allan in 1937, upon seeing a photograph of two black men who were lynched in 1930)

Ba Ba Mouton Noir!!!

You know it's bad when Germany and Britain call you the dark heart of Europe. Oucch!

Ooh la la...here's yet another reminder that all is not as it seems...even in a land as perfect as a painting with its history of neutrality (mmm...Nazi money anyone?), fresh air (oh those fascinating consumptives and their quest for Swiss air) and chocolates (okay, they're holy, let's not go there).

Yes, this is the poster for the Swiss People's Party...and no it's not a kids cartoon. Those are three white sheep atop the Swiss flag kicking a black sheep (Baaaa!) across the border. Now some say that this poster alluded to kicking out foreign-national criminals from La Suisse.

But others see it as racist. I ask you...why couldn't that sheep have on a beret and a striped T-shirt? Or wearing clogs? Perhaps showing a row of bad British teeth? Eating a bowl of pasta?

Non!! Mon Dieu! It's a black sheep so yes, I must come down on the side of those who call it racist.

The funny thing is I've driven past this poster a few times and thought it was advertizing something for kids. It was not until the controvorsy broke that the old lightbulb went off in my head.

Not that I am shocked. Few things shock me these days.

And, oh btw, that is one agile sheep...do you see its two hind legs kicking out in tandem. That is the Jackie Chan....errrr...(wrong color)....William Tell of sheep. Except then he'd be shooting an arrow at the apple on top of the sheep's head. Never mind!

I need to brush up on my Swiss references. It's either William Tell or Heidi. And we all know what Heidi would do....milk the damn sheep...drink the frothy, warm milk (Yechhh!), make some cheese and then kick the sheep over the border. Oh man!

P.S. For all those who asked. I am fine though I have a slight whiplash (a bit like being a little bit pregnant) but I now drive like an old lady and those darned Swiss bicycles just swoosh past me. But I don't care. They can't kick me...I am in my tank-like car.